Two years of thoughts I've never shared. Words I've written at three in the morning when I couldn't sleep because she was in my head. Confessions that would give her power over me that no one else has ever had.
And I'm offering it to her like it's nothing.
Isla stares at the leather-bound book like it might bite her.
"You want me to read your poetry."
"Yes."
"About me."
"Yes."
"Why?" She asks in confusion.
Because I need you to understand. Because words on ice and in kitchens aren't enough. Because I've been hiding for two years and I'm exhausted.
"Because you asked me to prove I'm real," I say instead. "This is the realest thing I have."
She takes the journal carefully, reverently almost. Opens to the first page where I've written the date: September, two years ago. Right after that party. Right after she destroyed me.
"You don't have to read it all," I add quickly. "Just... enough to understand."
"Understand what?"
"That I've been obsessed with you since the day I saw you. That every cruel thing I did was because I couldn't figure out how to want you without hating myself for it." I sit on the edge of my bed because standing feels too vulnerable. "That you were right about me, but you were also wrong."
She sits in my desk chair, the journal open in her lap. Starts reading.
I can't watch. Can't sit here while she reads my soul laid bare in terrible verse. So I get up and pace to the window, staring out at the campus below. Lights twinkle across the quad. Students heading to parties, to the library, to wherever Friday night takes them.
Normal people living normal lives.
Not like me, waiting for the girl I've been torturing for two years to read poetry I wrote about her and decide if I'm worth forgiving.
"Sebastian." Her voice is quiet. Uncertain.
I turn around. She's on the third page, and her eyes are wet.
Fuck.
"I'm sorry," I say immediately. "I shouldn't have shown you. It's too much, too soon?—"
"Stop." She looks up at me. "Just... stop talking for a second."
I stop.
She reads another page. Then another. The silence stretches so long I start to feel sick.
Finally, she closes the journal but keeps her hands on the cover.
"This one," she says, voice rough. "The one about the library. When you wrote about watching me shelve books and wondering what I was thinking about. What I dreamed about when I wasn't being crushed by expectations and bills and survival."
I remember that one. Written on a Tuesday night last semester when I'd gone to the library specifically to see her and ended up hiding behind the stacks like a coward.
"What about it?"
"It's beautiful." She traces the leather cover. "They're all beautiful. Raw and honest and so different from the person you've pretended to be." She looks at me then, really looks at me. "Why did you hide this? Why did you waste two years being cruel when you could have just... shown me this?"
