Lying crossed my mind. Yet I knew if I lied, I’d be taking a giant leap backward. “Sleeping. Inside a wigwam. A dude named Brady invited me to get out of the rain.”
“Brady? Who the hell is that?”
“Where’s Shelly?” I retorted, with the same amount of sarcasm.
“Hell if I know. If you hadn’t disappeared so quickly, you would have known I had no desire to spend what little timewehad left with Shelly.”
We just stared at each other. Without words.
“Didn’t you know that?” he asked.
I shook my head. My resolve was waning.
“How could you not know that?” His eyes were tight.
Unable to shake the feeling of deep regret, I broke eye contact with him and wrapped the blanket tightly around my body.
“What’s the real reason you walked away, Suzannah? I need to know.” He hadn’t called me by my real name since we first met.
I just stood there with the sad realization that my lack of trust—and my immense insecurity—had caused every bit of this. What’s worse, we had missed our last day together because of it. My insecurity roared back. “When I saw Shelly, I ... guess I figured you wanted to be with her. She’s—” I stopped short of sayingbeautiful, like Livy.
“Complicated. I told you that. She’s the looniest chick I’ve ever known.”
“You didn’t exactly say it like that.” I forced a nervous chuckle, wishing I knew what made her so loony.
He didn’t answer me. And I didn’t say anything else. The silence between us stretched so long it seemed even the droopy, dew-laden necks of goldenrod sensed our despair.
Not able to stand the distance any longer, I sat down next to him. Only then did I notice my clothes in his lap.
He shifted until we were facing one another with our knees touching. “Shelly was important to meonce. She’s not anymore. She’s nuts.”
“Maybe so. But she’s ...” As much as I wanted to saybeautiful, like Livy, I stopped myself. Was her heart beautiful? Was she kind? Loving? Good to others? Leon had just said she was nuts.
“She’s what?”
“I figured she was your first love. And that y’all had lost your virginity together. I figured you’d always be bonded because of it.”
He didn’t confirm or deny my suspicions; he just said, “I’m not bonded to Shelly. Look, Suzie, I know we just met two days ago. And maybe it’s ludicrous to think down the road when we live in opposite directions.” We caught one another’s eyes. Deep inside those pretty green irises of his, I saw an earnestness I hadn’t seen before. “I don’t want this to be the end of us.”
There. He said it.Us.
He took my hand in his. “I don’t know what the future looks like, or if I’m nuts to think we can have a long-distance thing, but I don’t want to be another face in your crowd.” He had remembered my exact words.
“I don’t want that either.”
“Johnny and I have to split right after Hendrix. That’s in a couple hours.” At Leon’s reminder of the time, I felt the hornet’s sting again. Our hourglass was almost empty.
“When I was alone during the storm, I realized a lot of things about myself,” I said.
“Like what?” he asked, with that tender expression I’d grown to crave.
“Like how hard it is for me to trust boys. Trust anyone, really. So many people I should have been able to count on have let me down.”
Leon sighed, shaking his head slowly. “I know, and I’m sorry.”
At the mere thought of my complicated, psycho family, I pulled my legs up close to my body and hung my head. “I’ll never be able to forgive Dad for what he did to Ron. Or me.”
Leon parted his lips to say something but stopped.
