“Jase…” I repeat before swallowing. “I can’t go out with you. I’m sorry if I’ve led you on. I don’t think I’ve given you any signals, but if I have, I’m sorry. And maybe in another timeline, you’d be the perfect guy for me, but I’ve been in a very serious relationship my entire life and…” I shrug. “He’s it for me.”
“Oh… I didn’t…” He lets out a breath. “Shit, I didn’t know.” He rubs a hand behind his neck and shakes his head. “You never have anyone coming to visit…” He starts, then abruptly stops, his hazel eyes looking down and then back up at me like he’s confused. He slowly turns his head toward the table. Sebastian, surprisingly, isn’t staring at us as he seems to be engrossed in what looks like a pretty intense conversation with Dex.Probably regarding the same thing Jase is moments away from uncovering.
When he turns back to me, his brows are pulled together, and his eyes are narrowed. “You’re not trying to tell me—”
I look down, not because I’m ashamed of what I’m about to say but because I’m trying to find the words. “I’ve loved him since I was four years old. He was there with me the day my dad was killed and—”
“That’s not love. That's a trauma bond and probably intense codependency.” He interrupts, and I internally roll my eyes at the same things I’ve been hearing my whole life.
I cross my arms over my chest, discomfort and irritation blossoming there. “Two things can be true at once.” I wasn’t in denial that Wild and I were a little—okay, a lot—codependent and trauma-bonded, but I refused to believe that love wasn’t capable of blossoming out of those things.
“He’s your stepbrother, but you were raised as actual siblings… In the same house. That is not normal. I guess you can’t really say he groomed you since you’re so close in age… but… he preyed on your weakness. Probably used your vulnerability over losing your dad—”
I put a hand up, not wanting to give him any more time for this bullshit psychoanalysis. “You don’t know shit about my life or what we’ve gone through. You have no idea who initiated what or when or what it was like growing up for us.”
“Have you even tried something else? He said he’s never slept with anyone else, soyou.” He scoffs. “I’m guessing it’s the same for you as well?”
“Not your business.”
“The fuck? You just made it my business.”
“You asked me out, and I thought you deserved the courtesy to know why the answer was no. My mistake, you actually don’t deserve shit,” I snap, because I am officially over this conversation.
“Whatever. You guys are fuckin’ weird. This is not normal or healthy, and the forbidden shit is fun now, but what about when you guys get older, and the novelty of it all wears off? You’ll have wasted your whole life chasing the high of this, and when it fizzles out, you’ll have nothing.”
“I’m sorry, who made you the expert on this or even relationships in general? You have no idea what our relationship is like.”
“Yeah, and quite frankly, I don’t want to. Good luck, Halle,” he says before walking away without another word. Wild’s in front of me no more than a second later, his hands framing my face and forcing it upward to look at him. “You have five seconds to tell me what he said to you to put that look on your face before I break his jaw.”
“Wild…”
“Three,” he says to let me know he’s counting.
“Just what you’d expect. He also uses the word ‘weird’ a lot. He’s in desperate need of a thesaurus.” I expected a chuckle, but Wild’s eyes are still hard and intense. I’m not convinced he won’t go after Jase to show him what he does to anyone that fucks with me. “What if no one gets it? What if we’re destined to live this life of having to explain that this isn’t just about a hot forbidden relationship, but we’re more than that? What if it bleeds into our kids’ lives one day?”
“Okay, okay. Come back from the ledge, please? By the time we have kids who are old enough to understand, I’m going to assume that any and all discourse will have settled down. So let’s cross that bridge in ten to twelve years, yeah?” He sweeps the hair back out of my face before pressing a light kiss on my forehead and then the tip of my nose.
I nod, trying not to fixate on the vision of our young daughter coming home with tears in her eyes because one of her classmates said their parents told them we weregrossor something. “You think this is what Sara was trying to protect us from all along? Why she separated us for that summer?” I grimace, remembering those three months between my junior and senior years when Sara sent Wild to live with her sister, almost an hour away.
That was the summer everything changed between Sara and me. I was so angry, and I never really let it go. It was the summer before he left for college, and Sara wanted to create “distance” between us even though he would be gone for months at a time while attending the University of North Carolina. She claimed she didn’t like us having that much access to each other and thought that space would cause things to fizzle out.
A part of me believed she didn’t think things were serious between us, and having me out of the picture would cause Wild to move on to another girl, subsequently breaking us up. Shenever outright said she was vying for me to experience my first heartbreak, but I always suspected it.
Regardless of her intent, she was very wrong.
If anything, the space that summer brought us closer together. We talked on the phone constantly, we texted, we sent letters. Romantic letters. Nasty, filthy letters about what we wanted to do to each other the second we were reunited. Letters that said all of the things we may not have been comfortable saying in person. I was only seventeen, just beginning to conceptualize what my life could look like, and I outlined it in countless letters to him that summer.
Our wedding day. Marriage. Kids. Our jobs. Where could we live? Where we’d grow old together.
When I look back, it’s easy to say these were all the things kids said in their late teens when they were deep into their first love. But it’s been almost nine years, and I still think about the wedding we planned–on a beach at sunset, and our kids' names–Noah for a boy and Morgan for a girl. While the vision of where we’d live has changed many times, the promise of sharing a home with Wild has always been there.
“Baby, we should go. Jase is probably going to tell your friends, but…” he looks back toward the table before looking back at me. “Seems like you have a decent friend in Dex.”
Remembering that they were alone while Jase and I were talking, I asked him, “What did you guys talk about?”
“Nothing more than you’d expect. He asked how it started and what it’s been like these past ten years. What the future looks like.”
“What did you say?”
