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I shake my head, running my hands through my cropped hair and turning away from her as I try to find my composure. Then taking a breath, I turn back, meeting her tear-filled stare. “I’m falling apart, Blair. Just the sight of your face is destroying everything I’ve tried to heal over the past six years, and all you can manage to say is that you can’t wait to be out of this godforsaken town. Were you even planning on coming to find me? Did you even care to see where we stood after all these years? Care to see the destruction you left behind?” I take a breath, my hands shaking as I stare into those stunning blue eyes that live in my dreams. “You’ve come flying back in here without a fucking care of who it impacts, acting as though I’m the one who hurt you, hiding behind counters, and shying away from me as though we weren’t part of the same damn whole.”
“Don’t you fucking get it?” she yells back, the empty roads swallowing the sound of her cries. “I’m ashamed. I’m embarrassed. I fucked up the one amazing thing in my life and have been struggling ever since. Do you have any idea how it feels to have to come back here and face you knowing what I’ve done? How fucking bad I hurt you. Just seeing you like this, seeing that you’re still in pain and knowing that my arrival is making it that much harder is tearing me to pieces.”
Tears fall down her cheeks and she hastily wipes them away as she takes a deep, shaky breath, her gaze remaining fixed on mine. “It has never been my intention to hurt you, Nick, because when you hurt, I hurt.”
Fuck.
I fall forward, my hands braced against the hood of my truck as my head hangs low, barely able to manage taking in the sound of her heartache and those words I’ve always needed to hear. Only, I don’t know what to do with them or where to go from here. What’s the point in knowing that we’re both still aching when she’s going straight back to New York? Tearing the wound open is all for nothing because, at the end of the day, it’s not going to make anything any easier or help me heal and move on. And it sure as fuck doesn’t look as though it’s helping her.
“So, that’s it?” I ask her, unable to even raise my head. “You’ve said what you needed to say, you’ll go back to fixing up your grandparents’ place, and then you’ll silently slip away when you’re done?”
Blair inches toward me, unaware of just how much pain I’m really in. “What’s the point, Nick?” she whispers, reaching out toward me before pulling her hand away. “Why dredge up all of these feelings and fuck us both up, only for me to fly back to New York in a few weeks? Doing this, airing all our dirty laundry and putting everything out in the universe isn’t helping either of us. It’s better this way.”
I shake my head, unable to believe the words coming out of her mouth. How could she come back to Blushing thinking she would just sweep it all under the rug and pretend there isn’t a gaping hole right in the center of my chest in the shape of her face?
Needing a minute, I turn and walk away, taking a few steps down the quiet road, and I’m grateful when she doesn’t try to follow me. Fuck, it feels as though she were leaving me all over again. Only last time, she sat in my lap with her arms wrapped around me, and that somehow managed to soften the blow, but this time, she thrust her fist right into my chest and tore my heart out in one fell swoop before crushing it under her foot like a piece of discarded trash.
When the cold becomes too much, I trail back toward the truck, finding Blair sitting in the back with her stupid tree. She fiddles with something, but I really don’t have enough energy to figure out what. Instead, I climb back into the truck before trying the engine as though it might magically work, but God knows I haven’t been that lucky today.
The engine fails again, and I lean back in my seat, staring up at the cloudy sky through the dirty windshield. I suppose I should be grateful that it’s only a soft snowfall today. It could be worse. There could be a blizzard.
My gaze settles on the rearview mirror, watching Blair as she continues to fiddle, still finding it so surreal that she’s even here. I’ve thought about this moment a million times over, and I can guarantee that it hasn’t gone down the way I’d always pictured. Hell, I’m sure Blair’s thought about it too.
A deep chill settles into my bones, and I cross my arms over my chest, trying to hold on to what little warmth I have left, wondering just how quickly I’d lose my balls if I suggested Blair get naked in the back of my truck with me. I start searching through my phone for games I can play that don’t require cell service when a terrified scream breaks through the silence, the sound like nails on a chalkboard.
“NICK!” Blair screams, the high pitch of her voice tying my stomach in knots.
My head whips up, staring into the rearview mirror to find Blair’s tree filled with orange licks of burning flames, quickly spreading. “FUCK!”
Terror grips me in a chokehold, and I bail out of the truck, racing around the side and reaching up toward Blair. With my heart pounding faster than ever before, I grab Blair’s arms and yank her back, her body tumbling over the edge of my truck away from the fire as she squeals with fear, but I quickly catch her, barely having a second to help settle her on her feet before reaching for the straps holding the damn tree down. But fuck, there’s no denying the heat from the flames is sure as fuck welcome right now.
“No, no, no,” Blair panics, looking at the tree she so carefully picked out.
Quickly unstrapping the big bastard, I launch myself up into the bed of my truck and find a portion of the tree that isn’t currently burning and throw the fucker down into the freezing snow as smoke billows up into the sky.
“What the fuck, Blair?” I demand, jumping down to the burning tree and kicking up snow over it, hoping like fuck this doesn’t turn into some kind of crime scene. I mean, on the bright side, at least all the people in the cemetery are already dead. It’s not like we can accidentally kill them again.
A part of me screams to let the tree burn, to let us soak up the warmth it offers, but judging by the look on Blair’s face, that suggestion isn’t going to go down well. She’d prefer to freeze than to lose the tree she went to all this trouble for.
Blair hurries around to the burning tree, helping me extinguish the flames, and it takes all too long before we’re left with a smoking tree, that’s now nothing more than singed branches. Well, at least one half of it is. The other half is buried in the snow, so the jury is still out on that.
Blair collapses against my truck, her hand on her chest as she breathes heavily. “Holy shit. I didn’t mean for that to happen,” she tells me, her eyes wide as her hands shake. She turns around, looking into the bed of the truck and reaching in before pulling out a lighter. “I just . . . I found this in your coat pocket and I was so cold. I was just playing. You know, holding the flame near my face just to feel a little warmth, and I guess the flames caught on the netting around the tree. I’m so sorry. Did you get burned? Are you hurt?”
“I’m fine,” I mutter, clenching my jaw. I reach toward her and snatch the lighter out of her hand before she accidentally sets my truck on fire too. Shoving it into my pocket, I glance over the still-smoking tree. “At least this might act like some kind of bat signal. Maybe someone might come looking now.”
“Shit,” she mutters, moving toward the tree and bending down, trying to pull at a good section of the tree and maneuvering it around to see the other half of it. “I guess this part isn’t so bad. It’s salvageable, right?”
“Just get a new tree,” I tell her.
“Are you kidding? I searched for ages for this tree. It’s the only good one they had left. I’m not abandoning it.”
“Wow. And here I thought abandoning the things you loved was your specialty.”
Blair whirls on me, rage pooling in her eyes, and this time, I know I’ve crossed a line. “For fuck’s sake, Nick? How long are you going to hold it against me? I get it already. I fucked up. I left you. I broke your fucking heart, and it was terrible, but how the hell are your constant string of insults supposed to help? Does talking to me like shit help you feel better? Does it make you feel like the big man on campus? Hell, if I knew you hadn’t matured any further than the twenty-three-year-old asshole I left behind, then maybe I would have taken my chances with the frostbite walking home.”
“Shit, Blair. I’m sorry,” I say, stepping toward her and invading her space, momentarily forgetting that maybe this isn’t okay. “It just came out. I’m still so fucking angry at you that I can’t seem to reel it in.”
“Oh, boo hoo,” she spits, shoving her hands against my chest, forcing me back a step. “Stop acting like you’re the only one hurting.”
