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“I’m sorry,” I shout at her back. “Don’t go.” Now it’s my voice that breaks. “I’m sorry.” The word barely gets out.
I sprint after her, hoping my knees won’t give way. She won’t turn around, and it feels like I’m running after a completely different girl with her hair so different. I drop the sodden jacket to the ground—it’s not raining anymore—and wait for her to turn around. She doesn’t.
A slender shoulder begins to shake.What is she—?
“Eden?” I reach a hand to her arm, and even though her sleeve is wet through and cold like an icicle, I’m scorched just by touching her. “I’m sorry,” I whisper, her full name an echo of all our kisses. She shivers violently under my touch. “No matter what you… what happened with us, I shouldn’t have spoken this way, it destroys me to hurt you.”
I turn her around to face me, but her head is down as she’s quietly crying. Tears just pour down her cheeks and not a sound comes from her mouth. She just stands there, looking at the puddles by her shoes, shaking from head to foot.
A curse flies out of my lips. All the time I knew her, I saw her every day, and we each went through a ton of horrible teen stuff. I never once saw her cry. She was sullen or mad or tearing up. But never full-on crying.
And now...to see her so sad… It breaks me. It’s as if she’s abandoned herself to the crying, and I can’t stand it. I’m about to catch her under the knees and carry her somewhere safe, where no one can hurt her, but before I make a complete fool out of myself, I say:
“Don’t cry, baby. Don’t cry.” My hand slides up and down her wet hair, feeling her tremble under my touch. “It’s so hard to get used to the new hair,” I murmur under my breath.
And then she hits me. Well, not really. She just swats at my hand, the way your friends do when you say too many jokes to them. But we’re not friends, are we? We’re people who keep running away from each other. We’re nothing. She mumbles something and I can’t catch what she’s saying, so I tip her face up with a finger on her chin.
“Lift your head for me,” I murmur.
She lifts her face and the rest of the world disappears. She raises those honey eyes to mine, water on her lips, her cheekbones sharp and wet and freckled, begging to be kissed. I think my heart might stop from the exquisite music of her beauty.
“I’m sorry about what my da—about what was done to you after we broke up,” she says, her face set and white, as if she’s determined to get the words out no matter how hard they are to say. “I didn’t tell him you had hurt me. It wasn’t me.”
“I know,” I say immediately, and I do know. Deep down, I never thought she was the one accusing me of assaulting her. I just knew. “I know it wasn’t you who spread the lies.”
“But I didn’t come to the school myself to discredit him either.”
“Why didn’t you?”
This is it. I’m holding my breath. Four years of torment, of pure hell, are about to be explained. No one will ever take back what happened to me, or how I have lived these four years, but an explanation would bring me so much freedom, so much peace, I’m dizzy with the anticipation of it.
She owes me one. Doesn’t she?
But she’s already shaking her head. My chest empties of all hope—and air. “I couldn’t,” she just says. “I just couldn’t.”
“Was I…?” My throat hurts when I speak, and I have to stop and start over. “Was I not worth fighting for? Was I not worth at least trying to stop him?”
She shrugs.
Shrugs.
This is unreal. How can she just stand here, in front of me, and shrug?
“Look at me,” I say, with more venom than I’ve ever heard come out of anyone’s lips. But this is what I’ve become now. What she’s made me. A venom-dripping demon. “Do you hate me that much? Did you hate me that much back then?”
She obviously did. But why?Why?
I am this close to sinking to my knees and screaming that ‘why’ until my throat is ripped to pieces like some sort of pathetic cartoon. But at the same time, I can’t move. I’m immobilized.
Finally, she looks straight at me, and my breath catches.
I’ve never seen an expression like the one that’s on her face. And there’s one word that describes it, just one: Pain. Raw pain. Leaving room for nothing else.
“I hated everything back then,” she says, her voice tortured but clear. I can’t even lie to myself and say I imagine her saying those words. They are real. “I hated everything,” she repeats, “but never, not for one second, did I hate you.”
I sway on my feet, suddenly dizzy.
What is she talking about?
