I wanted to tell Dakota everything—the whole truth—because the guilt of what I was doing was starting to become too heavy to bear. I was suffocating under the weight of this deception, and the words—the truth—kept crawling to the tip of my tongue, desperate to get out, to warn Dakota, to tell him what he deserved to know.
And every time I saw him, it was like my mouth was sewn shut.
Beyond that, I didn’t know how to believe that he could actually like me, and I was sure it was because he didn’t truly know me that he was able to convince himself that he liked me.
He was seeing someone that didn’t exist, projecting an entirely fictional person onto me because if he only knew how lacking I was, then he wouldn’t have any kind of interest in me.
I was a mess of emotions, a fucked-up past and a fucked-up present colliding in awful ways. It was because my past had such a firm hold on me that I felt like lying to Dakota was the only way. Before coming to Ashbrook, I wanted closure more than anything. And now I didn’t know what I fucking wanted.
I wanted to pretend none of this was happening, but avoiding or ignoring it wasn’t an option.
If I wanted to…to keep this, I needed to dig out all the beliefs that had embedded themselves under my skin. They were doing more harm than good.
They’d had their time, and now it was up.
I woke with a gasp,heart pounding. It was dark, the room was quiet—except for the soft breathing that surrounded me. I was wrapped up in Dakota’s arms, and I thought I was dreaming for the longest time. I wasn’t sure if minutes or hours passed, but I wasn’t about to move, to cut the dream short and have this feeling stolen from me.
My cheek was pressed against his bare chest, moving with every steady inhale and exhale, his arms banded around me, one leg thrown over mine and tucked under the other.
Holding me in place. Keeping me tethered.
I pressed my lips into his skin—softly, inhaling his scent as my eyes slid shut.
I didn’t remember falling back asleep, and when I woke up the next morning, I was alone.
18
YOU’VE CREATED A MONSTER
DAKOTA
Iwas never really one to think I’d made mistakes, didn’t believe in dwelling on the past, but for the first time in my life I was pretty sure I’d fucked up.
I never should’ve told him. But knowing me, there wasn’t any reality where I didn’t tell him.
I could be patient.
And now that I’d learned about his past, I could be even more patient. I could wait forever. The walls he’d built made perfect sense now, and I wasn’t sure I wanted to tear them down anymore. That felt too disrespectful, like I’d be invalidating everything he’d gone through and the only way he’d found he could cope.
I’d climb over them and meet him where he was instead.
There were four days left in our winter break, and I wanted to spend every single second with Reese.
He didn’t want to spend one single second with me, however. He was too busy.
Too busy ignoring me.
Well, not exactly. But he’d slid his walls back up after my confession. Or—and I liked this thought better—he wasn’t ableto put his walls back in place and was just avoiding me because then I’d see the truth.
He was just scared, which only made me want to hold him. Comfort him. Chase away those fears and show him there was nothing to be afraid of. Not with me.
Well, maybe there was. I’d kind of turned into a stalker—except I was very bad at it, so I didn’t think it even counted.
I went around campus looking for him every day—it’s not like I really had anything better to do—but I never found him; I didn’t know where he was hiding, but it was making me anxious. He was doing what he did at the beginning of the semester: coming in after midnight when I’d already fallen asleep.
I couldn’t stop thinking about what we’d done at the cemetery, either.
I wanted to do more with him. I wanted all of it with him. Everything. Anything he wanted, or I wanted, or we wanted. I was cooking up fantasies that would turn him into a tomato in half a second if he heard what they were.
