“Did you really?” I finally asked, my voice low with disbelief. “Did you really think of me this whole time?” I spoke the words because from my perspective, I had been gone from Austin’s life. Gone long enough that he had never bothered to call.
“Yes,” he answered immediately, his words nearly overlapping mine. “Yes, Blair. I thought of you every day. Every fucking day.”
I tilted my head, my eyes dropping as I looked at him. There was nothing in his expression that made me doubt him. Nothing in his eyes, anyway. Only in his actions.
“So…” I started, already hating the words forming in my mind. In all the versions of this conversation I’d played out over the years, I had never wanted to say them. No girl ever wants to say these words.
“Why didn’t I call you?” Austin asked, saving me from having to.
My eyes grew heavy as I blinked once, then nodded. Because this was it. The question that had lived in my chest for years. The one I had never had an answer for. Good or bad—I was finally about to have one. Austin let out a slow, heavy breath. And I had the feeling that from the moment he’d seen me in Seren’s apartment, he’d known this question was coming. Whether I asked it, or not.
“I wanted to,” he said quietly, his gaze steady on my face. “Every day, I wanted to.”
“Why didn’t you?” I pressed, my body begging for the answer I had carried for so long. He exhaled again through his nose, shaking his head slightly, like he was still trying to find the right words.
“The first couple of months, I was so excited to call you. Every day I woke up and thought— I’m going to work through this, and then I’m going to call Yellow. You’re going to do the work you need to do, and I’m going to do the work I need to do. And then I’ll finally be good enough for you.”
A soft breath left my lips as he spoke, emotion pooling in my stomach. I couldn’t quite name it, it was just emotion, sharp enough that my eyes began to sting. My heart wanted to believe his words but my mind didn’t quite want to.
“And then,” he continued, “about three months in, I realized it wasn’t going to be that easy. The more work I did, the more work I realized I still had left. It felt like I was taking apart every inch of who I was—everything I’d been through, everything I’d done. I’d take it apart, examine it, and then realize how rusted and broken it all really was.”
I wanted to reach across the space between us and pull him into me, not out of habit or hunger, but because I could hearthe weight in his voice and my body still knew how to respond to it. It would have been easy. Instinctive. One step forward, one decision made without thinking. But I didn’t move. I stayed where I was, hands folded in my lap, letting the distance remain, because wanting something didn’t mean I was allowed to take it anymore. Not like before. We weren’t those people now. We didn’t have the right to reach for each other just because it felt familiar.
“Why was it rusted?” I asked quietly. “Why was it broken?”
“I told you before, Blair, that I’ve done bad things,” he said. “But it was worse than that. Because I finally started to realize that maybe I wasn’t a good person who did bad things.” He sighed. “Maybe I was just a bad person.”
I shook my head immediately. “No,” I said simply. “You weren’t.”
Austin met my eyes again, a small smile flickering across his lips, gone almost as quickly as it appeared. “I knew you would say that.”
“It’s the truth,” I told him. “I’ve always known it. After everything you did for me, you could never be.”
“That’s what Seren said too,” Austin nodded, “but… I wasn’t convinced. I did a lot of bad, Blair. I did a lot of things that caused people harm. Just because I did some good too, well, to me, they didn’t cancel each other out.”
His expression shifted, guilt flickering across his face. “And the more I realized just how bad of a person I was, the less I wanted to call you. Eventually, Seren pushed me into going to therapy,” he continued. “She wouldn’t let me go to hers, she said her therapist was named Lucy. Or Lucky. Or something.”
I almost smiled at the thought that Seren and I might have landed in the same therapist’s office by name alone. I pushed the thought aside. Coincidences stopped surprising me a long time ago.
“But I found this old guy, Dr. Reeves,” Austin said. “And… he helped. Talking to him didn’t make the mountains smaller. It didn’t make the climb easier or shorter. There were still just as many of them, but with him, at least I had a compass.”
“Yeah,” I smiled softly. I knew exactly what he meant.
“He helped me realize that even though I had been a bad person, there was no way to undo it. I couldn’t go back. I couldn’t change what I’d done. The only thing I could do was acknowledge it. Take ownership of it. And make sure I never do it again.” Austin’s eyes held mine. “I might have been a bad person,” he said quietly, “but that didn’t mean I couldn’t become a good one.” He exhaled, something like relief in the sound.
“So I did. I became a good person, Blair. And I liked it. I liked becoming better. I liked who I was finally being.” His mouth twitched, almost a smile. “And eventually, instead of not wanting to call you, I wanted to again. But every time I thought about it, I told myself—I can be better. I can climb more mountains before I call Blair. I can be so good for her, because that’s what she deserves.”
A warmth spread through me, gentle and sure. I wasn’t disappointed in him. I never truly had been. Austin had always shown up the same way. Thoughtful. Intentional. Steady in the way he gave himself to what he cared about.
“And all of a sudden, it had been two years later…” he started.
“And we were strangers,” I finished for him, knowing exactly what he meant.
Austin frowned again and nodded. “Yeah,” he said. “We were strangers.”
We both inhaled at the same time, and the air felt thicker for it. His words didn’t echo or demand anything. They just existed between us, filling the quiet, changing the shape of it. I could feel the pause stretch, the way neither of us moved, like acknowledging it meant committing to what it carried.
“How are you?” Austin asked, breaking the silence. “How is everything? How’s your life? I want to hear everything.”
