Our Hearts Knew Better (Our Hearts #1)

Ready to Run?

It only took a day for it all to end.

My giddiness fell back into nerves the more hours went by that I didn’t see or hear from Levi.

Adam wanted to hang out, but he couldn’t that first day back because he and his dad— not by my choice , he complained—had to take care of some house and work stuff— one more year of playing his game , he stressed—from being away for weeks.

We met up at the beach part of the bay and sat near the water. I dipped my toes in as he told me everything about his trip he hadn’t told me through texts. He watched me a lot, grinning under the cap of his hat, taking me in again under the sun, and I laughed when he joked he was going to miss knowing a vampire.

But my amusement only jolted my jitters away for a few seconds, and I had to ask about Levi.

“He’s just busy,” Adam told me, no worry in his tone to next tell me not to. “Gets that way before the start of a new school year. I wouldn’t worry about it.”

“He didn’t tell me that,” I muttered to the sea.

Adam scoffed out a laugh. “He’s hard to distract. Gets inside his head.”

Now worrying would’ve been easier not to do if I wasn’t something potentially in his thoughts. His potential second thoughts. I could understand him not wanting to have the conversation about us in front of his dad, and when we’d just had our first kiss, but we were off the boat now.

I’d been inside Levi’s head as he’d been inside mine, and I’d never felt almost…shut out like I did now. It’d only been a day, but we kissed . I called him my boyfriend and now he wasn’t calling me at all.

Was he really just busy?

“Has he talked to you about why? Why he’s in his head?” I held my breath, my lungs aching when Adam’s puckered mouth and shaking head released it.

I dug my toes into the sand. So Levi hadn’t said anything about yesterday. Because he was busy? Was he waiting on me? I’d been ready since we happened.

And we needed to tell Adam. He’d still been flirting and we couldn’t blur the line that was there anymore.

But this was going nowhere, so I told myself to stay in another present moment.

Until that same night, I had to get back out of the house, out of the waiting state, on the search, knowing with everything that connected us, I’d find Levi.

He was at the bridge, beside his bike, tapping on the screen of his phone.

I felt the thrill in my heart at the sight of him, then the settling of my breaths as I was assured he wanted to be found by the vibration in my pocket. I probably tore a hole in my shorts trying to get to his text.

Hey. Are you around?

I smiled as I answered, I’m right here , approaching him quietly to see the first reaction on his face before he saw me, to have my expectations affirmed, to have another assurance. For him to restart this new lapse in my breathing.

As soon as he looked up, his eyes lit up and he smiled, too, so immediate and shining away all my questioning darkness.

My heart leaped so fiercely my body followed, right into his arms as he oof ed and caught me. His laugh blew my hair, and I loosened my hold some when I realized I was probably crushing him. But I still held on like I couldn’t let go, the uncertainty I’d stewed in since after he kissed me locking my arms, pulling at my nature to lean into the possibility of loss even as that wasn’t possible here. Not with him. He was busy and with me now.

“What are we doing tonight?” I asked him when I finally pulled back, blowing out a laugh of my own. My hand fit into his like a puzzle piece as I hoped for more kissing and plans for tomorrow, wanting him to steer us back there.

“I…” He swallowed. “I was thinking.”

I stepped closer, the tip of my shoe pressed into his. “About you and me?”

A storm clouded Levi’s eyes as they held mine, edging in my own darkness again.

He dropped my hand.

No, mine slipped. It was hot out.

I took it back quickly so he didn’t think I didn’t want to hold his hand, that I didn’t want an us.

He dropped my hand again.

He . Dropped. My. Hand.

And he suddenly couldn’t look at me, as I looked at him clearer through a building haze. That storm swirled deep. As deep as his popped dimple with his frown. His face was flushed, and his hair was more than just breeze blown, like he’d been running his fingers through the strands. Stress strokes.

Levi was a tight ball of stress and I was trying not to unravel until he gave me the words to stop it.

He shoved both hands into his pockets, where I couldn’t reach them, his phone going, too, as my own was now fused to my fist. “There’s—” He swallowed again, his voice lowered and strained as his next words skewed everything I knew about him, everything I knew had happened between us. “There’s not a me and you. I don’t want there to be.”

My head shook as I tried to blink away the haze, not letting those words settle as they tried to twist me up, but this didn’t make sense. I was frozen in the burn of those twelve hits, my stare drifting and unfocused, unable to speak, and I wasn’t sure how long I just stood there before he had to be the one to speak again.

He said my name, and when I blinked back to his gaze, there was something not so dark peeking through the storm and he had shifted more toward me, like maybe he was going to take it back. Words he was putting too much effort into getting out.

He didn’t. He tightened his face again once I showed some life back in mine.

“What are you doing?” spoke my disbelief, finally. It reflected in him, like he wasn’t expecting me to question, or at least not in such a defiant way.

He bounced on antsy feet, a silent stutter in his mouth before he could even say something. Something not right. “I didn’t want to hurt your feelings.”

I stepped back from the pity he put in his eyes. Not right.

“And you were drunk—”

“What?” A breath before the snap. “ What? What are you…no. No .”

“Summer.” My name again, a soft beg that made me rigid, my head shaking so hard I felt dizzy.

“No,” I repeated. “You kissed me. And I wasn’t drunk then. And what do you call what you’re doing now?” Tears fell, and he watched them roll down my cheeks, his only movement that muscle jerking in his jaw that used to be for me and against all my troubles. Now he was making himself one and no other move to stop my hurt feelings.

He looked almost…helpless.

There was something he wasn’t telling me. He was saying things he didn’t really believe or feel. He didn’t. He didn’t not feel for me.

“What’s wrong with you?” I could only whisper this one, a still too familiar and too stinging question. “What happened?” A sudden urgency moved me closer to him again. “Whatever it is, I can help fix it…”

He stepped back now, a small shake in his head, a hard blink of his eyes. “You didn’t do anything wrong.”

“ What happened? ” I stressed at that assurance, almost a rush of new air in my lungs, but they seized against a full breath at his stress back.

“We just can’t, Summer. I’m sorry,” he whispered, and it cracked every piece inside me that was still whole.

“But you said—” My voice broke and I sounded just like how he’d looked at me—pitiful. “You did—” He said and did so much .

Every conversation we’d had since the first flashed in my head, everything that told me he was falling for me as I was falling for him.

Everything he’d done for me and with me was right there, real , showing me the beats of his heart that were mine, showing me how I mattered to him. All the signals. . .

His smile at seeing me, just moments ago? That wasn’t the smile of a boy who wanted to break a girl’s heart.

“Everything’s real.” I quoted him, from just the other night, the way he squeezed my hand as he said it then now a sick clench in my stomach for how he was trying to ruin it, a flicker of that desperation then back in his eyes before it was gone.

But not this flicker of fire now in me.

“You said that. Everything was real,” I insisted, fought, pleaded against what he was saying this night. “I’m not stupid,” I pushed through my teeth, half confused over who I was trying to convince now, until I blinked the returned haze away and it was still Levi, again, tracking my tears. “Even if you hadn’t kissed me, I know you and I know you like me. I saw it and I felt it.”

“And that’s my fault,” he pushed back, a lift in his stiffened shoulders, as stiffened as his arms, and his hands that hadn’t left his pockets. “I shouldn’t have made you feel things I don’t.”

Gravel pressed into my shoe and I beared down to shift the pain but it was too centered. “Why are you doing this?” I pushed more, my voice staggered air, caught over him expecting me to believe he’d just been pretending to be a nice guy, some wolf in sheep’s clothing.

His mouth did that silent stutter thing, his howl weak. “I thought…I thought I did. Then we kissed and…I wasn’t feeling what I thought I was.”

“You’re lying —”

“I don’t wanna be with you.” There was a tremble in these words, a final push at me, to go and accept this.

I sucked in a breath, finally expanding my lungs, aching with this deeper burn. So deep I knew it would live in me, right beside the others.

And there was nothing I could do about it.

Whatever had happened didn’t even matter anymore, because Levi was choosing to hurt me. He was watching me break and he wasn’t doing anything to pick up the pieces. We couldn’t rewind this.

I asked myself what it was about me that made people I want not want me back.

And then, the right question, what was it about them that made them act this way?

And then I reminded myself it wasn’t my job to figure anybody else out.

Levi did want to be with me, he did , but he wasn’t letting himself have me. And it wasn’t my job to force someone to care about me anymore.

Fuck him too.

I swiped at my face with that second “Fuck you” of my life, this one slicing at my throat more, wet, but clear. “I’m not waiting for you. I’m not waiting ,” I said, with more of the fire in me that allowed me to go, to walk away.

The tears wouldn’t stop once I was alone, my face even hurting from all my swiping, until I eventually just let them fall, this new hollow place in my heart feeling bottomless. I clenched my fist to my chest to try to fill it, like I could dig past my ribs and hold the breaks together, feeling the heat under my hand, sucking in air just to breathe, just to accept .

The end of two worlds, crumbling like dominos, but I couldn’t accept this. All the stages and I was stuck in shock.

With each slowed, dragged step, I yearned for words on a page, wanting to be back inside my books, where pain was temporary, and the one who hurt you healed you happily ever after.

But this wasn’t the third act. It was the end. And Levi and I weren’t actually dating.

He wasn’t my hero.

He wasn’t a book boyfriend.

He was blond.

I had that thought and laughed through my cries into my hand until I was just tears again.

Levi was as real as my pain, and he wasn’t coming to kiss it better.

I’d stopped paying attention to where I was going, exhausted and restless, wanting to sleep and walk forever, feeling like I was already sleeping and walking forever.

A car approached me from behind and I was out of body as I moved out of the way.

But the car slowed beside me, and I focused on the glow of its headlights on the road as I slowed, too, and we both stopped.

“We meet again.”

Adam.

The sound of his voice was like a retreat, and I remembered I could still breathe—I was still breathing, as I glanced over at him, as he smiled, leaning toward the passenger side window.

“You getting in?”

His smile faded the longer he stared at me, the longer I just stared at him, to a kind of alarm at the sight of me. I could imagine how alarming I looked. I wanted to sound every one. I wished they’d been sounded for me.

He vacated the car, leaving his door open as he rounded to a stop in front of me. He was wearing his cap, and when the shadows passed through his eyes as he studied my puffy feeling face, matching the shadow settled in me, I thought I could like this look more. This look of certainty. This look that didn’t hide.

“My dad too,” he told me with a sigh, only half right, and I couldn’t speak to explain the other half. And I was conflicted on if I should. If I should let Levi tell him himself.

All I knew was Adam was going to be here for me, as I was going to be here for him.

I winced when he touched my cheek, my wounds now in my skin, that I realized was still wet.

“It’s too early for the train, but get in, we’ll drive,” he said, with a tug on my hand before letting me go to round the car again.

I stared down at my fingers as I curled them into my palm, then I shook them free as I climbed into the car with Adam.

“Ready to run?” he asked with his smirk, and I managed a nod, the smallest lift in my lips as he pressed the gas.

I had a third world in Adam.

I was ready to run.