Chapter Twenty-Four
Isaac
Wait.
What?
I pulled back, my hands still on Sunny’s shoulders, and stared at her. Her eyes were wet, but there weren’t any tears yet, and her pointed chin was angled up in defiance.
“Sunny,” I said cautiously. “I think I’m missing something.”
“What is there to miss? I just told you I love you and now you’re telling me I should settle for being fuck buddies instead!”
“Okay, when you say it like that, it sounds bad, but—”
“But what?” she said and stepped back. My hands felt cold without her shoulders underneath them. “What else is there? I love you and you don’t love me. End of discussion.”
“No,” I said. “No, not end of discussion. I—” I tucked my hair behind my ears and tried to figure this out, my pulse pounding in my ears. I couldn’t lose her. I couldnot. “You didn’t want to be my muse, remember? As of just a week ago? And I was gutted, because I always wanted it to be you, and it wasn’t, and—I guess I’m just confused as to how we got from there tohere. You didn’t want something romantic with me, and now you do?”
“Yes,” she said flatly. “That’s what I just very thoroughly explained to you.”
“But... that’s why we were such a good fit. You didn’t want anything close to love with me, and I couldn’t have given it to you even if you had.”
She turned and braced her hands on the edge of the counter. I could viscerally feel her urge to run. But she didn’t.
Yet.
“People can change their minds, Isaac,” she said. Her voice was tight. Quavery. “Peopledochange their minds. All the time. That’s what I was trying to tell you. That I thought I knew what I wanted, and I was wrong. I don’t know how much more clearly I need to spell it out.”
Her cheeks were slashed with red, and I could see the pulse beating just above the neck of her sweatshirt. My chest ached with the thought that I had hurt her, because that was the last fucking thing on earth that I wanted to do, and I just needed her to understand that it wasn’t her fault, it had nothing to do with her and had everything to do with me being incurably broken.
I put my hands on the counter too, leaning forward until I could feel the cold surface on my forehead. “I’ve never pretended to be anything other than a fucking mess,” I said into the butcher block. “It’s on the billboard.Isaac Kelly: Damaged goods.”
“And so that’s it? You don’t even want to try to be anything different? Just damaged goods on the shelf for the rest of your life?”
“It’s not about trying,” I answered. “Ican’t. That part of me died with Brooklyn.”
“I’ve never judged you for how you’ve grieved her,” Sunny said. “Not once. And I’ve never felt jealous of her, even thoughI know a lot of people would have in my shoes. But this? This sucks. It sucks a lot.”
I should have expected this reaction. Of course, this was how Sunny would see it. “I’m not choosing her over you,” I started to explain, but then she cut in.
“No, you’re not. You’re choosingyourselfover me.”
I straightened up to stare at her. “That’s not it either,” I said, a wounded kind of aggravation pulling at my words now. It felt like I was being deliberately misunderstood. “That’s not—no. That’s not what’s happening.”
She wasn’t looking at me, was still looking down at her fingers splayed over the edge of the counter. Her knuckles were white and bloodless. “It is what’s happening,” she said slowly. “And you think right now thatIthink that you’re choosing your memories of Brooklyn over me, but I know better. You’re choosing the version of yourself that feels the safest over the both of us.”
I couldn’t even diagnose what bloomed in my gut just then. A stain of anger, an unfurling of hurt, shame, yearning.
I wanted to yell, and I wanted to cry, and I wanted to fling myself through the kitchen door, and I wanted to sit down on the floor and never move again. How could this be what she thought of me? How could she make it sound like everything I’d done—everything I was as a person—was wrapped in some kind of myopic narcissism? I had never tried to make my pain someone else’s problem. I had never tried to put myself at the center of things. I’d withdrawn from the world, I’d left, precisely because I didn’t want everyone to think I was choosing myself.
When the truth was that I just couldn’t think or breathe outside the fog that had rolled in the moment we got Brooklyn’s diagnosis.
“I would rather claw out my own liver than feel again what I felt when Brooklyn died.” My words came out cold and sharp.Rotten ice cracking under the sun. “I would rather break every single bone in my hand with a hammer, twice, three times, than feel it again. You make it sound so simple, to love after that. So easy.”
Sunny lifted her head and looked at me. The corners of her mouth were pale. “I know it’s not simple,” she replied. “Iknow.”
“Then why are you acting like it is? I’m telling you that you make my life better and brighter, that everything about you is perfect—do you think that I don’t wish that I could love you back? That I don’t wish every single thing were different right now? It’sme, Sunny, it’s the broke-down heart insideme. I can’t love again any more than I can make the rain stop or sun shine. I can’t.”
