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To make it true.
“The dreams started last year. I’d had them as a kid too, right after Danny… right after,” he murmured. “After Bennett almost drowned in a river while we were in Colorado last summer, they started again. First it was Danny in the water, then Bennett, then you. But it was always the same. I reached you guys, but I couldn’t hold on. I wasn’t strong enough.”
“But something’s changed,” I suggested when he didn’t continue.
Aiden nodded. “It’s just Danny in the dreams again. Has been for a while now. In the early dreams, he tells me he’s sorry right before I lose my grip on him and he goes under.”
“It didn’t happen that way, did it?” I asked gently.
He shook his head and dropped his eyes. “I kept yelling at him to wait for me— that he was going too far out. We’d gone swimming enough here to know where the riptides typically were. He wasn’t a great swimmer, but he did okay. I called out to him, telling him to turn back, to come back to me, but he didn’t. I thought maybe he couldn’t hear me. I swam like hell to reach him. But I wasn’t fast enough. The current took him, then me. I was screaming at him to hang on. He didn’t make a sound… not one. He didn’t call out for me. Nothing. I reached him just as he started to go under.”
Aiden sucked in a deep breath. Tears were flowing unchecked down his cheeks. He didn’t even try to wipe them away anymore.
“I managed to grab his hand. I told him I had him, that I wasn’t letting go. I started pulling him with me as I swam with the current instead of against it. Not fighting it made it easier, and I knew I just had to hang on long enough until we reached the end of it. I was so fucking tired, Ash,” he whispered.
“I know you were, baby,” I said as I pressed my lips to his fingers.
“I called over my shoulder to Danny that we’d be okay. That he just needed to hold on a little longer.” Aiden shook his head and then covered his eyes with his free hand and let out a gulping sob. “I kept telling myself his fingers slipped. But they didn’t,” he cried. “He let go. He fucking let go.”
I couldn’t stifle my own choked sob as I moved into Aiden’s space and wrapped my arms around him.
“He let go, he let go…”
Aiden kept repeating the phrase over and over again as he pressed both hands to his face. His body was racked with violent tremors as he cried.
“It wasn’t your fault,” I whispered helplessly, but I wasn’t sure he even heard me. The words were so inconsequential that I gave up trying to find the right thing to say and just held onto him. When he quieted, I didn’t press him to continue, but was glad when he did it on his own.
“I searched for him for what seemed like hours, but was really only a minute or two. Then I swam as fast as I could and ran to the house to get help. My mother kept screaming at me, asking me what happened. We were standing on the beach and I was begging Keith to help me find Danny, but he said it was too late. I tried to go back in the water, but a neighbor who’d heard my mother’s screams stopped me. The authorities searched for hours, but they never found him. My father arrived and began screaming and crying. He asked me what I’d been thinking, how I could have been that stupid.”
Aiden sucked in some much-needed air and pulled back from me a little. I wiped at his face half-heartedly because I didn’t know what else to do. “What did they say when you told them it wasn’t an accident?” I asked.
“I didn’t tell them,” Aiden whispered. “I couldn’t.”
I swallowed hard. “What… what do you mean?”
“I was sure I’d been wrong… that he hadn’t let go. It was all such a blur that I just couldn’t let myself believe that he’d… he’d done it on purpose. I convinced myself it was an accident. Even after I found the note in the book that he’d left on my desk in my room, I refused to believe it was anything but an accident. It was easier that way.”
“Easier to believe you couldn’t hold on to him instead of believing you let him down?” I asked.
Aiden nodded.
“You know you didn’t, though, right?” I asked, even though I knew the answer.
“I left him, Ash. He needed me and I left him.”
“Aiden, it wasn’t your faul—”
“I was all he had!” Aiden shouted. “I was the one thing in his life he could count on.” Aiden grabbed the book between us and nearly ripped the cover off in his effort to open it. He jabbed his finger at the inscription. “It was me and him, always! Us against the world! And I fucking left him! I couldn’t save him!”
