“Please don’t do this. Please don’t leave me.”
“You’re breaking my heart.”
You could’ve been honest with her about your talk with Leif. Instead, she’s going to be blaming herself foryourmistake. Since you shoulder-checked your way into her life, all she’s ever known is pain. Physical, emotional. You ruined that girl the moment you hit her with your car.
It was an accident. I didn’t mean to. I didn’t want to get attached. I?—
Try telling someone who actually cares. You’re all alone. You’re always going tobealone. You don’t matter.
Nausea sticks to the walls of my stomach, and my throat puckers in a single warning before bile floods my mouth. I scramble blindly for the trash can beside my bed—unused since I’m apt to repurpose my floor into a littering zone—and I white-knuckle the rim just in time for a yellow-tinted stream of vomit to expel from my lips. It singes my esophagus on the way out, but there’s barely any substance thanks to my hunger strike. Tears spring to my eyes, the putrid stench of stomach acid hitting me in the face like a brick.
I feel another retch coming just as there’s a knock on my door, and Crew’s voice permeates through the partition, plied with concern.
“Knox? Are you in there?” he asks, the hallway lightpeeking beneath the partition and casting a shadow over his shuffling feet.
I have no idea how he got into my house, but my tears of exertion almost transmute into tears of relief. My vocal cords are unoiled, and it couldn’t be clearer when I call out to him. Hoarse, rubbed raw, arguably representative of how terrible I feel.
“Don’t come in here.”
Apparently, I forgot who I was talking to. Crew is one of my best friends—my goddamncaptain. He’s as stubborn as I am. Maybe more so, and that’s saying something.
“What’s going on? Are you okay? You’ve been MIA for days.”
A stint of despair crystallizes in my bones, and my nerves bristle like the frayed endings of rope. I need him to leave. He can’t—he can’t see me like this.
The darkness and disorientation make it hard to construct a comprehensive sentence. Not to mention that I have a migraine actively curb-stomping my brain in. I know Crew isn’t above busting my door down to get to the bottom of everything.
I set the trash can down next to my bed, praying that my gut doesn’t revolt again. “I’m…I’m fine. Just sick. Yeah, must’ve caught a bug or something,” I lie, my sprinting mind desperately clawing for excuses.
Crew makes a prusten sound. “If that was really the case, you would’ve told Coach, and he knows jack shit about your disappearance.”
Fuck me.
“Don’t worry about me.”
“Kind of impossible not to when you’re one of the strongest players on the team. Are you going to open the door, or is it coming off the hinges?”
Ugh. I don’t really feel like replacing it any time soon.
Dragging myself out of bed just long enough to flux myembarrassment, I lumber over to the partition, deciding that the only way to get him to leave is to feed him small crumbs of information to hold over his seemingly insatiable curiosity.
Once the door swings open, shock is written all over his face.
“Staten and I broke up,” I tell him, staring into the supermassive black hole that is my bedroom, a presentiment of lifelong loneliness hovering, unspoken, in my mind.
It always felt like there was a fault line running through me, on the verge of cracking, but this is the first time I heed the warning with a modified breed of fear. Staten doesn’t realize how many pieces of me she still carries—how many pieces she’llalwayscarry. I’ll never be whole without her, and Leif made sure of that.
Crew’s eyes enlarge. “Wait, what? Are you serious?”
I point to my temple with unfettered lunacy. “Leif Kennedy, he—he got into my fucking head. Kept feeding me lines that would turn me against her, and I was the goddamn idiot that let them work.”
“What did he say to you, Knox?” Crew’s voice is low enough to emulate a growl, but he has far more control.
If I was in any state to preserve my insecurities, I wouldn’t answer. But I simply don’t care anymore. I don’t care about putting on a face for my friends. I’m going to bare myself like a stone fruit, and maybe someone will have the decency to de-pit the root of all my baggage.
My teeth saw at my bottom lip until I uproot a bloody flake of skin. “He told me I wasn’t compatible with her—that we were from two different worlds. He said she’d be better off with someone like him.”
“What a fucking asshole.”
