I Found. . .
I couldn’t breathe and I couldn’t slow down now. I could only run.
I ran the entire way, and Levi ran with me, not trying to stop me until we cleared the trees for the patch of grass to the train tracks.
“Summer.” He called my name through winded breaths. “Summer, hey .” Twice he said my name, urgent and concerned, and I didn’t want him to stop, so maybe that was part of why I still didn’t stop, to hear the need and the care for me.
The sound of the train’s whistle vibrated through me and fired up my feet—I was almost too late—and I stumbled onto the tracks, catching myself with one arm as someone else caught me with the other.
Levi. Still here for me.
“Get off,” I told him, shoving at him, knowing he didn’t dodge trains and not wanting him to stay because he felt obligated. No matter how much my fingers wanted to curl around his shirt and keep him beside me.
I shoved, but it was like pushing against a rock, as the train chugged closer, also not wanting him to drag me off before I could have this moment to just be and not think, not break.
But he didn’t do either. He didn’t get off and he didn’t drag me with him. And I should’ve known he wouldn’t.
Somewhere beneath every throbbing vein and muscle and organ in my body, I did know. I knew who his best friend was, and he knew who I was, so I knew he would understand why I had to stand here tonight.
He didn’t keep the spot beside me. He moved behind me, pressed right up against my back, and he secured his hands in both of mine. Secured me in an embrace that both comforted and warned of getting me off these tracks when the time came to jump, like he worried I wouldn’t.
I squeezed Levi’s hands, where ours were entwined together at my stomach, at the thought, another reminder of what he’d been through with Adam.
And now I was putting him through that with me.
Need me to stay?
No.
Get off.
I wasn’t putting him through this with me. He was choosing to go through this with me.
Adam and I were choices he made.
I leaned into him, my eyes stinging, and I knew it was more from his steady hold around my waist and less from the bright lights of the train…that was almost upon us.
And like last time, my body shook with the tracks.
Closer, closer. . .
My lungs seized and my heart raced. My ears flooded with the deafening sounds, my sight blinded to the lights.
Closer, closer, just a bit—
I was lifted, then toppling to the ground, my limbs tangling with Levi’s until we rolled to a stop on our backs, our lungs heaving.
The train whizzed past us, and like last time, laughter tore from my throat. And I laughed and laughed until that was the only sound left in the quiet and I quieted too.
My eyes traced the stars until I had enough air to find my voice. “I’m sorry if I scared you.”
Levi took several of my slower thudding heartbeats to respond with, “I’m sort of used to it,” and those beats seemed to still completely as I sighed.
“With Adam.”
Grass shuffled lightly near my head, where Levi’s head was, so I guessed he nodded. “One day he’s gonna get himself killed.”
I heard the fear in his words, and when I looked over, I saw it lingering in his eyes when he met mine. His skin was flushed, clammy, and his hair was the mess I loved it to be.
“Why’d you stay?”
His lips parted as his eyes danced between mine, soft under the bend in his brows. “I wanted to be with you on the other side.”
Everything rushed back then, and I crashed hard. My body felt heavy enough to put indentions in the ground, and I wished for the earth to swallow me up. I’d rather be buried alive in the soil than continue to die in my dad’s rejection. In his silence, that tomorrow would bring.
“It’s a temporary fix,” Levi murmured, like another warning, some advice, as the sting returned to my eyes.
“What’s the permanent solution?” I asked him, the words wobbly as the sting moved to my nose.
“You,” he breathed, then swallowed. “You are. The only way it’ll go is to feel it. Then you keep focusing on you. Keep discovering, Summer.” My name, a third time, an urging on his tongue. “Find your happiness and live there .”
Adam found baseball.
I found. . .
Levi’s teeth came together with that jerk in his jaw, like, in this moment, he was with me in my unhappiness—and he literally was—inside the closed in walls where I still lived. “He wouldn’t even look at you,” he said, with shock over and disdain for my dad.
My dad’s back, the hair at his neck I had pleaded to, his twisting and dismissing were now the deepest imprint.
“He’s all I really have in my life,” I said, the words leaving me like another plea attempt, the sudden squeeze in my throat so tight I couldn’t say more, Levi’s face, everything around me, now underwater.
I blinked, and a well of tears cooled my flushed face as they rolled down, my sight cleared to show me Levi, not just tracking them, but stopping them right before they met the dirt. His hand reached up so quickly and his fingers were so soft as they grazed my cheekbone.
He’d touched me so many times tonight, in so many ways. And I still wanted more.
He paused, and lifted his hand away with a swallow, studying his dampened fingers and seeming almost…conflicted.
You’re too much, Summer.
I couldn’t hear the thought or bear seeing it in his stare when he’d finally meet mine again, so I started to look toward the stars, always sure and shining, when Levi captured me with his returned gaze, the spark as unmistakable as his words.
“I’m in your life now.”
“Really?” The whisper this time was warm air breezing through me, a thawing to the new cold feeling that had settled into my chest tonight. And somehow, that ached, too, a force strong enough to sit me up.
A noise escaped my mouth, the start of a sob. I bent my knees, wrapping my arms around both and burying my chin in the center, trying not to sink, as years seemed to pour from me. Grief and untouchable yearnings, old and new losses, found freedom and love, soaked every area of exposed skin, my face, my arms, my legs.
I looked and sounded and felt unrecognizable to both me and Levi, and while I had no choice but to sit with myself, he had a choice, and he still chose to stay.
He’d sat up, too, and remained sitting beside me, his shoulder pressed to mine in his firm steadiness, as I let myself feel the worst and the best I’d ever felt.
The emotions almost ebbed as fast as they flowed. When you knew the scars from a war were coming, you already built that tissue for the first big battle. But it was a release my body thanked me for. I was releasing my dad and making the room for myself.
I didn’t need him.
And I promised myself I would never need him again.