“I know.”
“You didn’t stand up for me.”
“I know.” His voice is anguished.
“You didn’t even—” I stop myself, because listing Brennan’s mistakes could cause him to be here all night.
“I know,” he repeats, softer this time. He swallows hard. “I suppose everything that’s happened to me recently is just karma catching up.”
My brows draw together. “Huh?”
“I deserve losing everything since I claimed the right to my success at the cost of your dignity.”
I glare at him. “None of what happened to me has anything to do with you, Brennan. Don’t use your ego to link the two.”
The air shifts. He lifts his eyes to mine, and there’s no defensiveness there. Just raw regret. “I don’t expect forgiveness.”
Time compresses into a single, breathless moment where I recall the buckets of tears I shed. Knowing that I had only a handful of people outside of Willow Creek who knew it wasn’t me who self-sabotaged my life. The slow rebuilding of my sense of self.
There is closure in what Brennan’s saying to me despite my claim I didn’t need it. After staring at him for a long moment, I remark quietly, “You don’t get to decide what this means.”
“What?”
I didn’t plan to move. But something inside me cracks open. I’m not certain what it is and I refuse to name it. Maybe it's a full circle of grief. Maybe it’s that residual love.
Still, this is my choice.
I edge closer.
His breath stutters. Just once.
I lift my hand, stopping inches from his chest, giving him time to make a choice.
He holds his breath, not closing the distance.
So I do.
I touch his lips with mine. It’s hardly more than a brush. It’s not hunger. It’s acknowledgement. It’s me saying goodbye to the version of us that never stood a chance. I’m struck by the electricity that’s always sparked between us. The kind that doesn’t care about timing, or truth, or heartache.
The kind that remembers every almost, every what-if, every moment that was stolen from us.
When he takes me into his arms and deepens the kiss, I realize that for me, what started as a goodbye from grief is colliding with a truth I refused to admit even when my mother asked.
Brennan McCallister is a wound I never recovered from.
14
ONE-TIMER: SHOT TAKEN IMMEDIATELY OFF A PASS
Every nerve ignites inside me. I’m trembling under the force of it.
In this fragile moment, all my fears dissolve, pushed aside by one urgent need.
Him. Brennan.
His lips trace a path down my neck as his hands roam over my hips, clutching me against him tightly as if to reassure himself I’m real.
I let out a soft moan as his fingers grip me tighter.
