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Shane shows us which room he’s picked for himself then tells us we have our pick of the other three bedrooms in the suite.
Blue and I glance at each other and silently decide to choose separate rooms. We’re each going different directions when Blue’s voice shatters the tense silence in the suite.
“What about everybody else?”
She knows the rest of my friends are coming to Georgia later tonight when Gabe’s plane returns home to pick them up.
Shane glances at me then back to Blue, answering her question before I have the chance.
“They’ll get another suite of rooms.”
“And Brinley will need a room,” Blue adds her violet eyes dancing between Shane and me. Her voice is so full of hope that it cracks the shell around my heart. “When we get her back.”
Spoken like a statement, but really, it’s another one of her questions.
Shane’s lips pull into a thin line, and I look away to stare out the large picture window into the parking lot.
Neither of us have an answer.
Shane retreats to his room after telling Blue the rest of the Inferno should arrive in about five hours. He leaves Blue and me alone in the main space of the large suite, and I can barely look at her.
I hate the sound of hope.
The look of it.
How it brightens someone’s eyes even when all signs point to the worst possible outcome.
To be hopeful is to be brave. Despite the ever-darkening tunnel, hope is the light that not many people can bear to see. It’s the hopeful who keep fighting their way through that tunnel, believing they’ll find their way out of the darkness, even when that tunnel is collapsing down around them.
Maybe to be hopeful is also to be stupid. To be delusional. To be irrational. The last evil in Pandora’s Box, hope digs into your heart, claws itself into place, and never lets go. It rips away at you, and you’re left with a large gaping hole where your heart used to be.
Blue is braver than me.
But then I’ve already learned not to hope.
I hoped for too many years that those weekends would end. And by the time they did, my heart was a blackened, festering mess with walls built around it that nobody could access.
I once thought Emily could get past those walls, but looking back, she was always outside of them.
Sympathetic, but never fighting with me.
It’s Blue who’s been tearing my walls down brick by painful brick with all her damn questions. Regardless of what nightmare I face, she grits her teeth and balls her hands into fists, right there by my side to face whatever threatens me.
Maybe I’ve been a little hard on her.
After her panic attack on the plane, I finally witnessed the battles she fights on her own.
Two are better than one, I’ve heard.
If she’s willing to fight the nightmares that haunt me, I need her to trust me so I can help her battle her own.
“You sure you want separate rooms? It’s not like we’ve never seen each other naked before.”
Attempting to sound light-hearted, I fight the urge to tell her she’s sharing with me whether she likes it or not.
Gently, she pushes a stray hair from her face.
“How many more people are coming?”
