“Why did it take you so long to say that?” My voice breaks. I’m afraid the time apart has done us no favors.
“You blocked me on everything,” he points out. I start to protest (email exists!) but don’t get the chance. “I wrote you a letter. Several, actually, but I trashed them all until that last one.”
“I didn’t get a letter.”
“I didn’t send it. I still have it if you want to read it. I carried it with me for weeks, convinced every day thatthiswould be the day I was brave enough to send it.”
“Why didn’t you?”
“It was a bad letter, full of excuses and self-sabotage and groveling.”
Despite myself, my mouth twitches. “I don’t mind a little groveling.”
He breathes a laugh. “Maybe it wasn’t so bad, after all. But the words felt wrong,” he says as one or both of us closes the last bit of distance. We’re so close now, trading air, inhaling each other’s syllables.
“Telling you that I was sorry was never going to be good enough. I needed toshowyou, but I didn’t know how. And then, after I’d had some time to reckon with what I’d done, the truth became painfully clear. I needed to fix my own shit. I needed to get out of New York and write something I was proud of. I needed to grow up. We wouldn’t have survived if we’d gotten together seven years ago, Mars. I wasn’t ready then.”
His words hang in the barely there space between us.
“And now?” I’m in a trance. Dazed by his proximity.
“I already told you: I’ve been waiting ten years. Just say go.” His husky voice scratches my skin like sandpaper. It’s almost enough to make me forget.
“How do I know this time will be different? That you don’t think I’mpathetic?” My voice cracks as I step away from West.
His eyes are wild and desperate as he pushes his hand through his curls. “Because I never have. I was upset, yes, but I was also terrified of your fans, Mars. They are relentless. I wanted to get rid of the connection between Fox and me so that no one on the internet would care if you and I tried to make a real go of it.”
“We’re not famous! We’renotFox and Juniper. No one would have cared.”
“Maybe you’re right. But they combed through our history. They saved our college pictures and made the online equivalent of one of those crazy FBI string boards.” He drags a handover his face. “It freaked me out, Mars. When I said all that, I just wanted them togo away, and I wanted them to see how invasive they were so that we could figure out how to be together without any eyes on us.” He’s dangerously close to groveling, just like I thought I wanted. I feel nauseous about all of it.
“Do you understand how that article destroyed me? How it flattened me so thoroughly that I blew up my career because of it? How am I ever supposed to forgive you for that?”
I’m not sure how it happened, but we’re standing inches apart again, forever doomed to orbit only each other.
He looks away as he rubs the side of his jaw. “Do you want to forgive me?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It’s the only thing that does.”
I swallow past the tears that threaten to overwhelm me and brush past him. “If you want me as much as you claim, you would have apologized,” I say over my shoulder.
“The book is the apology!” he shouts, forcing me to come face-to-face with what was clear from the first page. I stop walking.
For seven years, I’ve operated under the idea that West hates me. The article is the evidence, and cutting him out of my life was the conclusion. It was painfully easy to draw a line fromAtoBtoC, untilDroughtcame along and upended the premise. If none of my carefully drawn lines make sense, what does that mean for the one I’m keeping between us?
“I was trying to speak your language, Jupiter.Ourlanguage. The way we did from the very beginning. I was trying to get the words exactly, perfectly right, because I knew I’d only get one more chance. I didn’t contact that journalist before my book was out, because at the time, a public apology felt like a cop-out.It would have been too easy. I wanted to give you the apology that you deserved, and that wasn’t with some online statement that you had no reason to believe. It was only once I’d finishedDroughtand put it out into the world that I thought there was even a chance you’d forgive me.”
I close my eyes and take a bracing breath. West is wrong about one thing. There were days I was so sad and months that were so dark I would have accepted a public statement or an email or a note sent by carrier pigeon. Instead, he wrote me a whole damn book. A love letter on every page. He devoted the last several years of his life to apologizing the best way he knew how.
I turn toward him, one foot on a tightrope, unsure which way the wind will blow.
He takes a shuddering breath. “I don’t know if I deserve your forgiveness, but you once told me that’s not the reason to give it.”
My chest squeezes until I can’t breathe. Heat and fear and longing coil tight in my center.
I look at the strong lines of West’s jaw and the broad planes of his shoulders, and it’s hard to see the boy I fell in love with underneath the confident, determined man standing before me, but there are traces. In the rhythm of ink-stained fingers tapping against thighs. In the slow dip of dark lashes against his cheeks. In the way my brain settles when I’m with him, if only I can stop fighting instinct. And forever in the way he looks at me, and how I savor the heat of his gaze all the way down to my bone marrow.
