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“I don’t care,” Paige nearly screamed, slapping his fingers away before he actually touched her. Tears streamed down her cheeks. “He loved her. He wanted to marry her someday. And she let another guy kiss her?”
He watched her curl into herself, cradling her arm around her waist as she bowed her face and clenched her eyes shut.
Agony tore through him. He didn’t want to watch this; he ached even knowing he’d started and couldn’t stop it.
“Paige, please,” he begged with no idea what he was actually begging for. “No matter what happened that night, she’s still your best friend. Hating her now is only going to hurt both of you. I guarantee you one hundred percent she is sorry for what happened, and if she could take it back, she would in a heartbeat. I mean, the way she cried over him…” He shook his head. “I swear I’ve never seen anyone cry like that before. She refused to leave his side. She was…she was devastated.”
Paige wiped her wet face and looked at him. He tensed under her all-knowing gaze, and everything became clear. He wasn’t just pleading her friend’s case; he was pleading his own. By the look in her eyes, he could tell she knew that.
“I don’t know,” he mumbled, suddenly uncomfortable. Hugging himself, he glanced to where his family’s car had sat minutes ago. “Or maybe you’ll do just fine without her.”
His family seemed perfectly fine without him.
“No.” Paige sniffed back a few more tears. “No, I wouldn’t. And I’m sure your family is not fine without you either.” Turning slightly away from him, she brushed her hands off onto her thighs as if needing something to do. Then she drew in a deep breath, collected herself, and looked at him over her shoulder. “Thank you for telling me.”
He nodded, unsettled by how easily she’d been able to find composure. Holding pain inside couldn’t be good for a person. If she was repressing anything, it’d hurt her more in the long run.
Not sure what else to say, certain anything that came out of his mouth would only induce her to hold more in, he reached for the handle of his truck door. “I should…I should go.” He’d already done enough damage. He couldn’t handle the thought of doing more. Especially to her.
But she stopped him with a single word. “Logan?”
He paused and heaved a shaky breath, afraid to turn around. “Yeah?”
“The night I cut my finger at The Squeeze and saw your wrists…”
When she didn’t go on, he swallowed and rotated to face her. She was going to ask about his cut marks; he just knew it. He didn’t want to talk about them. Ever. He’d been in a dark place then, so dark he wasn’t sure how he’d ever climbed out of all that black. He couldn’t reasonably explain why he’d done it, couldn’t rationalize the overwhelming necessity to end everything. He’d just needed to stop the pain.
“I was so messed up.” He breathed out the confession. “I don’t know why I cut them. I’d just gotten my life back on track. It didn’t make any sense.”
Paige merely watched him. So he kept talking, blurting it all out.
“After…after my parents kicked me out, they let me keep my car. So I drove it as far as I could on a tank of gas. Then I sold it for cash. It was jus
t a quirk of fate I landed in Granton. But I found a job, a crappy place to live, and since the entire town centered around the university, I eventually enrolled. But it was like I was on auto pilot.
“Inside, I knew I didn’t deserve any of it. And every day I attended class, I would see all these normal people around me, going to classes, living their lives, like nothing…nothing wrong had ever happened in the world. I just didn’t belong, so I tried to take myself out of the equation.”
Paige shuddered, wrapping her arms more tightly around herself, but let him keep talking.
“When I woke in the hospital, Sam was my state-required counselor. She’s the one who convinced me to attend the grief meetings. She thought…” He chuckled derisively to himself. “She said that she could tell just by looking into my eyes that I’d lost someone close.”
He glanced at Paige, expecting her to share the irony with him. But she just stared up at him from her own beautiful, dark, grief-stricken eyes.
“You told me once you didn’t expect me to forgive you because no one else ever had,” she said.
Nodding, he watched her intently, waiting and hoping, yet dreading too.
She gave him a tremulous smile. “I didn’t understand what you meant. I didn’t know your parents had kicked you out and cut you off. I didn’t know you hadn’t seen them since graduation, or how much you had struggled to get your life back on track. I didn’t know you’d fallen so low you wanted to end it all.”
He squinted, wondering what she was getting at. “You couldn’t have known. It’s fine. I didn’t—”
“No.” Her lips tilted in a somber smile. “It’s not okay. I understand what it’s like to lose all my loved ones so suddenly, but I never felt guilty about it. I never thought I deserved to be cast out of their lives. Not the way you did. And maybe still do.” She drew in a large breath. “I think you have suffered just as much, if not more, than I have since Trace died, so I’m going to tell you something and I’m going to mean it, but I think the real person who needs to say this to you is yourself.”
Logan frowned, not comprehending at first. When it struck him what she was about to say, he panicked.
No. No, he wasn’t ready to hear this. Not from her, not after he’d just hurt her by revealing what he had about her friend.
He began to shake his head, his eyes begging her stay silent. But she reached out anyway and took his hand. It stalled his resistance as nothing else could. Her fingers were warm and stable and they made him want to fall to pieces.
