“Weeks?You never said it first!”
“I absolutely did!” Luke scoffs, a brow arched at me indignantly. “I said it the night you asked me to go to New York. When we started planning that trip.”
I blink at him with confusion, trying to wrack my brain for the memory of that night, desperate to recall what was said.Luke was miserable until I suggested the impromptu vacation, so there’s no way he would have said it before that. But in no part of that conversation afterward were those three little words ever uttered. I would have clung to that like the only life raft left in the ocean, given how in love with him I already was at the time. Unless…
“That was a dream,” I say softly as it clicks. “You said that to me in a fucking dream. I wasasleep!”
“You weren’t asleep yet. You answered me.”
“What did I say?” I balk.
Luke bites his lower lip, giving me a coy look that tells me he knows he’s being a little shit, and he knew I absolutely didnothear it properly. “Well, I suppose it was more of a grunt.”
“Because I was fucking asleep, asshole!” I laugh. “That doesn’t count. That doesn’t even remotely count.”
“Okay, well, in the recorded history of the universe and chronological time, it is written in the stars that I told you I loved you first. So, there.”
“God fucking damn it, I hate you so much.”
“No, you don’t.” Luke smirks, reaching up and touching my face. I hold my hand over his, squeezing his fingers tightly, kissing the inside of his wrist.
“No.” I smile, tears coming to my eyes. “No, I really fucking don’t.”
We spend the next few hours clearing the air of everything that happened and what we missed while we were apart. Luke tells me what the doctors clued him in on when he’d first woken up while I was too out of it to notice, and I catch him up to speed on the rest.
He’s overjoyed to hear that I am officially out with all of my friends and that it wasn’t a cosmic disaster, and he laughs when I tell him Tiff was onto us from day one. Based on their years of history, he’d have been more shocked to learn shehadn’tfigured it out before I came clean. However, Luke is stunned to hear about Chrissy’s redemption arc, even more so on the heels of Frank’s unexpected albeit messed-up apology. Bigots apologizing for their bigotry in 2023? Inconceivable.
When I tell him that Pete’s been denied bail after being arraigned on multiple felony and misdemeanor charges, including two charges of attempted murder in the second degree, one for him, the other for his mother, Luke goes quiet. He looks away from me, almost like he’s ashamed. I don’t understand why at first.
But then he says, “I shouldn’t have let it get to that point,” staring down at his bandaged arm being propped up under a mountain of pillows.
He has full use of his hand, but there’s a numbness in his pinky and ring finger that may never go away—it’s unclear yet. The doctors say it could take time to come back, but in the grand scheme of things, if that’s the only permanent damage he walks away with from all this, he’s damn lucky. He’s going to need a ton of physical therapy.
I can almost see the gears turning in his head as he questions what he could have done differently to change this outcome—a feeling I’m intimately familiar with. When he turns back to me, he gives me a startlingly vulnerable look, tears welling in his eyes.
“You were right, and I was too proud to listen.” He sniffs. “I should have taken it to the cops the first time. I should have ended things for him right then and there. But I was convinced it wouldn’t help. That it would only make things worse. It always made things worse.”
Luke tells me exactly what happened that day after he’d left my house, filling in the missing pieces of the story. He says he’d driven around town for a few hours before ultimately going back to Pete’s because there was simply nowhere else for him to go. He’d locked himself in his bedroom as soon as he went inside, ignoring his mother’s frantic pleas for forgiveness through the door, and then later, Pete’s drunken demands that he come out and face him like a man.
He was planning on packing up his things and driving back to New York, but as soon as Pete got wind of that, he’d sabotaged everything, wrecking the truck in his childish fury. He was so pissed that Luke wasn’t engaging with him that he took it to the next step. Still, Luke kept himself locked away, trying to make another plan to escape.
“You should have called me,” I say softly. “Even if you hated me, I could have at least gotten you out of there.”
“I never hated you,” he says with a sigh. “I wasn’t even mad atyou. Just angry in general for the way my life was going. I couldn’t think straight. I was too ashamed to face you after everything I said. The way I screamed at you… I was afraid I’d fucked up everything between us with my issues, and I couldn’t deal with it. So, I kept deleting your messages and ignoring your phone calls, convincing myself it was better this way. When you eventually stopped messaging me, the silence somehow hurt worse. I didn’t know what to say to you. How to make up for it. I kept telling myself you deserved better.
“That night, when you texted me that you wanted to talk,” Luke continues, a deep frown across his brow. “I almost ignored you again. I stared at that message for over an hour, debating whether or not responding would just fuck up your life more than not. What would have happened if I’d followed through?”
“When youdidtext me back, I was at the bar with the guys trying to figure out ways I could win you back. It was not apretty picture. I even wrote a bunch of horrible sonnets on a napkin, hoping they’d impress you. Thankfully, the evidence was destroyed….” The poor napkin was so drenched in blood that it wasn’t salvageable. “But I never gave up on us.”
Luke gives me a small smile, but it’s laced with sorrow. “I’m sorry,” he says softly. “I’m sorry for putting you through all that.”
I sigh, looking away. Would it have been easier to avoid all of this? Absolutely. Do I regret any moment of it? No. Not when I know what the alternatives could have been. I can feel how this is still weighing on him, even though it feels like it’s ancient history to me. All of it became irrelevant the moment I thought I’d lost him forever.
“Are we going to be okay, though?” I ask, studying him closely.
“Do you want us to be?” Luke replies cautiously, hesitantly. Like he thinks I could honestly tell him no.
“Of course I do. There’s no question. At least not for me.”
