“If there’s any place perfect for the baring of souls, it’s here. I think it’s time to get it off your chest.”
“So I can get offyourchest?”
Logan chuckles, and I smile as my body vibrates with his laughter.
“You can stay here as long as you like,” he murmurs. “Come on, baby. It’s time.”
The old, sweetly familiar endearment unravels me like a spool of thread. I swallow against the lump in my throat. “I…”
I can’t. I can’t talk about After. My heart balks at the thought. But maybe he’s right. It’s time we spoke about Before.
His hand traces slow circles on my back, the light, steady pressure giving me courage. I take a deep breath, grateful that I can only see the faint outline of his face in the candlelight.
“You know why I left, right, Logan? About Mr. Hillerman.” I flush, heat crawling up my neck. “John. He—god, this is terrible to say out loud. I feel so much shame. We had sex.” I hide my face against his chest again. His shirt smells like warm candle smoke and that familiar, sea-salt fragrance I love. “I knew it was wrong,” I say, my voice muffled against the fabric. “But I wanted to blow everything up. Just to see what wouldhappen. Just to change things.” I laugh bitterly. “And it did. I blew everything up.”
It’s quiet for a moment. In the distance, I can hear a plink of water, the soft rush of a breeze sweeping through a passage, the squeak of a faraway bat. If he lets go of me now, pushes me away, I’ll splinter into a thousand pieces.
But he doesn’t. Logan’s arms tighten around me. I hesitate for a moment, then I give in, sagging against him, letting him give me his strength. The rest of the story spills out of me in halting, frayed sentences. John’s daughter walking in on us. How she didn’t keep it quiet—quite the opposite. How cruel the kids at school were that day. Then finally, when I was called into the principal’s office to talk to the authorities about a potential investigation because I was a minor.
“Your mom tried to help me. She tried to help, and I threw her kindness away.” I sigh. “And then there was you. You looked so shocked and angry when you found out.”
His hand, which was tracing lines up and down my back, paused. “I wasn’t angry at you.”
“Don’t lie to me. Yes, you were.”
His sigh lifts me a few inches. “I was angry, yes,” he admits. The fingers resume their soothing motion. “But more so because you didn’t tell me yourself what happened. Regardless of our dating drama, you were still my best friend.”
“How could you understand what I’d done?”
“You forget that I was also an agent of chaos in high school.”
I huff out a watery, hoarse laugh that sounds a tad more hysterical than I intended.
“Joking aside, I would’ve understood because I cared about you.” His hand tenderly brushes the hair away from my face.
A part of me wishes he would stop—I’m barelykeeping my sobs at bay as it is. But the other, weaker part of me leans into his touch.
His expression turns serious. “But, Sierra, I need you to really hear me. The way those kids treated you at school—that’s not how the adults saw it. They saw you for what you were: a kid. That’s why someone called the cops. He knew exactly what he was doing. You were a child. He was an adult.”
I try to swallow past the lump in my throat. “I was seventeen. I knew what I was doing. He…he called me a temptress. He was so much older, more experienced, more worldly. A goddamn councilman. I felt powerful seducing a powerful man.”
“You were akid,” Logan says firmly. “A kid with a neglectful mother and a predator who took advantage of you. You said you wanted to change things—that it made you feel powerful. But I think it was because you felt powerless. With your mom’s addiction. With me.” His eyes turn shadowed and haunted. “I’m just as responsible. I treated you so poorly and threw you to the wolves.”
“Hey, now,” I chide gently. “If you can excuse me for being a dumb kid, then you can excuse yourself.”
Logan sighs. “Yeah, but…”
“Yeah, but,” I echo. “Especially when you had nothing to do with it. We were broken up, Logan. If anything, that absolves you of responsibility. Looking back, it was like you knew it was time to cut me loose before I dragged you down too.”
His body stiffens beneath me. “That’s not what happened. It was just one of our usual short-term breakups. We were going to get back together.”
I squint at him. “DidIknow that?”
“Okay,Ithought it was temporary,” he admits. Hegives me a rueful smile. “I thought we had an understanding—that we were endgame, no matter what. But I know now I was a controlling, narcissistic asshole. I broke up with you whenever I didn’t get my way. I took for granted that you’d come back when I snapped my fingers.” His thumb glides across my cheek before he cups my face in his palm. His voice is so soft, I almost don’t hear him when he says, “I didn’t deserve you, Sierra.”
No, he didn’t, but not the way he means. I prop my head on my folded hands on his sternum and gaze down at him. From this angle, the edges of his strong chin and high cheekbones seem to smooth out into delicate curves. He looks almost fragile, like the half-formed, breakable humans that we were back then.
“We were young,” I mumble.
