Chapter 14
14
The county fair wasn’t really Alex’s scene. Even without Devin’s enhanced werewolf hearing, her ears hurt from the combination of screaming children, dinging bells from rigged ring-toss games, and the constantly looping melody of a parked Mister Softee truck.
Riotously colored tents and food stalls sprouted across Meyer’s Field overnight like so many magic mushrooms. The scent of fry oil and spun sugar hung heavy in the air. From funnel cakes to fun houses, everywhere Alex looked promised thrills or chills, but thanks to spontaneously kissing Devin Ashwood a few days ago, she was still full up on both those fronts.
Alex was only here because Rowen heard they needed someone to run the face-painting booth and begged Alex to sign up. They’d set her up at the far end of the field among local vendor stalls selling crocheted coasters and hand-stamped greeting cards.
The booth was simple: a couple of folding camp chairs and a card table for her materials and cleaning supplies. At least the organizing committee, in an act of uncharacteristic benevolence, had provided a white canopy to keep the sun off her back.
A couple of hours in, Alex found herself having a surprisingly nice time. The kids’ excitement was infectious. Her cold, black heart warmed by a degree every time she put her hand over their eyes so she could sprinkle glitter across their freshly decorated cheeks.
Parents stood at her shoulder, monitoring her services rendered with varying degrees of curiosity and trepidation. Despite the side-eyed glances at her tattoos and piercings, Alex was pretty sure she won some of them over when they heard their kids giggle and gasp in wonder as she held up a small mirror to reveal their reflections sporting unicorn horns and tiger stripes.
She hadn’t painted anything in ages, and it was nice to dust off the cobwebs, using her skills to make something simple and delightful. It was impossible to stay grouchy while painting kittens and dragons and rainbows. Her favorites were the kids who wanted to be something they’d made up themselves, a “ghost collector” or a “snow shark.” A few gangly teenagers even stopped by asking for fake tattoos on their biceps, hearts that said Mom .
The word didn’t make Alex’s belly flip anymore. It had been so long since her own mother left. As a child she sometimes tried to imagine a parallel universe where her family stayed together, but she could never quite get there. Natalie Lawson had never belonged to her. Not really. At thirty-four, it was a fact rather than a tragedy.
By noon her line ebbed as most folks headed toward the food stalls. Alex had just finished turning a little boy into a starfish when out of the corner of her eye she caught Devin walking toward her.
Even though he’d been here more than a week, her heart still flew into her throat every time she saw him against the backdrop of her hometown. It was still so strange. Jarring. She always felt like she’d conjured him, like he had stepped, somehow, as a mirage out of her mind.
He was dressed for the unusually crisp air in jeans and a long-sleeved baseball tee; she was still getting used to the way he was slighter in person, narrower hips and a tighter waist, than he appeared on TV. Alex knew from the ice bath incident exactly how that body felt against hers. How warm.
She shook her head, refusing to let herself linger on the feeling of his legs on either side of hers, his arms caging her in. Thanks to the new moon, he should be fully human tonight. Or as close to it as he could now get.
For some reason that made Alex more nervous. As if his being a werewolf had blotted out the fact that he was first and foremost famous. And someone who’d once hurt her.
She’d just started outlining butterfly wings on a little girl with ribboned pigtails who proudly introduced herself as Manuela when Devin took up a spot behind her shoulder, apparently settling in to watch.
Manuela was unwilling to be observed without comment.
“There’s a man behind you,” she informed Alex, not bothering to lower her voice.
“It’s okay,” Alex said as she swirled indigo paint over the little girl’s brow. “I know him.”
“Is he your boyfriend?” Manuela, tiny investigator, prodded.
“No,” Alex said evenly, glad he couldn’t see her face.
Manuela squinted at him, considering this input.
“Is he your dad?”
Alex barked out a laugh; Devin choked.
“My dad’s over there.” Alex pulled back her paintbrush and pointed over Manuela’s shoulder to where her dad stood corralling a small petting zoo that included goats, lambs, and a very old, very grumpy-looking pony.
Manuela turned back and threw up her hands, exasperated. “Well then, why is he here?”
“I’m her friend,” Devin said, and Alex had to nod and smile and pretend that word didn’t somehow feel like both too much and not enough.
Manuela had turned her inquiry over to Devin. “Are you gonna get your face painted?”
“Oh, I don’t think he wants—” Alex said, but Devin crouched down until he and Manuela were at eye level.
“Do you think I should?”
“Yes,” the little girl declared with all the gravity of a formal deliberation.
“Then I will,” Devin said, tone equally serious.
Watching him be sweet sent a pang through Alex. At fifteen, she’d thought him unimpeachably benevolent. At thirty, hopelessly self-centered. She was beginning to suspect reality was somewhere in the middle.
He was human, even if he was a werewolf.
Alex placed the final touches on her butterfly design and invited her giggling subject to choose a glitter. After the big mirror reveal moment, when Manuela’s grandmother generously thanked Alex in Spanish she could mostly understand, the little girl happily hopped down from her stool.
Devin helped himself to her abandoned seat.
“Seriously?” Alex dunked her brushes to clean them.
“Why not?” He gave her half a grin and gestured toward her palette. “Dealer’s choice.”
“The face-painting stall isn’t really for adults,” she said, even as a dangerous kind of curiosity had her considering his features, thinking about colors that would complement the pink undertones in his skin. “You’ll look silly.”
“With this bone structure?” He had an impish glint in his eye that Alex recognized. “Never gonna happen.”
God, how much of Colby was just him, completely unfiltered?
Alex picked up her damp brushes and wiped them dry on a clean rag.
“Is that a dare?”
She was surprised. She’d always heard that Devin subscribed to the same macho bullshit as The Arcane Files ’ showrunner. Well, here was one way to put that theory to the test.
Leaning forward, she gripped Devin’s chin lightly between her thumb and forefinger.
He didn’t flinch as she adjusted the angle of his face to make it easier for her to paint, just looked up at her from under those long, dark lashes.
With her opposite hand, Alex brushed a strand of hair back off his forehead, out of her way. He’d let it grow; in the back it brushed his collar. Up this close, she could see a few strands of gray glinting in the sunlight amid the sandy brown, shining like woven silver.
God, Alex, it’s called aging. Did she have to be so romantic about it?
His face had changed over the years, gotten slimmer, the skin tighter against his cheekbones and across his forehead. He’d always had a slutty mouth, lips too pink, the bottom one overfull. The beard he’d grown after TAF balanced things out, made him less pretty. It also cut her canvas in half and would make the contrast between the bright colors even more ridiculous.
Alex started with black, to sketch the outline.
“That’s cold,” Devin complained as the bristles touched the tip of his nose. He wrinkled the offended area, smearing paint toward his cheek. He had tiny veins on the sides of his nostrils that they must cover with makeup for press events. Seeing them made Alex feel strangely protective, almost tender.
She made intense eye contact with her palette.
He ducked to catch her eye. “Am I making you nervous?”
“No.” She dipped a cotton ball in water and cleaned up the smudge.
His breath fanned across her wrist.
Devin narrowed his gaze, trying to read her. His eyes were so pretty. Alex could stare at him for hours for no reason other than the selfish pleasure of it. But she wouldn’t. Obviously.
It was fine that she didn’t really dislike him anymore. She’d known he was charismatic since the first time she’d watched the pilot. That wasn’t news. He wouldn’t have lasted three decades in Hollywood if he hadn’t learned, at some point, how to make people want him. And the fact that he’d actively put those skills to work on her behalf, curling his finger and goading her out of her shell? Well, Alex felt totally normal about that. Obviously.
“You paint stuff other than faces,” Devin said, not a question, as she brushed across his cheeks and up onto his forehead.
“Yeah,” Alex said, taken aback at the observation. “Mostly oils, sometimes watercolors—I mean, I used to. All my canvases have been languishing in my dad’s garage under dusty tarps for years.”
She shouldn’t be so surprised that he was watching her while she watched him. There couldn’t have been more than a handful of inches between their mouths. Observation at this range was practically inevitable.
“How come?” She could tell he was trying to keep his face still, not to throw her off, even though he clearly wanted to raise his eyebrows.
Alex rinsed the brush before switching from black paint to pale pink.
“Shelling out seventy bucks for a tiny tube of oil paint when we were drowning in bills always seemed too selfish. Painting isn’t a poor-person hobby.” Her mouth quirked. “Though thanks to you, I’ve recently come into significantly more disposable income.”
“Have you decided what you’ll do with it?” He didn’t seem perturbed that she’d managed to part him from not one but two sizable chunks of his money since they met.
“You mean after I pay off all the bills?” Alex paused, looking over his shoulder to where her dad was working. “I don’t know. I’ve never had the luxury of choice before.”
They should have enough left over that she could rent a bigger place, maybe turn the loft into a studio. She could go down to part-time at the vet, finally have enough hours and energy to accept the community center’s long-standing offer to make her the director of programming. The monthly subscription model she’d worked on in her head for years, adding hybrid and online classes to modernize their income streams, could go from a pipe dream to reality.
Alex hadn’t slowed down long enough to consider how massively Devin Ashwood had changed her life. Twice.
She switched to white paint for the finishing touches. When she held up the hand mirror, he didn’t bat an eye, even though she hadn’t held back at all. Had gone full Pixar. Cloudlike white wool and rosy pink cheeks.
“A wolf in sheep’s clothing,” he said, getting the joke immediately and smiling. “Very clever.”
He blinked when she offered him a tub of makeup-removing wipes.
“What are those for?”
And you know what? Alex couldn’t even in good faith say he looked bad.
The motherfucker was right—some combination of good genes and comfort in his own skin made him look endearing, inviting, underneath the paint. Like a hot dad , her mind supplied, and then Alex wanted to die .
Despite their obvious age gap, she’d never had this particular lurid thought about him before. Though she couldn’t imagine she was the first. Devin Ashwood was an actor of a certain age. He had that whole “distinguished” thing that happened when former pretty boys lose the last traces of baby fat plumping their cheeks.
“Are people calling you a zaddy?” Alex slapped her hand over her mouth the second the words fell out.
It was something she’d text the group chat. Before she’d met one, Alex used to indulge in all kinds of harmless speculation about her celebrity crushes. This felt decidedly different. Decidedly dangerous.
He’s a real person. That shouldn’t be so hard to remember.
Instead of going pale or red with indignation, Devin merely looked confused.
“Are people calling me what?”
Oh god. He didn’t know what it meant.
This was worst-case scenario. Now Alex had to explain .
Could she lie? Say it meant, like…someone with good fashion sense? Anything but the truth.
Her mind was a cauldron of filth, bubbling over.
Good girl, bend over for me , in his gruff voice.
NO. Absolutely not!
Devin sat, in the middle of the fair, waiting for her answer.
“Ummm.” The face paint made this worse somehow, she decided.
He looked both prettier—her design drawing attention to the absurd luxury of his eyelashes—and more rugged—the dark beard jumping out in contrast, his jawline practically squared off.
“It’s like a sex thing,” Alex said finally, spitting out the words like she was allergic to them.
That took him aback. He looked over both shoulders.
Oh yeah, Alex remembered, mortified, there were kids everywhere.
Fuck. She was a degenerate.
Devin lowered his voice, but his eyes sparked with interest. “It is?”
“Yeah, maybe Google it.” Desperately searching for a distraction, Alex threw up the On Lunch Break sign they’d given her and pointed toward the only ride that didn’t make her actively sick. “Wanna go on the Ferris wheel?”
She’d dug her own grave. Any second now, Devin would smirk and ask, What kind of sex thing? with a full-body leer. He was well aware what he did to her. In the haze of looking into his eyes, she’d forgotten herself and handed him a ripe opportunity to crow.
Her crush was a cyclone, ready to swallow her whole.
He seemed to sense her embarrassment and didn’t press the issue. Devin Ashwood put his hand on her elbow to pull her gently aside so a kid coming toward them on a scooter didn’t barrel right into her.
“Sure,” he said, his touch gone from her arm before she could focus on it.
They made their way to the line for the ride.
“Is it okay to give children that much sugar, like, legally?” He looked on with concern as a kid a few places ahead of them gobbled a snow cone, smearing red food dye 40 across his lips until he resembled the Joker.
“I think on special occasions.” Alex thought about how contained his world must be in LA. The youngest person he saw on a regular basis was probably some twenty-one-year-old ingenue brought into auditions to read for the role of his wife.
Wait—On the show, Colby had (briefly) a long-lost younger sister. That actress must have been thirteen or fourteen. She’d been a series regular in seasons 3 and 4 before they wrote her off. God forbid she start to display any character growth independent of a man.
What was one more death on the already heaping pile of Colby’s tragic backstory? There was a specific fix-it fic she’d read back in 2016 that was just sixty thousand words of Colby moving to a cottage in a coastal Maine town where all he did was go to therapy and learn to knit.
“Have you ever been in therapy?” Alex realized as the words left her mouth that she’d done it again, extended a conversation from her head out into the world without a proper setup. All her closest friendships lived online in group chats with no rules about non sequiturs.
At least this question seemed to throw him less than the last one.
“Yeah, I went for a little while with my ex-wife. We were sort of past the point of no return, though. Therapy ended up speeding up the divorce. I guess that proves it’s effective, just, you know, in the other direction.”
Alex was glad they were walking side by side so she didn’t have to look at him. Even though Devin was being casual, didn’t look hurt or offended that she’d asked him a second inappropriate question in a row, she still felt like a slimeball. He wouldn’t be revealing stuff like this to her if he knew how much pleasure she’d gotten over the years from mocking him with her friends.
“Sorry, I didn’t mean to pry.”
“You didn’t.” Devin gave her a look again, like he was trying to figure her out. “Anyone who wants to can read about my failed marriage online. Fun fact— People magazine keeps their archives from the late aughts onward linked on their website.”
Alex had, in fact, read the article he was talking about—a “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” cover story his soap opera actress ex did, not long after they’d filed. Unfairly but unsurprisingly, Erica Ashwood (née Trevain) had been unpopular in the fandom from the moment she and Devin had started dating while working together in season 6 of The Arcane Files . You could tell she’d tried to use the divorce press to set up her singer/songwriter career—posing with a horse at the sprawling Nashville farm she’d bought “to get away from all her ghosts.”
Alex had been twenty-five and still holding her big Devin Ashwood grudge.
He was her nemesis, the perfect imaginary outlet for all her seething frustration with her life. She’d savored the sense of schadenfreude. Had let every ugly, mean feeling her parents’ divorce had inspired fall all those years later on these beautiful famous people she didn’t know as the group chat took turns copy/pasting passages and sending Crying Colby memes.
Now she felt like an asshole. She really didn’t want to feel bad for him. Alex preferred to feel bad about herself, exclusively, in peace.
“That must suck, having your private life splashed all over as entertainment for strangers.” For me.
Devin gazed pensively into the middle distance. “I’m sure it would if I could read.”
Alex startled, and he cracked, his mouth shifting into a closed-mouth smile.
She’d never seen or even heard of Devin Ashwood making fun of himself. Of the way people, perhaps ungenerously, saw him as less than bright. It was a level of self-awareness she would never have given him credit for before she met him. Alex savored the ways she’d been wrong about him, devouring every revelation that made him real and somehow winding up hungrier after the fact.
“The truth is boring compared to the headlines,” he said. “Erica thought she’d married a bigger star or at least someone with ambition bigger and badder than a career-defining role on the TW network. We would fight every time I signed a new contract. After the tenth season, she said I was selfish staying with a ‘sinking ship,’ even though she wasn’t even working at that point. Erica always said she married me for my potential. And I guess I ended up being a bad bet.”
Alex felt a childish impulse to rush in, to say that Erica Trevain was a talentless hack. It was a strange reaction, to feel protective of a younger version of this man she didn’t know, not really.
“I’m sorry,” she said, meaning it in more ways than one.
“What about you?” he said as they reached the front of the line. “Ever been to therapy?”
Alex watched the ride, all those people going up, up, up, none of them worried about the fall.
“When I was in high school. For a while. My dad thought it would be a good idea, after my parents got divorced.” Her throat constricted as she skirted within grazing distance of their brief, one-sided history.
“And was it?” Devin shielded his eyes against the sun.
“Eh.” Alex pulled a few tickets out of her back pocket and handed them to the attendant, who ripped the orange paper in half and pointed to one of the gently swinging carts.
“I think I was too good at telling the therapist what she wanted to hear. Or she wasn’t good enough at getting me to not do that? I don’t know.”
“That makes sense.” Devin led the way to one of the bobbing carts. He held the little metal gate open for her. “That you’d find a way to keep even a professional at arm’s length.”
“You think I’m ice-cold?” The metal bench was hard under her butt as she took a seat.
“No.” Devin dropped himself next to her with a grin. “I think you wish you were.”
The space wasn’t that tight—she watched four teenagers squeeze into one cart behind them—but Devin manspread spectacularly, so their thighs ended up pressed together when they didn’t have to be. Alex couldn’t ignore the heat of him, the heavy slab of muscle in his thigh. She could reach out, place her hand on his knee, slide up across the rough denim.
He was looking at her, smiling, hair stuck to his cheek. Without thinking, Alex reached to brush it back.
Devin turned his nose into her wrist, brushing the sensitive skin there like he couldn’t help himself.
Oh god—was the Ferris wheel the most romantic ride at the carnival? From a pop culture perspective, objectively, yes .
This was the only place in the whole fair that created a degree of sequestered privacy. It moved slow enough that no one was likely to get motion sick and yak. The sides of the cart kind of obscured them from any potential viewers from the ground. You could hold hands or make out or do whatever it was that Reese Witherspoon got up to in that one movie that Alex had never seen but that she did sometimes come across gifs of on Tumblr.
She recognized the way her whole body buzzed with electricity. Before she knew better, Alex used to think a crush couldn’t hurt you if you didn’t act on it. Locked safely behind the boundaries of her own mind, Alex lived out a thousand fantasies without ever risking her heart.
She’d told her friends plenty of times that a crush was bootleg love: all the endorphins, none of the risk. A crush on a celebrity was best. Because it was impossible, you could fantasize about anything, unburdened by pesky details of reality. You could live out whole relationships like that, daydreams where you were always in control. Fictional lovers couldn’t leave you.
It would be so easy to fall into the same trap she’d missed as a teenager. To let a single spark catch in the kindling of weakness for Devin Ashwood that somehow still ran in infinite supply inside her chest. To go up in flames for him.
She had to do something to fuck up the vibe.
“I actually met you once, before you came to Tompkins.” Confessing the origin story of why she’d hated him for almost twenty years ought to do it.
Devin startled beside her, dragging his gaze from the sky to her face. “What do you mean?”
Alex swallowed. “You came to Florida’s Supercon in 2008, and I had one of those passes for a meet-and-greet photo.”
Devin winced. “Oh man. I did so many cons back then. I’m really sorry but I don’t remember.”
“No. God no. It’s fine. I didn’t expect you to.”
“Somehow I have a feeling it’s not fine.” Devin held himself very still. “Did I forget to put on deodorant?”
“No.” Alex laughed. “I distinctly remember you smelled expensive and kinda spicy.” She chipped at her already half-ruined nail polish. “It’s just…” She took a deep breath.
This was silly. She could say it. Even though she never had before.
“I made this really intense costume. It was—You know the Underworld Ambassador—with, like, the green facial wounds and the neck spikes?”
“Oh shit, really?” He looked genuinely impressed. “Damn. That thing was elaborate. And you made it yourself? When you were like, what—sixteen?”
“Seventeen. The con was on my birthday.” The rocking motion of the ride was making her sick.
“I wish I’d known,” Devin said. “I would have sung to you, no problem.”
Alex could only imagine the tizzy that would have sent her into. She’d seen YouTube videos of him playing Hanson covers on an acoustic guitar.
“That would have been a relief for me, actually. Sometimes you get out there under the lights and it’s just, like, How do I use a pen? How do I spell my last name? ” He pulled a face.
“No, I—I didn’t tell you it was my birthday.” And it was like Alex was back there in that convention center room, the world walled off by curtains. “I was super nervous and weird, and I’m sure a lot of people are weird about you, but I really…” Her chest hurt, the cage of her ribs suddenly too tight. “I cared so much. This may come as a surprise to you, but I was not a cool child. Not well-liked. And my mom had quit on us not that long before that and I just…”
“You wanted me to fix it.” Devin looked crushed, his whole face sinking.
Alex exhaled. “Yeah.”
He knew. Of course he knew. So many strangers must put their problems on him.
“And I didn’t,” he said.
“You almost did.” Alex smiled at the memory for maybe the first time. “You were sweet at first. My crush was a problem .”
“But then…” he prompted.
“But then”—Alex exhaled heavily—“when I left I overheard you saying to the photographer that the reason you were so nice to me was because I was”—she made herself say it—“a grade A freak that was gonna die alone.”
It was such a child’s wound. Alex had nursed so many hurts since then.
Her dad calling from the hospital.
Packing the car to leave school in the middle of the semester.
She’d had her heart broken many ways. But you never forget your first.
“Alex. Fuck.” Devin lowered his face into his hands. “That is so awful. I want you to, like, punch me in the face.”
“It’s not all your fault.” She hit him on the leg gently to coax him to look at her. “No one could have lived up to my idea of you.”
He swallowed thickly. “You were just a kid.”
“Yeah, but I’m not anymore.” Alex could see environmental factors now. The stress of the situation, the goading photographer.
He looked so miserable; his face drained of color. “?‘Freak’ is on the list of ableist words my agent gave me in 2020 during that brief window when it seemed like white men in Hollywood might actually get canceled.”
Alex laughed, the sound shocking in her own ears.
Devin had been right the other night at the town council meeting: she didn’t treat most people, including him, like they were real. Multifaceted and capable of depth she might not immediately clock.
Blanket disdain had served her as a powerful weapon of self-defense, or so she’d always thought. What had it saved her from, really? What did she have to show for it? She was a bitter hag at thirty-four. It took a lot of gall to maintain a superiority complex when you’d accomplished nothing. When the only person you liked less than everyone else was yourself.
It stung that Devin Ashwood had clocked her coping mechanisms in a handful of days. He was the world’s least self-aware man—he had a tattoo on his own thigh of a fan-favorite line he’d once ad-libbed—but somehow he saw through Alex like cellophane.
The thing about getting an apology from him all these years later was, Alex didn’t need it, not really. Devin wasn’t the one she needed to forgive.
Poor thing’s gonna die alone. She was the one who kept repeating it.
“I never stopped to ask myself what might have been going on in your life.” It was a realization as much as a confession.
He blinked. “Are you asking me now?”
Alex was. She had the capacity for it. Finally. “I think it might make us both feel better.”
Devin squinted. “Summer 2008, right?”
“June,” she confirmed.
He scrubbed his hand over his face. “My parents were going to jail.”
“Devin, what?” Alex had followed every story on him back then. She’d heard that his parents had managed his money when he was growing up, that it had caused tension, that he’d filed legal paperwork when he was sixteen to get control of his own assets. But this?
She thought she’d known the whole story. Because she was an archivist. Because she was his biggest fan. Alex realized now that none of that meant shit.
His voice was tight when he spoke. “My agent—my former agent—Jade, kept it out of the press through some miraculous feat. I’d cut them off almost a decade before that. And the sickest part is, I thought that would make them love me. Like, they’d miss the money, sure, but they’d realize what they really wanted in their lives was our family.”
He laughed bitterly, staring down at his hands clenched white across the metal lap bar.
“But no. They refused to change their lifestyle when the cash stopped flowing and I guess burned through whatever they took pretty quickly. They must have wanted to keep up appearances badly enough that they committed tax evasion and fraud. I’m not sure if it was pride or what, but I didn’t even find out about what happened until after they were sentenced. Their lawyer called my lawyer. Professional courtesy, he said.”
Alex knew what it meant to have a parent put their own interests above hers, but she’d always had her dad leaning in, loving her enough that her mom’s absence faded to a dull ache. She couldn’t imagine suffering the betrayal twice. The lack without the abundance.
“I, ah…” Devin shook his head. “I really thought it was my fault. You know, like I should have kept supporting them, kept it from coming to that. Anyway, in the end, no one asked me.”
Alex had always thought parasocial relationships were a victimless crime. But she could see now the way the lines blurred when you met your heroes. How Devin took on everyone else’s expectations, the way the weight of them crushed him when he could no longer carry it.
There were no words to reflect their parallel hurt, the betrayals they’d both held back then, hidden beneath their skin.
Devin tried and failed to give her a smile, the curve crooked.
“Probably for the best that they never called again and asked me for help,” he said, so low Alex almost missed it. “I would have given them another chance.”
When he turned to face her, his eyes were the clearest green she’d ever seen, the sun on sea glass.
“It’s not an excuse. I still wish I’d been better. That I’d been what you needed on your birthday.”
“I know.” Alex could see how hard Devin tried, how hard he was still trying, to give people what they wanted. To please them, if he could. “It took me a long time to be mad at my mom. As a kid, it felt like if I was mad at her, that was such a big, all-consuming hurt that it would wipe out everything. I’d lose all the good memories of her tucking me in or making spaghetti. I think, even then, I knew those good memories were all I was ever gonna get of her.”
Alex had to fight to push the words out. But she wanted to. She wanted Devin to know this part of her. She wanted him to understand.
“It was a lot easier to be mad at you. Not the real you. But, you know, the cardboard-cutout version that had said the same thing I was hearing at school and around town. The kind of thing I heard in my mom’s voice even though she never said it.”
Her eyes stung, and in the few seconds she had to make the choice to stop talking or start crying, she chose the latter.
“That I wasn’t good enough. Wasn’t wanted.” And Alex felt like her ribs had come apart. Like all the soft parts of her were out in the open air.
“You can still be mad at me,” Devin said, quiet and gravely serious as he reached over and swiped at her tear tracks with his warm thumb. “If it’s easier. If it helps.”
Alex threaded her arm through Devin’s and leaned her head on his warm, sturdy shoulder.
“I couldn’t,” she said honestly, “even if I wanted to. And I don’t.”
From the top of the Ferris wheel, together they watched clouds drift lazily across a sea of flawless blue. No moon in sight.