Total pages in book: 122
Estimated words: 114951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 575(@200wpm)___ 460(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 114951 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 575(@200wpm)___ 460(@250wpm)___ 383(@300wpm)
I looked down at my hands — the same hands that had held her face, her waist, her heart for one impossible minute — and curled them into fists.
“If you think I won’t fight for you this time,” I whispered to the empty drive, “you don’t know me at all.”
The ache in my chest sharpened. It was the kind of pain that made me feel alive, the kind that existed because what I was fighting for mattered.
She mattered.
I wouldn’t chase her now. She needed space. She needed safety. She needed breathing room.
But I could prove her wrong.
Her taillights were long gone, swallowed by the night, but I stayed there anyway — rooted to the driveway like leaving might undo the last ten minutes.
Hell, maybe I deserved to stand there and feel every ounce of what I’d been missing for years.
Because one thing was certain as the air finally settled around me:
She could run from the moment, from the intensity, from me.
But I would never run from her again.
And I didn’t care what I risked in the process.
Disappear
Ariana
Present
I stared at my hands — the weathered, textured skin of them and how my knuckles were white from gripping so tightly. I had them folded in my lap, and I looked at them as if it were the first time, as if they were something to discover, as if they held all the answers.
I didn’t know who I was anymore.
Those hands were once young, once smooth and pale and devoid of the fine lines that marked them now. They once held fast to a boy who loved me and made me feel safe. They once cared for my younger brother, holding him and bathing him and teaching him how to ride a bike. They once worked for me, writing grant applications and college essays. They once helped the community I cared about so much.
Now, they were cold and brittle. They trembled from fear. They ached with loss. They longed for a past so far out of reach I couldn’t even see it anymore.
Nathan came home the Sunday after Thanksgiving looking like a complete stranger. His eyes were red and underlined with a deep purple, like he hadn’t slept all week. He kissed me absentmindedly upon his arrival, immediately showering and then passing out until he had to work the next morning.
When he finally asked me what I did for Thanksgiving after not checking in even once on his trip, I told him the truth.
And it had been a mistake.
At first, I didn’t think he cared. “You were gone and they invited me,” I’d explained, and he’d acted like it was no big deal. But after a long, quiet dinner, he’d started in on the questions.
“Where was it?”
“How long did you stay?”
“Who was there?”
Every question was careful and calculated, but it was enough for me to know he was building a story in his mind. Somehow, by the end of the conversation, I was backpedaling and trying to justify why I went. I felt guilty.
Me.
The one who was left behind while he went to Vegas for the holiday, who would have spent that holiday alone had it not been for Shane’s invitation.
But Nathan didn’t care.
He’d have rather me been alone, if his tone was any indication.
And I should have felt guilty — not for spending Thanksgiving with friends, but for what I did after.
Except I didn’t.
I didn’t feel a single ounce of anything other than longing when it came to what happened with Shane. I wished for a world where I could have stayed right there in his arms, where I could have let him kiss me senseless, where I could have believed him and the notion that it could all be so easy.
“I’d take your hand and run. Tonight. Right now. Without looking back.”
A chain twisted around my heart and pulled tight at the memory of those words, at how desperately I wished for them to be true.
But for the first time since the day Shane McCabe walked away from me, I understood why he did it.
It was the same reason I couldn’t stay, the same reason I couldn’t entertain his offer.
I loved him. Even still, maybe always, I loved him.
And I loved him enough to not let him lose everything that mattered to him just for me.
If I would have let him take me home, if we would have crossed even further over that line between us, everything would have imploded. Nathan would have lost his mind — he already was just with the knowledge that I was in the same household with Shane for Thanksgiving.
“I told you to stay away from him,” he’d seethed.
“He was one of like fifteen people, Nathan,” I’d explained, exasperated. “I was invited and so was he. What was I supposed to do? Walk out because he was there and just spend Thanksgiving by myself?”