“Hold on. Listen,” he continues gently. “It helped losing the one person who never made me feel like I was anything less than perfect. Who saw me. I needed to know there wasn’t something wrong with me, that they’re the ones with the issue. It took losing you to show me just how much I don’t need their approval. Maybe I never needed it. All I needed was you, and then I needed to really find myself. I know what true pain feels like now, Ave. I knew it the second you walked away.”
My heart pounds and my thoughts swirl as I try to piece together Kane’s meaning.
“It’s not over, Ave,” he vows. “You and I are inevitable. I’ll be here when you’re ready to talk, because we both know this isn’t the end for us. So go do what you need to do. Find yourself, if that’s what this is. But I know in this life and the next, it ends with us. There’s no other way for it to end but with you coming home to me every night.”
He turns to face me on the steps, his eyes imploring me to believe him. My traitorous heart yearns to reach out for him before the stark reminder hits me that he let me go. Hewatched me walk out that door when I laid my heart bare, ripping myself apart for him to communicate with me. The hurt rises in me, whether from now or years past, until it all blurs together in the moment.
There are layers of hurt here. Months of begging to be seen. To be enough for someone to stick around. To be someone worth chasing after. I can’t breathe as I look at the one person who has had my heart since I learned his name. There’s an ache in me from years spent as a forgotten kid with parents who never wanted her. The lines blur between him and them.
Why can’t anyone see me for what I am before they lose me?
Why do I have to walk away for someone to realize my worth?
My thoughts jumble, and the words I need are nowhere to be found.
He stares at me, softness in his features, understanding gleaming in his eyes. His hand comes up to cradle my cheek. My face falls into his hold as tears I didn’t notice escape are wiped away by his thumb. My heart aches with so many unsaid things laid out between us.
He closes the distance between us, and his lips land on my forehead, soft and barely touching my skin, causing my eyes to close in the moment. Our breathing fills the space between us. When he pulls back, he takes one last look at me, then gets up.
He walks down the last couple of steps before his stride eats up the pavement. The flowers lining the driveway seem to wilt as he walks by and takes my heart with him. I haven’t moved, haven’t breathed, since he got up and walked away from me. I wish I could conjure up any words to speak in this moment, but my mind empties the longer I sit here.
When he reaches his truck, he turns back—his stare holding me in the night—before rounding the cab to his door. The moonlight bounces off his face, those severe features eating me up.
The moment lingers with a small shake of his head, and then he gets in. The truck starts with a roar in the night before he takes off, the lights fading into the distance.
I’m not sure how long I sit there, but the chill seems to seep into my bones. The shorts I have on do nothing to protect me from the cold taking over. The thoughts are still jumbled in my head, the past and present becoming one until I peel myself off the step, the feeling of his lips on my forehead following me inside.
I stumble my way to my bed as I reconcile how much Kane seems to have found himself in these past few weeks apart, less burdened by the demons that have constantly plagued his mind. He confided in me, and I feel as if I caught a glimpse of the man who was always hiding beneath that masked exterior. The man I only ever caught glimpses of before in flashes, small moments when he allowed himself to be raw with me.
But the hurt from the last couple of months doesn’t just go away after one moment of vulnerability. It rips open old wounds I have been working to fix. Those old feelings of abandonment don’t get erased with a few months of therapy and self-reflection. It’s a permanent scar that stains your heart.
Nothing in life has ever lit up my soul the way Kane has. It’s as if he is the sun, and I could never help but be drawn into his atmosphere for warmth and safety. I have been learning how to live without the sun for weeks now, and I haven’t crumbled the way I thought I would without him. I have persevered in a way I needed to know I could. Ican stand on my own two feet without him there holding me up. As much as my soul craves his, I’m not sure where to go from here.
I feel the tears dry against my cheeks—nothing left in me to expel. I turn on my playlist, listening to the sounds of a poetic song about losing the love of your life, wondering if that’s how our story ends.
CHAPTER TWENTY-FOUR
kane
If You Love Her – Forest Blakk
With the start of a new week, I took over the weekend shifts at The Grunge for an employee who had a family emergency, and I’m feeling it this morning. I had to drag myself out of bed, snoozing my alarms numerous times until I realized I’d never beat the morning traffic down Main to get to the high school. Since South Hill sits on the outskirts of town, bordering the next one over on its way to Nashville, the morning commute can be brutal if I leave late enough.
I was grateful for the extra shifts, though, since they left me little time to fixate on Thursday night. The highs and lows of that day seem to be unshakable. I feel good about where I left things with Avery. It was a step in the right direction. I know she can’t be enough to fix me, but she gives me a clear goal in mind of what a healthy, healing Kane could look like with her by my side.
I roll into school a bit later than usual, the first bell ringing and all the kids out and about on campus. The chaosof the morning soothes me, and the routine of seeing some of my favorite students today has me hustling across campus to make it before someone is there waiting for me.
I spot a mess of brown hair hurrying through the crowd and away from where everyone else seems to be going. His head is down, but the blue sling tells me exactly who he is.
I try to walk a bit faster and catch up with him as he breaks through the crowd. I gain on him and yell, “Trevor!”
His body tenses and he stops walking, but he doesn’t turn to look at me.
“Hey, where are you going?”
“I gotta go, Mr. D,” Trevor mutters, his back still turned to me.
“Trevor, please look at me and tell me what has you rushing away from school before the day has even started.” I reach out softly with my voice. He turns to me fully, and I finally see what he was hiding—the entire area around his eye isblack, swollen nearly shut.
