Page 69 of Quiver

“What?” Ava glanced at her via the bathroom mirror.

“You said I did everything right. I didn’t.”

Ava pressed her lips together tightly as if she had the impulse to argue, but it wasn’t strong.

“I know it. She knows. You obviously know, too, but I tried. Fuck, not hard enough, but harder than she did.” Kylie shook her head. “I don’t know how to stop justifying myself. I spent years making all the excuses.”

She sagged forward against the sink and shook her head. She knew so many things now but couldn’t stop pouring them out in the wrong place to the wrong person. “I was twenty-two and in over my head. I begged her, and I came back for her. I almost told her last week. I started to anyway, but she’s so damn stubborn, and my defenses are hardwired now. Even when I don’t like them, I don’t know how to stop. I keep trying, and I keep falling back on who we were at our absolute worst.”

“I think that’s natural,” Ava said. “Have you tried to tell her?”

“So many times, but I never get through it before she cuts me off. I want to strangle her sometimes, and other times I feel like she is strangling me. I get petty and jealous, which isn’t my best look, and I took it out on you. God, I swear I didn’t mean to, Ava, but I don’t even know how to relate to someone else she loved. I was trying to be nicer today, honest. You probably didn’t even have a chance to notice.”

“No, I did.” Ava sighed. “But I notice you said ‘was.’ Does that mean past tense?”

She hung her head. “Now I’m only trying to stay upright. I don’t know what else I have in me.”

“I want to help.”

“Even though I all but admitted I might not be able to stop myself from reverting to old patterns?”

Ava’s smile seemed tired. “Yes.”

“Why?”

“Because it’s not really about you.”

“Hmm. Not everything’s about me. Sounds vaguely familiar.”

“I’m not touching that with a ten-foot pole, but I care about Fletcher, and I know you do, too. I’ll also put it out there in case it needs to be said, I do love her, but I haven’t been in love with her for a long time.”

She sighed. “I can appreciate the difference, at least intellectually.”

“You two are very much alike.”

She pressed against the sink harder as the emotions threatened to drop her. “Not alike enough.”

“I don’t know you enough to argue,” Ava said, “but what I saw and heard today, it’s not the sort of thing that goes away on its own. The way you two turned to each other, stepped up for each other, clung to each other—”

Kylie raised her hand to cut her off. She’d been there, and she’d have a hard enough time compartmentalizing what’d happened without someone else highlighting the finer points. “None of it matters in the end.”

“That’s up to you.”

“No, it’s up to Fletcher,” she snapped, then pinched the bridge of her nose until the ice pick of a pulse point there slowed to something bearable. “She’s the one thing I can’t bowl over or make bend to my will, at least in any lasting or meaningful way. Whatever you heard in the truck, it was another slip, another temporary lapse. Fletcher is going to be okay, and I’m not sure I ever will.”

“You’re not giving yourself enough credit.” Ava placed a hand on her shoulder. “I know you don’t like to think about it, but I understand how hard she can be to reach. I know what it’s like to be on the outside of those walls. I know how it feels to be beside her and still alone. I know what it’s like to love her.”

“I don’t … I mean, I can’t … I do …” The word wouldn’t come out. She’d fought it for so long. She’d built so much of her life, her personality, her sense of self, on the self-sufficiency that came from getting over Fletcher Bouchard, but she didn’t have it in her to admit she had never stopped loving her.

Chapter Sixteen

Kylie glanced up as the doors to the small waiting room swung open, and Bex pushed through with blood on her blue scrubs but a smile on her face. “She’s stable. They’re moving her to a room now, and you can see her in a few minutes.”

Ava jumped up and threw her arms around her girlfriend. “Oh thank God. And thank you.”

Kylie shared her gratitude but not her exuberance. The relief weighed so heavily on her, she had to use both armrests and an unreasonable amount of her waning energy to push herself out of the hospital chair. “What’s the damage, or are you allowed to tell us?”

Bex nodded. “Yes. She listed you on her intake forms.”