Far longer than she had loved him.
Longer even than she’d ever loved anyone.
They had both been sixteen when he first asked her, and she had laughed in response. They would be twenty-one soon, with almost five years of this bloody battle behind them. Five years of fucking up and fixing things and fucking up again. It seemed impossible and tiring and amazing and beautiful. It made her exhausted thinking about it and it made her happy, but most of all it made her desperately needing him to wake up.
What if he never woke up? It did seem like the right ending for reality, after all. In real life, you didn’t get a neat resolution. Explanations never happened, and if they did they were usually half formed. The brittle ice of his apologies to her, while underneath an ocean of what he really wanted to say surged and flowed. Never breathing a word about it, because what would a word have done?
It would have madehersorry.
And he wanted it to be him, only him.
Or at least, she thought so. But what if she never got to ask? What if she—
“Are you upset because you think I’m taking the combination to the safe to my grave?”
She had her head in her hands when he suddenly spoke, which of course only made it ten times more shocking. The sound almost made her jump out of her chair, and she came extremely close to giving him a good whack. In fact, she probably would have if his face wasn’t a bleak mosaic of blacks and purples.
Instead she had to settle for shouting.
“Oh my god, you asshole. You total, total asshole. I swear to god if you ever let anyone smash your face into the ground like that again you better stay dead. Otherwise I’ll just fucking murder you.”
“It’s super nice to see you, too, Letty. I’m glad you…want to…murder me?”
“Idowant to murder you. I want to murder you to fucking death.”
“Well, that’s typically the state murder leaves you in.”
“Do you not think I know that do you think—”
The tears just came, right in the middle of her rant.
One second she was furious, the next she was blubbering like a fool into her hands.
Though she suspected the worddeathhad something to do with it.
“Hey, come on. You can’t cry. You’re supposed to hate me, remember?”
“I don’t hate you. How can I hate you when you wrote those emails?”
There was a long pause then. Long enough that she knew he knew what she meant.
It was even more obvious when he answered, in a tone that was trying hard to be casual.
“What emails?”
“The ones you sent me.”
“You mean…the one where I was a huge dick after your accident?”
“No, I mean the ones where you seemed to realize you had been a huge dick and then agonized over it and beat yourself up until I lost my fucking mind.”
Again, there followed a huge silence. And when he eventually spoke, his voice was even more unconvincing than it had been when he first asked which emails she meant.
“I don’t know what you might be referring to.”
“That’s okay. Because every word is burned into my brain, so it should be pretty easy to jog your memory. Let’s start with you being the person who called 911.”
“That…anyone would have done that. I would have had to be a sociopath not to.”
