“What?”
He struggles a moment to keep his eyes on the road, trying to glance at me.
“I knew you weren’t no-contact with them, like you told me. A lot of the time I just had to get up and go to the window. Sometimes you were just outside, talking to your brother or mom or dad on the phone. I felt like I could tell who it was by the tone of your voice sometimes,” I say, a secret I never told him before, I realize.
He’s fallen quiet, processing what I’m saying.
“I know you thought you were protecting my feelings by just keeping in touch with your family when you thought I was asleep. But it sucked that you felt like you had to hide that from me. All of it sucked.”
It wasn’t right to ask him to choose me over his family. But how do you love someone who won’t choose you? He never had,and that had been the first crack in our relationship. A fault in the foundation, really. He never advocated for me to his family the way I needed him to.
Shawn barely moves even to breathe. I watch his throat as he swallows.
“I know I reacted strongly when you showed up...and I’m not apologizing for that,” I say slowly, and meet his eyes when he stops at a red light.
He holds my gaze gently and nods a little. I’m surprised he doesn’t push back on it.
“But it is nice to get a chance to talk a little again. Even if it’s just for some closure. But I’m gonna be real, I think everything makes even less sense now that I’ve actually met and know your folks.”
Bringing up the sum of all our problems, the evidence of the end of us, feels I’ve drawn a line in the sand. I can see it in the hard line of his mouth as he nods and doesn’t push back on it.
The light turns green and the way the car jerks forward feels like it says a lot about his mood.
“Who said families were supposed to make sense?” Shawn sighs. “There’s a lot that I still don’t really know how to talk about.”
I guess his family wouldn’t make any more sense than mine did, the way I didn’t really end up close with either of my parents. That desperately wanting a stronger connection only made it more difficult to have one.
I watch the sun start to glare against the clouds, slipping down in the sky. We’re quiet for a long time, and every fewseconds I peek at Shawn chewing the inside of his cheek the way he always did when he was deep in thought.
For a moment, I think he’s going to try to tell me something about his family that will offer at least a sliver of clarity.
“I don’t know if you still go hiking much, but you shouldn’t go into the woods for a bit. Since there’s a wild animal out there mauling deer and things,” he says, brow furrowed as he chooses his words, not glancing up at all from the road ahead.
I frown a little. What does that have to do with anything we were talking about?
“If anything ever happened to you,” he says, but doesn’t finish the thought. A muscle tenses in his jaw.
I think about the dreams, the beast I had met in them. There’s no reason to, it’s just a dream. It’s not the same thing as what he’s talking about. But I can’t help but feel he senses its presence out in the woods as keenly as I do. That all of this tension over the wedding, the issues with his family, and my being here manifest together as something with teeth, a low, constant growl in the background that makes your hair stand on end. It stalks, ready to strike, just when we think we’re safe.
Shawn tears his eyes from the road, and when they meet mine, I realize the beast in my dreams has always had his eyes.
“Sure, yeah,” I nod and take a sip of the mostly melted smoothie to distract myself with anything else. It’s already going down uneasily, and I grimace at it. I hold it out to Shawn. “You can have the rest of this.”
His hand grazes mine and the sensation spikes in my middle, an explosion of little wings. Something far worse than lactose intolerance has been churning in my stomach.
Feelings.
Too many to parse through. Every high and every low we ever had, every sweet gesture followed by every problem, every fight and apology and make up.
I should shove away from him, after the number of times I’ve insisted to Laura that I could never let a guy make me feel so alone in a relationship again.
But here I am, ready to melt into his side if it means he’ll put his arms around me and stroke my back and make me feel like I’m the only girl in the world again, even if it won’t last.
14
Elise
We get back to the house almost too soon. Suddenly the twenty-minute drive from town to the Hayes House doesn’t feel like it’s just on the edge of being too long, but terribly short.
