Page 70 of Everything But Mine

Her face drains of color, and she recoils away from me. This distance hurts me too.

“No.” She shakes her head once violently. “I did not make fun of you.” Her voice cracks, and she presses her palm to her sternum. “I didn’t even mean to say it, but I—” Her hand clenches around the hem of her dress. “I’ve never really told anybody. Val guessed, but not because I said it. With Daray…” Her gaze drops, then lifts again, glassy. “I’d just seen you and felt lost in you. In the pain of what could have been. And it just slipped out.”

Something inside me snaps.

“Then why suck his dick before you told him?” I shout. The words ricochet off the walls. “My worst moment is fucking pillow talk to you?”

She swallows hard, her throat bobbing.

“Why didn’t you ever let me talk to you, Amanda?” My voice breaks on her name. The question tears out of me, raw and naked. She chose to leave over talking to me, so I drowned it all. Bottle after bottle, until the ache morphed into something I could survive.

She reaches for me again—slower this time—and still, I step away. The distance carves a slack open mouth and rounded eyes into her expression, and her pain guts me.

“I was hurting,” she says, tears finally cresting.

There’s pity there. Soft, devastating pity. I can’t stand it, so I go for the jugular.

“Nice try. You were having a grand time.” I laugh, sharp and humorless. “I saw it posted everywhere. Different weekend, different guy, wasn’t it?”

Her spine straightens. The softness burns away, replaced by hot rage. “Don’t you fucking dare, Eric.” She strides into my space and jams her finger into my chest, right over my heart. “Maybe your father was a dick, but you gave up—” She snaps her finger a hairsbreadth away from my nose. The sound cracks, a whip against my side. “Like this. You reject me at every chance you get. Don’t you go flipping the story like you’ve ever wanted me.”

The whip rips my skin open, fracturing not just a rib, but the dam that holds my feelings and heartache so it won’t touch her.

“Like I’ve ever wanted you?” The laugh breaks out of me, jagged and wrong. One step, after another, I move until her back hits the wall. The swell of her chest brushes mine with every intake of our synced breaths. I brace my hands on either side of her head, and her eyes flick to the tremor running through my arms. There’s nowhere for either of us to look but straight at each other.

“I don’t remember a single fucking moment in my life when I haven’t wanted you,” I say, the words tearing out of my throat. My lungs stutter because they can’t keep up with the truth I’ve kept locked away. “Why do you think it’s so hard to fucking breathe around you if I don’t want you? I claimed that baby in front of everyone I know, and it’s the most honest thing I’ve ever done. I would do it again. I’d do it every day until you understand the depth of my desire for you.”

Amanda doesn’t shove me away. She doesn’t melt either. She just stares at me, jaw locked, eyes blazing. “And yet you made choices. And I refuse to take any blame for not moping around. That’s not me.” She inhales deeply, anchoring herself in anger. My own evaporates leaving only wreckage. “I chose to make the best of what I had. What did you choose, Eric?”

I flinch because every ugly syllable out of her mouth is true. But so is every syllable out of mine.

My lungs burn as I stare at her, chest heaving. “Certainly not making the best of what I had,” I say hoarsely. “I thought I was choosing you. But I chose to let everything fall apart. And now,” I whisper, stripped bare, “every day, I have to fight this urge to tear my skin off because I don’t know how to exist in my own body, knowing what I did to you.”

She doesn’t gloat, but my Amanda won’t make excuses for me either; furious that I ruined us, unwilling to let me off easy. And while she’s here, listening, I don’t get to hide anything from her, even if it hurts.

I lean away from her and offer her my palm. She takes it without hesitation until the mattress dips with both of our weight, and I intertwine our fingers together, holding one of her hands in both of mine, her forearm on my lap.

“You have no idea how often I think about this,” I whisper through my hoarse yet steady voice. “I retrace every single word, every step. There’s still no excuse.” I swallow. “And it wasn’t just him. It was me.”

Her knuckles tense, her forearm stiffens. She’s holding herself together with patience and discipline, not forgiveness.

I look away, shame dragging my gaze to the floor. I trail my fingertips up the bare skin of her arm until I reach her shoulder. She resists me when I add pressure—her body hasn’t gotten the memo that we’re no longer at war. She indulges me, though, and we lie side by side, just an inch between us, hands entwined.

“That night,” I say quietly. “When you kissed me. When we kissed into dawn…” I inhale, the feel of her tongue on mine still vivid like it was yesterday. “You asked me to be with you. And I wanted to give you that. I did. But I didn’t know how… with you leaving.”

She shifts beside me. The mattress dips. Her thigh presses into my knee, then pulls back, and finally forward again.

“The idea of being away from you as something other than your friend,” I continue, “made me sick with insecurity. With self-loathing. I had no money. No way to visit. You’d be gone a whole year. I was so afraid I’d already lost you before I ever really had you.”

My voice gives out at the end.

I turn on my back, with her hand still in mine, staring up at the ceiling. After a beat, she props herself up on her elbow, and she flexes the fingers I’m not holding against the sheet, bunching the fabric, releasing it again. I don’t trust myself to look at Amanda past that.

The ceiling fan hums overhead, its blades cutting the air in a slow, hypnotic rhythm. Mahogany and green. The colors drag me backward in time into my father’s office, with the suffocating stillness, with the same dark wood, the same sickly green leather. And, of course, the same feeling of being disposable.

I close my eyes.

I was standing in front of my father’s desk, hoping against reason that my father would take pity on me so I could keep the only person I’d ever wanted to have.