Page 37 of Left of Forever

“Mystery showers? You had anamefor them and everything?” I ask, aghast.

He smirks. “Deluge of Dread seemed a little heavy-handed. You’d take, like, forty-five minutes and play ‘Silver Springs’ onrepeat, and I’d have to scramble and try to figure out what I did wrong.”

I toss my head back with a laugh. I did have a flair for the dramatic when I wanted to, I guess. “Be fair. Sometimes when I wasreallypissed, I’d play Alanis Morissette.”

“Oh, trust me, I remember.” His throat bounces with a laugh. “I got pretty good at decoding for a bit. ‘Silver Springs’ was the bad kind of mad. Alanis meant I got on your nerves somehow. Celine Dion was the real mystery. Sometimes she meant you were happy, other times she meant… Well. She indicated that it might benefit me to go get Cheetos Puffs and possibly something with both chocolate and peanut butter.”

I don’t realize we’ve stopped until I catch my own reflection in his sunglasses, a dozy grin leaping up my face. “It’s all coming back to me now,” I say.

“Nice one, Byrd,” he says lowly. The look on his face makes me feel like it was funnier than it is. He nudges my foot. “But you see what I mean?”

I turn around and continue walking along at his side, a little closer this time. “I get it,” I tell him. The fights weren’t the bad part. At least we were trying to communicate then, even if I didn’t recognize it for what it was, even if I needed to lean into the power of song to channel my emotions. I let out another small laugh when I picture it, and this is when it hits me.

I miss fighting with him. It was when we stopped fighting that everything went cold.

We make our way down where the bank angles toward the water, then turn to our left and walk in a line toward the park, right at the edge where the tide slides across it. Our shoulders brush occasionally as we amble along, listening to the steady sighand swish of the waves. My attention divides between everything in front of us and the man on my right, mentally sifting through a little piece of our past with me. After twenty-five yards or so, I hear him grunt a laugh again.

“What?” I have to ask.

“You remember when they tried to add some carnival rides at the festival that one year?” he asks, dipping his head toward the park like it reminded him. “They could only fit two on the lawn lot area.”

“And one was the world’s saddest excuse for a Ferris wheel.” That whole summer had been a bust. “I don’t think we went together? I hardly saw you that year.” The same summer that turned into the autumn I’d written about earlier, come to think of it. “You’d grown like half a foot, and your voice was changing by the time I saw you again. First day of seventh grade.”

“Eighth,” he corrects. “I remember you that day, too.”

“You do?”

He nods.

“What do you remember?”

He makes a warning sound that stretches until it rolls into a laugh. “You don’t want to be inside my head, Wren. It’s a pretty primitive place to be, especially when I was fourteen.”

“I’m not exactly delivering slam poetry over here, Ellis.” I laugh. “Please.”

He shrugs innocently in a way that says,Fine, but don’t say I didn’t warn you.“I remember you showed up with new assets.” He nods at my chest, and I see the planes of his cheekbones turn pink.

The sight of that flush fascinates me. Ellis has licked and sucked and nuzzled myassetsmore times than I could possibly count. He has greeted them like sentient beings and whisperedgoofy things into them, held them to his ears like they were whispering back, buried his face between them while I laughed. He’s napped on them. He’s bitten and left marks. The fact that he could still blush over something so known is a revelation to me.

I feel my smile bloom before it turns wistful, loop my thumbs around the straps of my little beach backpack. “You didn’t act like you noticed me in that way one iota, Byrd. Not for a few years still,” I say.

“You were too good for me,” he says without hesitation. He plucks a seashell from the sand at his feet and flings it out into the water.

My steps stutter, a small sigh punching out of me. This was always an issue. Ellis didn’t put me on a pedestal. He put me on a shelf where he had to strain to reach me. Like he thought I’d be harder to break. I stayed there because I couldn’t risk him seeing me in pieces, knowing he’d take all the blame.

“I wasn’t,” I say. “I never was.”

His brow folds behind his sunglasses, his mouth set in a hard line before it melts into something softer. A distant storm cloud surrounded by gold. “You were,” he says quietly. “You still are.” He pivots away.

“Ellis.” I wait until he turns back to me again. “If that were true then, what’s the difference now?” I ask, spreading my arms wide before I let them fall.

He takes two strides closer, careful, intentional, and steady. So close I have to tip back to look at him. “Now?” he says, and I swear I feel his eyes land on my lips behind his sunglasses, his chest near enough to feel his heat. “Maybe now I’m just too selfish to give a fuck.” He lingers, his pulse beating in his neck and his lips slightly parting.NowI suddenly think he might kiss me, and everything goes white hot beneath my skin. From thecorner of my eye, I spot one of his hands flex at his side, like he’s just stopped the impulse to reach for me.Do it, anyway, the most reckless part of me thinks.Take it. Remind me what it’s like with us. Should I?

He blinks first, clearing his throat at the same time that I take a step back, breaking the trance. He takes an additional step to put some distance between us again. Carefully putting me back on my shelf.

“I don’t know, Wren,” he says, voice rusty. “All I know is that it doesn’t feel like we’re done with each other. Does it?”

No. No, it doesn’t. I glance back at the horizon and shake my head.