“Did it ever occur to you, Britt, that I don’t have a roadmap for whatever this is, either?”
Britt was silent and a cold spot settled into her already roiling stomach.
None of this was what she needed to hear in order to forgive him.
The next silence was long and grim.
When he finally spoke again, he sounded drained.
“There’s still nothing going on with me and Rebecca. But I can’t keep saying that over and over. And I get why it’s scary for you. I get why the timing of Rebecca showing up is weird. I can’t put a force field around myself. But I feel like I can’t do or say the right thing here, Britt. And I’m pretty sure it wouldn’t matterwhatI said ordid.”
She didn’t say anything for a time.
Therewasone thing he could say. All she needed was three words. She somehow knew she could handle the craziness, the uncertainty, theeverythingabout his life. If it was laid down over an unshakeable foundation of those words. The ones he feared most.
“Whyareyou here, J. T.?”
She managed to say it quietly and evenly. But her heart had begun to hammer.
It was his turn to go silent.
“I couldn’t go to Los Angeles without... without seeing you. I saw the billboard and the benches and... I was worried about you, Britt.”
She suddenly felt unutterably weary.
That was that, then. A welfare check, so to speak.
Or at least that was all he was going to cop to.
“I don’t need you, J. T. I’ll be just fine without you. You can just go.”
The silence that followed seemed oddly absolute.
The kind, she imagined, that would follow when the earth finally topped turning.
She looked at him.
He was holding himself utterly still. His features had an almost waxy stillness, as if he’d utterly vacated his body. The light had gone out of him.
As if he was the one suffering with a brute of a hangover, and trying not to jostle it.
“Well, then,” he said. His voice was a little frayed, too. “I guess that’s what I needed to know.”
He pushed away from the railing he’d repaired.
He looked down at her and she looked up at him.
And then he bent and he pressed his lips to her forehead, where ten minutes ago it had hurt the worst.
She closed her eyes.
Now all the pain was in the middle of her chest. Her heart felt like charred ruins.
And oddly it felt like she was the one who’d lit the match.
There was some kind of brick clogging her throat. She didn’t say anything else.
His lips lingered there. She was half certain he’d leave a brand.
