Page 547 of Lessons in Cruelty

Kai shakes his head. Not denying it, but like he’s regretting it. “I…”

I slap my hand against the glass. “What, Kai?”

He flinches, but stays quiet as his eyes flick back to the ocean.

I hear my own breathing. Short and harsh and hot through my flaring nostrils, so I lean back on my heel and take a leisurely sip from my glass.

Hmm. Weird how all the acidity seems to have vanished. Guess this bottle just had to air out a bit. Because that’s what happens, isn’t it? Shit gets pent up, it goes rotten. Air it out, and all the stale resentment dissipates.

Damn, this booze is turning me into a Poe wannabe.

Is it the wine, or is it just time?

Time to get answers to the questions I’ve spent so many sleepless nights contemplating. No matter what he says, anything can be better than the bullshit I’ve come up with.

That I’m not smart enough.

Not pretty enough.

Not worthy of him…or his love.

Because what I felt when I used to play with Kai in the woods morphed from friendship to love in the blink of an eye.

One day in summer, one ray of light—that’s all it took.

The day Kai came to say goodbye. To tell me he was moving away.

The day he lied to my face.

That day, a shaft of yellow mid-afternoon sun pierced through the canopy of the maple tree and shone on his face, picking out golden highlights in his floppy hair. Reflecting off a speck of gold I’d never noticed in one green eye. An eye he squinted, which made his lip twitch, which suddenly made me aware that he had a mouth, and it was a mouth I wanted to kiss. That I wanted to feel all over my thirteen-year-old body. A mouth I wanted to hear whisper my name again, and again.

To hear him say, I love you, Heavenly. Now and forever.

I fell in love in an instant, and he spent every second after that crushing my heart.

So maybe I feel entitled to some answers.

Or maybe I’m just tipsy and I’ve repressed so much bad shit that it’s spilling over.

“You could have fought for me, Kai.” I slap the glass again. “So why didn’t you, huh?”

His Adam’s apple bobs, jaw ticking a few times as he stares out at the deepening purple skies above the waves.

He murmurs something, but too low for me to hear.

“Why?” I snap, my breathing back to its frantic near-panting. I’m so ready for a fight, so ready to scrape the last of the soil off this corpse I buried so I can see just how putrid it is in its decay.

“Because I’m a fucking coward, Haven,” he whispers.

Cold shoots through my veins like my heart’s pumping ice water instead of blood. It’s so fucking difficult to bite back the apology that wants to spill from my mouth, I’m shaking. But I force myself to remain silent, because the pain I see on Kai’s face is a fraction—less than one fucking percent—of the agony I’ve had to endure these past years.

I’m not enjoying it. Not getting any kind of satisfaction.

Just relief.

Because maybe now he’ll understand what I’ve been going through.

But then it’s not enough, because I see relief on his face too, like that one pathetic admission is all it took to clear his guilty conscience.