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Luca’s bitter laugh cuts me off. “Missed us? Give me a fucking break.” He steps closer. “Missing us would imply you ever cared at all. I personally don’t give any fucks about where you’ve been this whole time.” He’s so close now that I can make out each individual speck of amber in his dark eyes. “The only reason I’m even in here right now is because River won’t shut up about it.”
“Fuck you, man!” River snaps, looking betrayed.
Luca casts him a glare. “What, it's true right?” His gaze comes back to mine. “For some reason, he still gives a shit why you left. But I don’t.”
I move a step back because he looks like he wants to either leave the room or punch something...or both. As he passes by, I catch a whiff of the sea on his skin and I want nothing more than to reach out and grab him. I want to crush him in a hug and force him to listen to me. But I don’t. I just watch with sad eyes as he slams out of my bedroom. His footsteps continue down the hallway toward his room.
I’m so busy staring at the closed door, that I fail to hear River approach until he’s right there. Again, he’s so tall that his whole body dwarfs me and forces me to raise my face to meet his green eyes. We stare at each other in silence for a few very long moments. Lifting his hand, he runs his fingers along my jaw—lightly, but it brings out chills over my skin. His eyes look far away, almost like he’s not quite sure what he’s really doing. My traitorous body leans into him.
“I really did miss you,” I whisper, so softly that if he wasn’t so close, he wouldn’t be able to hear. “Sometimes, I still fucking miss you.”
For a second, his eyes widen before narrowing again. Like he keeps catching himself before he can cover up his real emotions. “It’s not enough.” His shaking fingers trace the lines of my face. “I don’t think you understand what you really did.”
Frowning, I draw back slightly. “I know what I did. I left. I left and stayed away and you hate me for it.” Looking to my feet in shame, I fight the tears that want to spill over. “I hate myself every single day for leaving you. You guys were my best friends. But I had my reasons, too. I heard what Luca told you that day.”
A small, somewhat sad smile stretches his lips. “You really think this is just about you leaving?” he asks and I tilt my head in confusion. “You do, don’t you?” A laugh bursts from him before he sobers and flits his eyes between mine. “Baby girl, this is so much bigger than just that. I could have forgiven you for leaving...hell, we were just a bunch of naive kids, too. I could have heard you out, but what you did to Luca goes beyond that. If he’d done that to you, I would have killed him for it.”
My heart jumps into my throat. “W-what?” I stammer and his eyes just narrow even further. It’s no use. He knows. Idly, I wonder what made Luca tell him about that night. I thought it would stay our little secret forever, but, clearly, River hates me for it.
“Don’t play coy. You slept with Luca that last summer. You told him you loved him, fucked him, and then left without looking back. You ripped out my best friend’s heart and tossed it in the ocean like it meant nothing to you. And then when we finally figure out where you went, Jax tells us to fuck off like we’re trash and then blocks my number. You fucking broke Luca. He’s literally never been the same, and there’s nobody to blame but you.”
The world mutes around me. He can’t possibly mean what I think he means. Not Luca. Luca’s always been the big man in town—loved by every girl for miles with his larger-than-life smile and sparkling, brown eyes. His guitar playing made chicks everywhere swoon and I always assumed he had a different girl whenever he wanted. But if what River is saying is true...
“I-I, what are you saying?” I don't want it to be true. If it was, that would make me a fucking monster.
Rivers' eyes flit between mine like he’s trying to figure out if I’m lying. “You really didn't know? He was a fucking virgin, Nora. Nobody knew. Since we were thirteen, he told me he was saving himself for the one girl we were both desperately in love with. He always knew his first would be you. He was in love with you, and you threw it back in his face.” His voice gets hard again, fury lacing his words. “Luca spent years thinking he did something wrong. He thought you hated him, or that he hurt you somehow and scared you off. He was just a kid, too. We all were.”
Tears track down my cheeks as the weight of his confession settles over me. I never in a million years imagined that I was Luca’s first. If I had known, I wouldn’t have run off the way I did.
“Do you see why he might not want you turning up in his house, reminding him of what you did? You say you missed us, but where the hell were you when Luc’s parent’s died? Where were you?” His nostrils flared with rage as he stepped too close to me. “You can go anywhere in the world, as long as you leave him and me alone.” Every word rips me apart as he stares down at me with loathing and worst of all...pity. “Let him have a chance to move on. You being here in his face every day will kill him, and I’m sorry, but no matter what your pathetic excuse is, I just don’t want to fucking hear it.”
Nora
My muscles stretch and a pleasant burn rolls through my limbs. Soft thumping pulses from the other room. I have about five minutes until the final class lets out and I can have the studio to myself.
I’ve been here at Landy’s for most of the evening helping her with her freshman contemporary class. The girls are awesome and really seem to want to learn. I’ve, honestly, had so much fun teaching and dancing with them.
Landy has been awesome, too. She’s such an interesting lady. From what she’s told me of herself, she moved here from Portland just last summer and decided to re-open a dance studio since she closed her last one before the move. I also learned today that she has cancer—stage three but slow moving at this point. It makes my heart hurt to think about the fact that such a vibrant woman is so sick.
Her bright smiles and even brighter hair, in my mind’s eye, paint a picture of a healthy woman with many more years of life ahead of her...but sometimes, I notice the way she favors her right leg, or the way she’s always cold no matter how warm it is in the building. She cut her hair yesterday, showing up with a nice bobbed style that personally I don’t think suits her as well as her wild curls had, but I realize the necessity. She still dances, though. Even though she has to be in incredible pain, she always dances.
I have the studio to myself, as Landy waves at me from the bottom of the staircase before retiring to her apartment upstairs. There’s rain pelting the floor to ceiling window that faces Main Street—the tail end of a small, summer rainstorm is upon us, but the tap, tap, tap on the glass puts me at ease.
I connect my phone to the sound system via bluetooth and let my practice playlist flow through the speakers. Over the years, I’ve compiled dozens of small playlists, organized by mood for the most part. Today's mood is...somber, to put it the simplest. Melancholy. Macabre. Depressed. All I can think about is what River confessed to me.
I move to the center of the room, bare feet gliding over the polished wood floors, shaking my arms out until my muscles are loose. The lights are dim, so as to not draw any unnecessary attention to the window from the street that fills with tourists at this time of night. They stop by from time to time to gawk at the classes and the dancers through the window.
When my song starts, my limbs loosen up as I let the music take me far away from here. Closing my eyes, I move almost from instinct rather than memorization. I have my go-to routines that I warm up with, things I’ve practiced over the years and come naturally to me. I use the routines as a means of stress relief now. And it works, for the most part. I can practically feel the stress lifting from my body and hovering somewhere far away from me. Dancing is my safe place.
No matter how hard I dance, my mind drifts back to what River said. To the look of betrayal in Luca’s eyes. A part of me wants to shy away from the idea that I could have done something so awful to him, and another part of me screams that I was only sixteen. How could I have known? He never told me he was a virgin, and I’m not sure I would have even believed him if he did. My heart aches just thinking about it. I remember that night so vividly that it often haunts my dreams.
I drop to the floor in a heap and throw my head in my hands. Sobs wrack my body in loud, ugly grunts. We had such a great day that last summer. Luca came to the beach house one evening and asked me to take a walk with him before we had to go back home with the Pembrokes. He took me down the beach where we walked hand in hand for what felt like hours. I’d been so wrapped up in the feel of his skin on mine that I didn’t realize it when he finally turned me around and placed my back against his front until we were both facing the open sea.
I remember looking up, locking eyes with him as he smiled down at me and placed a tender kiss on my forehead. Once the shock wore off, I was able to look around us and see that Luca had brought us to a little cove, tucked away at the edge of the beach. Behind us was a small cavern that led down into some covered tide pools I’d never had the guts to explore. We were utterly alone and I can vividly recall the way my stomach flipped at the realization.
My sobs turn ugly as I replay that night in my mind's eye for the millionth time in the last decade. It was the night Luca showed me how he felt about me, when he kissed me in front of the setting sun and laid me out on the sand. He made gentle love to me, kissing me in all the right places and whispering in my ear, telling me I was beautiful.
Afterward, we'd rolled over in the warm sand with his big arm beneath my head and gazed up at the stars for hours. I still can’t look out on the Milky Way without a searing pain shooting through my chest. I thought that night had been one of many for my handsome, unattainable friend. I thought I was a passing flirtation—a curiosity he needed to fulfill, but I was fucking wrong. I was so fucking wrong.
