Page 21 of Undone

“Yes,” I manage to wrangle out.

“Maybe seeing him will be good. You can move on from all that mess. And things can be different for you, moving forward.”

He doesn’t say what we both know.

That I’d had a small breakdown after I briefly saw Toren when he played in the Boston College–Harvard game. That after flunking out of Harvard, I’d tried to hack it on my own and failed. That moving back in with my dad hadn’t fixed anything; the memory of Toren was in the walls of my room. That I’d quit the job he’d gotten for me twice, oversleeping and missing shifts until my dad quit his job to work from home, going back to coaching so he didn’t need to travel as often or as far, or be away from me.

There’s a part of me that will always wonder if he was scared, even if he will never admit it. Is it strange to find comfort in just that possibility?

To my dad, it will always be tied to Toren Kane. It will never be depression; my difficulty only relates to my selfish obsession with the boy who snuck into my room for years. My best friend. Never mind the majority of my youth I spent convinced something was wrong with me, or the past three and a half years I spent telling myself that none of that was real. I was just being selfish and self-pitying.

Sometimes I’m almost sure my father’s right. There’s no real evidence that what I was feeling existed. And when it’s not there, I can almost convince myself that I did make it up. For attention, according to my dad.

Is he right?

Shaking my head, I try to focus in on him across from me, try to pull that deep gratefulness back to the front of my mind. He’s the only one who stayed, even when he didn’t want to.

“Yeah,” I agree, a little mindlessly as the image in my head shifts again. Toren . . . the feel of him against my body inside the storage closet, the sight of his tattoos. “Maybe.”

Neither of us speaks again for a long time.

Chapter 8

Toren

There’s a little redheaded menace hell-bent on making my life a living nightmare currently walking in circles around the Haley Center. At this point, she’s passed by me twice in each direction, a folded slip of paper in front of her like a guide map—one that clearly isn’t working.

Stay out of it.

Only, I fucking can’t.

My feet feel louder than I’m sure my worn-through boots actually are, legs making up the distance between us rapidly enough that I cut her off before she can make yet another wrong turn. Fingers deftly snatching up the paper fluttering between her chest and purple binder, I scan over her schedule.

“This way,” I mutter, avoiding her eyes as I head to the stairwell to lead her straight to her art history class. I make my way there easily, because I’d taken the same class last semester—maybe as torture or just to feel something different than my usual droning irritation.

She’s three floors off from the class number and in the wrong square of the quadrant layout, but she follows my every step—thankfully, silently.

I brush my knuckle along the concrete wall to the open metal frame of the door, ducking my head slightly toward it to usher her in without a word.

Lily hesitates, eyes cast down, and I take the moment to brush my gaze over her.

Polished black Mary Janes, matching opaque tights, a gray skirt, and a thick black sweater—complete with a pretty headband pushing back her auburn hair.

For a moment, my vision flickers, a younger version of her in a hallway nicer than this one. White button-up, a tartan skirt, and knee-high socks that came up a little too high on her short legs.

“You have to hold on to me,” I snap.

The entire ride to school, Lily continued to pull one arm and then the other away from my waist—over and over. I was near to a panic-induced heart attack at the image of her falling off the back of my motorcycle that kept plaguing my imagination. Eventually I’d just grasped her wrists in my hand and held them there, though her entire body had started to squirm near the end.

It didn’t help that she’d taken to rubbing them against my abdomen, crawling underneath my untucked button-down and pressing hard against the skin of my low stomach. So I had to drive the rest of the way half hard.

“I’m sorry—” she says, pulling her own helmet off and clunking it down on the seat. “My wrists hurt. It feels like knives.”

I don’t ask for clarification, because I already know. I reach for her right arm where she’s fumbling with the navy button, pulling at it until the thread loosens.

“Stop fidgeting,” I say, huffing my breath hard enough that a few of the strands of my black hair that aren’t secured back in the low bun flutter up around my face. I release my grip on Lily’s wrists to tuck her sleeves back, before undoing the button on one cuff quickly, painlessly, and meticulously rolling up the starched fabric.

“I’m not,” she says, fidgeting away from me again. “I can do it.”