“What’d you do wrong?” Carson replied quietly.
“Save me,” I said as I grabbed him around the waist and dragged him closer like a shield. He giggled as he tried to get away from me, and I kept dragging him back. “Don’t leave me with her!”
The look she pinned me with wasn’t encouraging at all.
“Go draw something amazing.” Sighing, I released him. “Apparently, I’m in trouble.”
I waited a little impatiently as Roxy made sure he was set up at her desk outside my office. I had a feeling I knew exactly what she wanted to talk about, and I didn’t want to have that conversation.
“All right, Mister,” Roxy began, walking into my office and shutting the door. She grabbed the chair across from my desk and dragged it as close as she could manage. “You’ve been avoiding people for days.”
“I haven’t been avoiding people for days,” I retorted.Sort of.I’d spent a lot of time alone—that much was true. I just needed to clear my head. To think straight. To either pack away all the messed-up emotions I was feeling, or make myself do something about them. “I was just having a great conversation with my nephew before you interrupted.”
“Maverick.”
“Fine.” I rolled my eyes. “Yeah, I’ve been avoiding people a little bit.”
“A lot,” she corrected.
“I just needed to work through some shit.”
“About Harley.”
“About…things…” I told her all too pathetically. From the judgy look on her face, she wasn’t buying my shit. “Yes! About Harley. Jesus fuck, you nosy woman.”
“Well, I’m here now, so talk to me.” She made herself comfortable in the chair as my gaze flicked in her direction.Well, she wasn’t going anywhere.Still, I just stared at her because for the life of me, I didn’t have a clue where to start.
“I don’t know how to explain Harley to you,” I admitted.
“Start from the beginning,” she suggested. “I just know what happened the last time—”
“You knowsomeof what happened last time.” I hadn’t told her everything. She knew enough to know enough, and she knew the emotional fallout.
“Then tell me everything.”
I sat back with a sigh, my lips pressing together tightly as I considered her.How in the world did I explain Harley to someone who didn’t know him?He was so much more than the surface levels of our story.
“I’ve known Harley for… fuck, it’s been eighteen years at this point,” I said. “I knew him growing up because… you know,small town. My senior year, I was in the bathroom, smoking when I wasn’t supposed to be—”
“Such a little rebel,” Roxy teased.
“You havenoidea.” I chuckled. To be honest, I hadn’t given her my story. I just didn’t talk about it with anyone. So I had no idea what she knew about the type of reputation I had growing up. “Anyway, I’m hiding in the stall, trying to smoke without getting caught, when I hear it… some kid is having a panic attack just inside the bathroom door…”
For the better part of two hours, I told her our story. I gave her as many details as I could, the memories coming easier the longer I talked. I told her about my childhood, about the chaos and the abuse. About the parents I didn’t know anymore and the brother who had used control as power. But I also told her about Harley’s past. I told her about the mother who manipulated him and the father who didn’t protect him. I told her about the systematic deconstruction of who he was as they groomed him to be something he never wanted to be.
I told her the stories about when we were young… just two kids thrown together in the most ridiculous way. Two kids who had no business fitting together as well as we did. We were opposites in every way that mattered, but somehow the pieces had still locked in place. Back then, it was simple. Easy. We had this thing the world hadn’t managed to ruin yet. And I told her how, eventually, the world did what it always does… it complicated things until that easy fit wasn’t enough to save us.
I told her the stories about when we were bold… when we were old enough to believe we could outrun the things that had shaped us. When we decided we were going to do things differently. That we would be braver and be something together. Two young men who wanted more—who deserved more—and how we thought we could pull it off. And I told her howeverything we tried to fight ended up crashing down around us anyway.
I told her the stories about when we were broken… truly broken. About the man who tried to bury himself in a life that was never truly meant for him and the man who stayed frozen in place, too afraid of the what-ifs to take another step forward. I told her about the hopes and the lies, the fight that ended us, and the ways I broke afterward.Truly broke in ways she didn’t know.
And in the end… I told her about the inevitable… the moment the universe pushed Harley and me back together, like it always did. Only now, we were unrecognizable versions of ourselves. The ghosts of our pasts were there, but we had both grown. Healed. We were better for all the shit we’d been through.
“Harley and I… we just don’t work,” I whispered at the end of it all. Maybe I was saying that for her benefit, or maybe I was saying it for my own. Either way, I hated it.
By the end, that was the one takeaway:I hated that we didn’t work.
And maybe that was the reason it never worked with anyone else. Harley was inevitably my person, and I wanted to think that I was his. The universe just… well, the universe had a cruel sense of humor. Or maybe it was karma for all the bad things I’d done in my life.
