“Was that really our problem? Because before you broke it off, you were studying just fine. You said yourself that I made your grades better. And was it really about your parents? You’d already told them to shove it.” He sighed. “It’s always felt like there’s something you’re not telling me.”
Ice rushed in my veins, my blood screeching to a halt. He wasn’t wrong, and I knew it. It was definitely more than school.
It was that night before I left. The way he touched me scared me so badly that something flipped inside me. Something he said, but I couldn’t even remember what it was. Something he did. Trapped, panicked, scared, exposed.
My brain could briefly touch a different darkened room in my fuzzy head, a different guy, but just like that, I’d change mental tracks. My stomach turned at the memory, or what was left of it, and all I knew was I couldn’t be around Colton anymore.
“I took you home to my family, Vi. I . . . I was ready to make big future plans with you. I told you . . . the hard stuff. Stuff I told no one else. And you just bailed one day. There was the stuff with your parents too, but I thought we had that worked out.”
“It was a lot, Colt. All of it. I couldn’t just cut my parents out.”
“I didn’t ask you to!” Colt looked at me incredulously. “I was willing to put in the work, Vi. I was willing to do what it took to bring them around. You weren’t.”
“It was just too much!” I snapped. “I was, what, nineteen? My major was super demanding. Then I was going against their wishes by switching majors. I just wanted their support, and I wasn’t going to get it?—”
“If I was in the picture.” Colt shook his head. “That’s some pretty conditional love, Vi.”
I didn’t breathe until my lungs felt oxygen-starved, too shocked by his statement. My eyes felt hot. “Not like your dad is much better.”
Colt sat up, putting his hands out and arguing at the wall opposite us rather than directly at me. “Then let’s stop wasting our lives on love we’ll never get, and just be there for each other! Be what we wanted to be.” He pressed his fist to his forehead. “If you dated me, I’d be out of your hair most of the time. Hang around in the summers maybe. Take a trip or two together.”
I leveled him with a look. “And that would be enough for you?”
“It’s called compromise! What do you think we’re doing here at this wedding? It wasn’t easy for them but they compromised!”
“I want to. I just don’t know if it makes sense right now.”
“If you really want it, then help me make it make sense.” Iturned to meet his gaze. His hair was wild from sleep, but he was still gorgeous. It was criminal. He must have slipped his fake teeth in at some point when I wasn’t looking. He covered my hand with his, squeezing twice. “We could work this out.”
I drew a shaky breath, letting it out through my lips. Images rose unbidden in my head. Colt and I sharing a house. Picking out plants at a garden center and making him dig the holes. The three children we didn’t have wandering around our yard. Around his family’s lake house. Around their farm.
My throat was unspeakably tight, my lungs bound by lead weights.
A family. We wanted to make a family. Not when we were as young as we were, but someday.
“Do you even remember? What we wanted to be?” he whispered. I looked at him and in so many ways, he was still the sad boy I left in a grimy hockey house in Boston.
“Of course I remember. I know what we wanted to be,” I croaked. “But if it’s going to cause some big dramatic upheaval with my family, I can’t take the distraction right now.”
Colt’s jaw feathered and he bobbed his head. “How close are you to finishing?”
“About three more years.”
A warm hand met my back. “I don’t want to distract you or cause problems in your life. I get what you’re saying. I just wish it was different.”
I laid my head on his shoulder. “Me too.” Little shocks of pain surged through me thinking of what I needed to say. “Three years is a long time. You have a right to be happy.”
Colton’s lips pressed into my shoulder. “You make me happy.”
I scrunched up my face to stave off tears. “You don’t haveto wait for me.”
His arm slung around my back and he kissed my temple. “If I wait for you, it’s because I want to. Not because I have to.”
Silence. I forced myself to take a breath. The deepest part of my brain served up a terrifying thought: what if we did all this and I pushed him away again? What if he was betting on the wrong horse? Because he was right: it was more than my work and my family. It was the hole in my memory from that one awful night.
But unearthing that would be the ultimate wrecking ball for everything I’d so carefully built.
We sat, holding each other, side by side, sheets draped at our waists. Who knew this wedding was going to take such an emotional turn? I thought at worst, we’d make out or do something stupid up against a wall. Which, I could indeed check both of those boxes. But I didn’t expect we’d go into how we’d hurt each other. I didn’t expect how much he still wanted this, or how much I wanted it. I thought I’d moved on, but if anything, seeing Colton again proved that he was even better than I remembered. Adult Colton was nothing short of a dreamboat.
