Page 75 of Double Dared
I turned around on my heels, then paused. “This afternoon, look up at the sky. You’ll love what you see.”
Emma chuckled and said she would, and I walked out of her apartment, freer than I had been in months.
Confidence built up inside me as I decided what to do and where to go. I knew where Taylor would be because we were the two sides of the same coin. We were the two halves of one complete soul.
And he loved me. He had to. I could tell now, because the way he’d let go of me this morning was nothing other than devotion, nothing but love. You didn’t do that for someone you didn’t love deeply.
And it was high time I told him so.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
taylor
The driver was kind enoughto point me up the trail before pulling away, and I spent the next hour and seventeen minutes counting steps because I’d forgotten to bring anything else to occupy myself with. No water, no blanket. Just the sunglasses folded in my jacket pocket and whatever was left of my better judgment, which had been running on fumes since the morning.
Harrison had told me about this place in the way he told me everything: like it was the only thing worth knowing, and he had been watching my face while I received it. A total solar eclipse, visible from Alderman’s Ledge at twenty minutes past three. He’d said it with the quiet of someone holding something carefully, and I’d heard it the way you hear a thing when you don’t yet know you’re going to lose it soon.
That was the trouble with Harrison. He made every ordinary thing feel special.
The path up was steep in places, and my lungs argued with me through the third switchback. The forest was loud with birdsong and the white noise of distant water, and above it, when I crested the final slope and the trees parted, the sky opened in front of me, blue and infinite.
Alderman’s Ledge was large enough that the handful of people already there didn’t crowd it. A family sat far to my right on a blanket they’d remembered to bring. Two women stood shoulder to shoulder a little further down, facing west. A man lay in the grass with his arm over his eyes, waiting.
I sat in the grass without a blanket, felt the cold of the earth come through my jeans immediately, and stayed anyway. The sky ahead was still ordinary. Still just sky.
I’d done the right thing. I knew I had. Knowing it didn’t make the afternoon any softer. It just meant I couldn’t be angry at anyone, which was a special kind of loneliness.
The wind moved over the ledge in slow, steady pulls, lifting the hair off my forehead and pressing the fabric of my jacket flat against my chest. I watched a hawk ride a thermal without moving its wings. I thought about the easy thing I hadn’t done. How simple it would have been to stay in that kitchen and ask him to stay with me. To be the person who takes what he wants and worries about the rest of it later.
I’d spent most of my life being exactly that person. The one who goes over to the table. The one who saysyes to the dare. The one who never counts the cost until the bill is already in front of him and paid by someone else.
This one I paid myself.
It was something like pride and something like grief, and they didn’t cancel each other out. They lived side by side in my ribs, perfectly aware of one another, politely not fighting. I’d given Harrison the choice because it was his to make, not mine to make for him. That wasn’t nobility. It was just the bare minimum of decency, the thing a person did when they understood that love wasn’t a thing you collected. You either held it open or you didn’t. And I had given him a chance to take what he wanted the most in life. The thing that had started it all.
I pressed my palms flat against the cold grass and held them open.
The sun had moved lower by the time the light began to change in the way I’d been told to watch for: thinning first at the edges of everything, objects sharpening the way they do before a storm, but without any of the threat. Colors shifted toward wrong versions of themselves. The grass beneath my hands was still green but no longer real. Shadows stretched and confused themselves. The hawk had vanished without my noticing, and the sky where it had been was a shade of blue I had no word for.
My chest ached.
I let it.
That was the whole point of being here withoutwater or a blanket. There was nowhere to put it and nothing to do with it, so I sat in the cold grass and let the pain fill whatever shape it needed to fill, let it press against the roof of my mouth, let it be real for once instead of something I joked around until it seemed manageable.
It wasn’t manageable. It was just mine.
The moon had begun to take its position. A thin, bright scythe of sun still showed at the left edge of the corona, and the temperature dropped so quickly I felt it on my forearms before my brain had registered the change. Around me, quiet murmuring from the family to my right, a single soft word from one of the women to the other, all of it muffled and reverent as something in a church.
Then, from somewhere above and behind me, a small portable speaker crackled to life. The sound was tinny at first, the bass struggling in the open air, before it found its footing and settled into something clear enough to recognize.
Piano. A twelve-string guitar underneath. The opening bars of “Brain Damage.”
I knew this shape of song because Harrison had played me this album twice already, once in his apartment and once in the car, and he’d talked about it with the particular reverence people reserve for the things that formed them. “Brain Damage” meant “Eclipse” was coming. “Eclipse” meant Harrison had planned this down to the track.
I didn’t turn around immediately.
I pressed my palms harder into the grass and sat with that for a breath, two, three. The light narrowed to a ring of white fire at the edge of the moon. The world went the color of old photographs.
