That I’m not smart enough.
Not pretty enough.
Not worthy of him…or his love.
Because what I felt when I used to play with Kai in the woods morphed from friendship to love in the blink of an eye.
One day in summer, one ray of light—that’s all it took.
The day Kai came to say goodbye. To tell me he was moving away.
The day he lied to my face.
That day, a shaft of yellow mid-afternoon sun pierced through the canopy of the maple tree and shone on his face, picking out golden highlights in his floppy hair. Reflecting off a speck of gold I’d never noticed in one green eye. An eye he squinted, which made his lip twitch, which suddenly made me aware that he had a mouth, and it was a mouth I wanted to kiss. That I wanted to feel all over my thirteen-year-old body. A mouth I wanted to hear whisper my name again, and again.
To hear him say,I love you, Heavenly. Now and forever.
I fell in love in an instant, and he spent every second after that crushing my heart.
So maybe I feel entitled to some answers.
Or maybe I’m just tipsy and I’ve repressed so much bad shit that it s spilling over.
“You could have fought for me, Kai.” I slap the glass again. “So why didn’t you, huh?”
His Adam’s apple bobs, jaw ticking a few times as he stares out at the deepening purple skies above the waves.
He murmurs something, but too low for me to hear.
“Why?” I snap, my breathing back to its frantic near-panting. I’m so ready for a fight, so ready to scrape the last of the soil off this corpse I buried so I can see just how putrid it is in its decay.
“Because I’m a fucking coward, Haven,” he whispers.
Cold shoots through my veins like my heart’s pumping ice water instead of blood. It’s so fucking difficult to bite back the apology that wants to spill from my mouth, I’m shaking. But I force myself to remain silent, because the pain I see on Kai’s face is a fraction—less than one fucking percent—of the agony I’ve had to endure these past years.
I’m not enjoying it. Not getting any kind of satisfaction.
Just relief.
Because maybe now he’ll understand what I’ve been going through.
But then it’s not enough, because I see relief on his face too, like that one pathetic admission is all it took to clear his guilty conscience.
It’s. Not. Fucking.Fair.
“That’s it?” I say sweetly. “That’s all you’ve got to say?”
His eyes don’t leave mine as he tips back his head and slowly drains the entire glass of wine. When he lowers it, it’s with resignation, like he wishes he could have drowned himself in it.
“What?” he scoffs. “Stillsurprised I can’t give you what you want?”
My breath catches. The wine-fueled haze, the anger, the years of buried pain…it all forms an acrid lump in my throat.
I want to shatter this glass against the wall, against his head, anything to make himfeelwhat I feel.
“Do you evenknowwhat I want?” I push off the window, too wobbly to be graceful, but I don’t care. “Because if you think I want you to be some perfect, heroic asshole who’s done no wrong, you’re kidding yourself.”
“So what, then?” He looks away, then back, a flicker of something raw and desperate in his eyes. “Want me to say I’m sorry?”
