Then I feel the pack pressed into my palm. It’s crumpled, like he’s been crushing it in his fist for weeks. I fumble one out and stick it to my lips, then lean toward him. Bastian’s lighter flicks to life. I feel the heat as the cigarette ignites. Like a kiss on the tip of my nose.
I take a test puff—and immediately regret every decision that led me to this moment.
My lungs revolt and I start to cough so hard I’m pretty sure I dislodge something internally vital. My eyes water, my chest seizes, and my cool girl, femme fatale dignity falls in tatters on the concrete between us.
Bastian laughs. It’s rusty and surprised, like he forgot he could do that. “When’s the last time you smoked?” he asks.
“Sophomore year of college,” I wheeze as I thump my chest with my fist in a desperate attempt to quell the coughing fit. “Apparently, I’ve lost my touch. And my appetite. Here, I don’t want this anymore.”
He takes it from me, still chuckling, and grinds it out on the step.
When I finally stop hacking up my lungs, I slump back against the door. “How did it go?” I ask as a car moseys by on the street. “With Harold.”
Bastian is quiet for a bit. Cicadas are chirping out amongst the trees, loud and annoying as hell.
“He’s cooperating,” he says eventually. “He’ll get us what we need.”
“Good. But that’s not what I meant and you know it.”
“I didn’t cross your line,” he says. I feel him turn to face me. “But I wanted to. God, Eliana, I wanted to.”
“You didn’t, though.”
“No. I didn’t.”
“Well, that’s what matters.”
“Is it?” he questions, sounding more pained than I ever would have expected. “Because I keep thinking about how easy it would have been. It would’ve felt so fucking good to give that son of a bitch what he deserved. The only thing that stopped me was knowing I’d have to come back here and look at you.”
I don’t know what to say to that. I settle for toying with the fraying hem of my sleep shorts.
“I’m trying,” he says into the darkness. “I’m trying so fucking hard to be someone who deserves?—”
He stops. The sentence hangs there, incomplete, like a bridge to nowhere. Someone who deserveswhat,precisely?Forgiveness? A second chance? Me?
Maybe all of the above. Maybe none of it.
I reach out and touch his knee. The denim of his jeans is warm from his body heat and rough under my palm. He goes completely still at the contact, like I’ve pressed a pause button on his entire nervous system.
“I know,” I say.
It’s not exactly aGet Out of Jail Freecard for the soul. I’m not sure I have the authority to grant that, even if I wanted to. But it’s acknowledgment. Recognition that the man sitting next to me on this shitty concrete stoop in suburban nowhere is fighting a war inside himself, and for once—perhaps for the first time in his life—he’s choosing to fight for the right side.
His hand covers mine. It rests there, hot and heavy, his fingers curling close like he’s afraid I’ll pull away.
I don’t.
“Trying counts,” I whisper. “It has to count for something.”
“I hope so,” Bastian murmurs, so low I almost miss it.
We sit there for a while longer, neither of us talking. But it’s not awkward or tense, the way it has been before. It’s just Bastian and Eliana on a stoop.
I don’t want to give that up just yet.
But nothing lasts forever. Especially not the good things.
“You should go back to bed,” Bastian finally says. “Get some rest.”
