My heart, squeezing, squeezing, squeezing, and not enough blood.
Whatever is between Hailey and Blake, it isn’t over. Whatever it is, there’s still something there.
I stumble to the bathroom and bend over the toilet ready to puke, but nothing comes.
I’ve spent my whole summer learning not to accept anything less than what’s right for me, and I know what I want. Who I want. But for the first time in weeks, I’m voiceless and numb. My hands are tied.
I want to be the guy who does the right thing.
I want Blake to be that guy too, even though it won’t be for me. He deserves to be the kind of guy who hears out his ex, who gives things a shot because he knows he messed up, too. Who fixes his mistakes and who takes the ashes of his past and digs through them to pull out something shiny and hopeful.
If I ask him to stay, I’ll be asking him to stop being the guy who does the right thing. It’s an impossible ask. I can’t do it to him. I won’t.
I slip into my bedroom and grab the duffle bag I arrived with, then open my dresser drawers. My tattooed skin screams as my tank top rubs over my ribs, but I don’t let myself pause. I just pack up as many clothes as I can fit inside the bag, and then I slip down the stairs.
Please don’t see me. Please don’t make this harder than it needs to be.
Blake and Hailey stand on opposite sides of the living room like bookends, and I slink through the space between them with my face burning and my lungs tight.
This isn’t Blake’s fault, and it’s not Hailey’s either. She’s me in ten years—a little older, sure, but still a human who makes mistakes and who deserves closure if she can get it.
“Where are you going?” Blake’s jaw is a slab of iron, working hard as he takes in the bag in my hands, my splotchy face.
I make myself stare into his familiar hazel eyes, memorizing the flecks of color, the way the light dances in them. I look until my vision swims and I can’t look anymore.
And then I push past him.
“McKenna!”
I shake my head once like goodbye. Then I make the wrenching choice, which isn’t choosing as much as collapsing into myself. I choose for him, so he won’t have to. So he can be good.
“It’s okay, Blake,” I whisper, even though it’s not. “Do what you need to do. It’s okay.” I sling the bag over my shoulder, and then it takes everything in me to step out into the blindingly bright day and not look back.
28
Blake
August
My breakup with McKenna is a scab, and every day I’m back in Rochester, sleeping on my old couch while Hailey reigns from my bed, I keep scratching that wound and opening it anew.
A month of turning things over in my mind, and every night I still ask myself how the hell my life blasted apart. That’s how heartbreak really kills you—not one gushing wound, but a series of tiny scratches where you slowly bleed yourself dry.
McKenna left me, but it somehow feels like I left her too. Because I failed her. I should have been stronger. I should have gone after her.
If I’d have known McKenna wasn’t coming back that morning on the beach—that I wasn’t going to have another chance to hold her in my arms, to kiss those perfect lips and tell her I loved her—I would have chased her. I would have begged her to stay.
But she’d said, It’s okay, Blake, and left and never looked back.
Did she not care?
Was every moment I thought we were falling a lie?
Three fucking days I waited. While my dad and Jodi and Hailey spun around me like angry hurricanes, their mouths moving even though I couldn’t hear because the last words in my mind were McKenna’s.
For three days I endured, hoping she’d come back. Only she never did, and eventually I had to retreat to a new corner to lick my wounds. In Rochester, at least, I had a place to stay.
Something crashes in the kitchen like Hailey’s hauled a cast iron skillet onto the stove.
I wince from my spot on the couch. My head throbs, but the only hangover I’m having is an emotional one right now.
“Blake? You up? I’m making breakfast.”
No shit.
Sunlight sneaks through the living room blinds and falls onto my face, bright enough to wake me up if I’d have been sleeping.
I shrug off the afghan my grandmother knit back when she was alive, swing my legs over the edge of the couch and shake feeling back into my limbs. Sleeping on the couch is shit for your back, and I feel old and sore and empty. My mouth begs for a drink, and it’s so fucking tempting to fall back into my old ways. To turn to alcohol and drugs to numb out the pain. To fill the emptiness my girl left behind.
No, not my girl.
Not my anything, anymore.
The only thing that keeps me away from the liquor cabinet, which Hailey so thoughtfully left stocked, is my desire to be the person McKenna believed I could be.
I can still be that guy. But first I need to unravel the knot of why I’m here.
I pad into the kitchen and find Hailey pushing runny oatmeal around a pot. The air smells like cinnamon and burned oats.
“Hungry?” Hailey asks, lifting an empty bowl in my direction.
“Nah. I’m going out.”
“You sure?” She squints at me, uncertainty obvious on her face. I haven’t touched her since the beach house, and she has to know she’s running on borrowed time. There’s only so much silence we can handle before we say the things that need to be said.
I wanted to try, but this was a mistake.
It’s time to move on.
I shove my feet in a pair of sneakers by the kitchen door. “Gym,” I say.
Hailey closes her mouth. Nods.
I pull a windbreaker over my head and slip out the door. It’s almost Labor Day, and brisk air knifes through my layers as I step outside. I pick up the pace and jog toward the gym.
Cardio sucks, but it sucks less than sitting still.
The gym’s all of a mile away, but a voice catches me as I pass over the bumpy sidewalk in front of a 7-Eleven.
“Blake Reynolds.”
I swing my head around for the source and find Patrick Dingle hanging his head out the driver’s side window of a pickup truck in the convenience store’s lot.
Pat’s a year or two younger than me, the star goalie on the Rochester Knighthawks lacrosse team. He partied like he played—hard. Not as hard as me, maybe, but close.
I jog toward his truck and lean down to peer in his window. “Hey, man.”
His face has the hollowed-out look of a junkie, his eyes a little glazed. He scans my body and produces a smile. “Can’t believe you’re out of the slammer.”
“What? Jesus.” I run a hand through my hair. “It was rehab, Pat. Not jail.”
He shrugs. “Did it work?”
“I—god.” How can I explain the way the thought of McKenna is the thing that makes me want to drink but also makes me want to stay sober? “I guess it depends on who you ask.”
Pat considers. “I don’t mean it in a bad way, but you kind of look like shit. Like someone died. You sure that was the intended effect?”
I snort out a bitter laugh. This summer something did die inside me, a little. McKenna had breathed all this life back into me, and now that she’s gone, I’m going crazy again, sitting on my couch and wasting away.
“It’s nice to see you, too, Dingle.”
“Aww, come on. I didn’t mean it like that.”
I bob my head. “Sure.”
Pat lifts an eyebrow at me. “You around tonight?”
I’m wading into deep water here. The old me would have said yes without thinking. The new me wants to know why he wants to know.
“Not sure what the plan is,” I hedge.
“A couple of us from the team are getting together at the McMinneman’s.” He spreads his arms wide and grins. “See where the night leads us. You’re welcome to join, unless it’s a sore subject…”
“Nah.”
I tap the side of my hand against his truck, producing a hollow metal thud. “Not a sore subject. But I’m good all the same.”
Pat cocks his head and narrows his eyes. “You sure?”
Am I sure?
Pat has seen me in a million inconvenient positions—naked in the locker room, fucked up out of my mind at parties. Destroyed Blake was convenient for him, and I think he liked me best that way.
After my shoulder surgery, he and a couple of guys came to my hospital room to wish me luck and check up on me. I remember the way Pat had leaned over my bed when everyone else turned away to check out the hot nurse who had the dubious pleasure of walking me to the bathroom to piss.
I remember Pat’s breath, dry and hot on my cheek, his greedy eyes. “What do they have you on? Oxy?”
The way when I’d nodded, he’d leaned closer and smiled. “Save me a few, yeah?”
I take a step back now and nod again. “Yeah, I’m good.”
I don’t want to be thirty and still looking for a score in the parking lot of a 7-Eleven.
This can’t be my life.
I pull my windbreaker tight around my shoulders, but instead of continuing toward the gym, I turn and head back home. Then I pull out my cell phone and walk into my garage to make the call.
“Dad?”
I know he’s pissed at me, Jodi’s pissed at me, the whole world is pissed at me, but the quickest way to relapse is to stay here. I don’t know how to fix everything just yet, but I know enough to try to save myself.
I take a deep breath and swallow my pride. “I need a place to stay again. Can I come home?”
29
McKenna
September
I step into the drafty lecture hall where my Social Entrepreneurship class is normally held and scan the huge room, blowing out a big breath. I’m the first one in on this gray morning, and the room is cool and almost damp-feeling, fall beginning to make its presence known.
I clutch my thermos of coffee to my chest to stay warm, then pick a seat close to the front of the room and set my notebook on my desk. I shouldn’t have gotten here so soon. Ever since I walked away from Blake over a month ago, I’ve kept busy with a manic swirl of activities, but being the first one here feels almost overwhelming—the empty space and aloneness pressing in on me.
I swipe open my phone with one hand, opening Instagram to let a series of mindless images wash over me. Here a perfectly-styled home with a fiddle leaf fig tree unfurling its huge leaves toward the sun. Here a couple on the beach in Hawaii, their tanned and toned bodies wrapped around each other as they practice unposed poses.
I scroll back far enough to find my most recent Pretty in Peonies post—a photo of a tiny succulent I’d set in the windowsill of the apartment I’m sharing with Brooke. Instagram informs me that six hundred and three people so far have liked the photo, including NotBurtReynoldsReynolds.
Blake.
What?
My fingers tremble as I open my previous photo, this one of me standing among the rhododendrons in front of my new apartment, my face half hidden by the bush’s leaves.
Liked by NotBurtReynoldsReynolds.
Back further still.
Liked by NotBurtReynoldsReynolds.
God.
I scroll back through my history—back before I moved into the tiny off-campus apartment with Brooke, back before I decided to return to school and switch to a Business degree, back before I spent the tail end of summer holed up in Brooke’s Long Beach Island house to recover from losing Blake, back before I walked out on the man I loved.
Blake’s liked every single one of my photos. He hasn’t stopped liking them just because I’ve been gone.
The air crushes out of my lungs, and the hurt of it brings stinging tears to my eyes. He’s thinking about me and supporting me even from afar, and somehow the limbo of it’s worse than radio silence.
If he cares so much, why isn’t he here right now?
Why didn’t he try to fix us?
Blake and I have been apart for longer than we were together, but distance and time don’t help ease the pain. He was right to warn me of the consequences. I should have known.
Brooke drops into the chair next to me, causing me to flinch. I hadn’t noticed anyone entering the lecture hall, but it’s been filling up around me. Students gather in clusters in the aisles, backpacks and tote bags and the fresh, shiny scent of optimism. They’re not yet jaded about being here.
“Did you hear about the party at the—” Brooke cuts off the second she sees my face. “What’s wrong?”
I shake my head mutely and shove my phone into her hands.
Her eyes narrow as she scrolls through my history, then widen as she comes to the same conclusion I just did.
“Damn,” she mutters under her breath. Her face is so full of sympathy it makes my stomach twist.
We both sit in silence for a minute while the professor shuffles to the front of the room, because what else is there to say?
“You know,” Brooke says at last, “Blake still cares.”
I want him to care.
I don’t want him to care.
I want everything in the whole world, but sometimes that’s asking too much. In real life you don’t get to kiss the man you want but shouldn’t have and walk away without a scratch. Real life holds up the things you want just out of reach and says no.
“I don’t know what to do with that,” I tell Brooke. My voice shakes on every word, and tears threaten to spill down my heated cheeks.
I spent the whole summer learning to ask for what I want, but when it came down to the single most important thing, I didn’t ask for it when I had a chance. I wish I’d asked, though. It would be better than this emptiness, the blank space of the in between.
“Blake left with Hailey. He didn’t want me.”
“You don’t know that.” I shoot Brooke a look, and she hands back my phone with a frown. “He didn’t say no to you, Kenn. You just didn’t ask, so he never had a chance to say yes.” She shrugs. “Maybe when you walked out, he didn’t think he had a choice.”
“I…” Well, shit.
She’s absolutely right, and the thought of everything I’ve lost makes me feel like my heart’s beating outside of my body—exposed and vulnerable and afraid.
What if I was wrong?
The professor clears his throat, reeling me in. It takes a minute for my vision to stop swimming, and when it does, I stare at the notes on his screen.
Making it official, reads the slide.
Step 1: Solidify your business plan.
Step 2: Register your business.
My skin tingles with a kind of knowing, and I sit up straighter in my chair. Pretty in Peonies is one the thing tethering me to any semblance of a plan. My desire to do justice to my little business was the reason it was at all bearable to come back to college, to wake up every day when the world had been stripped of all its color.
I told Blake once that I wanted to make my dream into a reality, and Professor Peterson at the front of the class just laid out how. It’s time to put my money where my mouth is.
I shove my phone into the pocket of my jeans and grab my notebook and thermos. Then I slip out of my chair and try to exit the room without interrupting the lecture. I can’t sit here with the weight of everything I know and everything I have left to do.
Out of the corner of my eye, I catch Brooke’s dark head swinging toward me, her bug-eyed stare.
“Where are you going?” she whispers after me, but I’m on fire now. I’m halfway to the door, and then I’m already gone.
* * *
When we first got back to school, Brooke strung our apartment’s tiny living room with Christmas lights.
“We need to embrace the season,” she’d declared, which we’d both laughed at because it was still August and the heat was the third person in every hangout we had, the air claustrophobic and thick.
She was trying to put distance between us and the summe
r, and I loved her a little more for her cheerful attempt, even though it didn’t budge the fog that followed me through every minute of every day.
The fog of loving Blake and leaving him.
The fog of walking away to save us both.
The Christmas lights cast a soft glow on Brooke’s hair as she swings through our apartment’s front door a few hours after Professor Peterson’s lecture started. She tosses her tote bag on the coffee table at my feet and drops her hands to her hips. “Where the hell did you go?”
I look up from the laptop balanced on my lap and flash Brooke my first real smile in ages. “I had a strike of inspiration.”
“Uh oh. Inspiration to do what?”
My grin widens, and I turn the laptop screen to face her. “To register Pretty in Peonies as an LLC.”
Brooke leans closer, and her face changes from concern to pride. “Well, look at that. You seriously did it, huh?”
I nod. “It wasn’t cheap, but yeah.” Guilty heat creeps up the back of my neck, and to avoid her eyes, I busy myself transferring my computer from my lap to the coffee table. “I made it Instagram official, too,” I confess. My mind flashes to the caption I wrote: I couldn’t have done this without you.
I wanted Blake to read between the lines, to know I was talking to him. Because if Brooke’s right and Blake thinks I left because I didn’t care, I need to set the record straight.
“Why do I feel like there’s more to it than that?” When I look up, Brooke’s expression has softened.
My heart sinks. “He didn’t like the photo, Brooke. It’s the only thing I’ve ever posted that he didn’t like, and I keep asking myself what it means and why I still care.”
She nods sympathetically and lowers onto the couch beside me. “It’s okay, Kenn. No one’s asking you to stop caring about him.”
I shrug, a little helpless as I try to explain. “It’s just, I miss him.”
“I know. And I know how much that hurts. But you deserve nothing but happiness right now. This is your moment, babe.” She squeezes my knee and brightens her voice. “Tonight, let’s celebrate the fact that you’re the baddest badass I know. With or without him.”
Step Summer Page 17
