“Probably true, probably true. But less of one to get my blood all over you trying to save my life.”
“You think that makes melessof a sociopath? Come on, Letty. I had to do something. You were bleeding everywhere and it looked like there was a rock in your head and I just—”
“You just didn’t tell me anything about any of this.”
She looked up at him then, but it didn’t make anything any easier.
Now she could see those pained eyes among the forest of bruises.
“If I had told you, how would it have looked?”
“Like you wanted to get top marks from your target.”
“Exactly. I wanted you to trust me because Iearnedit. Not because I did the only fucking decent thing I could possibly do. Seriously, I was your worst enemy, but you would have still done the same.”
“If I had rammed you off a cliff? Yeah, probably I would have. But I don’t think I would have kept the shirt you bled all over and then written poetry about it.”
“I didn’t write poetry, I—”
“Wrote something that sounded like poetry.”
He looked up at the ceiling, as though she’d busted him for doing something terrible.
Instead of busting him for writing about the bloody painting and the telltale heart.
“Yeah. Okay. I’ll give you that.”
“Will you give me the other stuff, too? The stuff about you loving me about a hundred years before you actually said a single thing? Loving me even when you claimed to hate me?”
“You must have known. You must have known I loved you. I practically told you so, so many times and in so many different ways. Why did you think I was at Breckenridge? Didn’t you wonder what I’d been doing in those two years you took off to recover? Didn’t you think it was weird that I was here?”
“I thought it was you being an asshole. Like you couldn’t breathe without me being there to belittle.”
He winced at the wordbelittle—but she couldn’t hold it back.
He had to know the truth, no matter how much it stung.
“And after you realized that was totally not the case?”
“I don’t know. I don’t know what I thought. Idoknow that you could have told me.”
“You wouldn’t have believed me. You don’t even believe itnowafter hacking into my emails and reading all my private thoughts and feelings that I never in a million years thought you’d see.”
Now it washerturn to sting, so sharply it made her eyes water.
Though it might have been more like crying, if she was being honest.
“God, don’t put it like that. I feel bad enough as it is.”
“You don’t have anything to feel bad about, honey.”
“But I do. I really, really do. I didn’t trust you, even after you did everything possible to help me. I blamed you for things that you weren’t to blame for. I jumped to terrible, shitty conclusions. And to top it off, everything was all my fault to begin with. You asked me out when we were sixteen and I rejected you in the grossest possible way.”
“And there’s theotherreason I didn’t say anything. I knew that you would think that, I fuckingknew.” He shook his head, despite the fact that it seemed painful to do it. Made a fist and punched the mattress beneath him. “But you’re not fucking responsible for shit that I chose to do. You didn’t owe me your love. You didn’t owe me a polite yes. It was not on you to let me down gently and somehow ward off punishment I was fucking stupid enough to think you deserved.”
“You weren’t stupid, you werehurt.”
“Yeah, and over what? You didn’t even fucking mean it. Right?”
