Our Hearts Knew Better (Our Hearts #1)

Mirrored

Summer

No matter the coin, I pick heads and I get tails.

I pick hope and I get dejected.

I pick effort and I get inaction.

Adam was on a call for half of my cooking time. I passed by occasionally and put my ear to the bedroom door. I knew who he was talking to from his pauses and his yeah s and his scoffs of a laugh, as he got his own tough love from his best friend.

Besides me, he only talks to Levi and Isolde and Griffin. He’s softer with Isolde. He’s bitter with his father. He’s in the middle with me and Levi.

He’s since gone quiet, and I’ve called for him.

Two bowls of steaming stew sit across from each other at the table by the window, the sunset soft rays through the glass.

I hate sunsets here. They’re a threat of descending darkness and I’m living inside enough of it.

“Adam,” I call again, my voice not nearly as beckoning as I spoon some soup and let it dribble back into the bowl. “It’s ready,” I say, entirely to myself.

I blow the steam away from my face, then reach toward the island, pushing myself up just enough to finger grab my phone and drop back down. He’s more likely to look at his phone, so I text him.

Stew’s ready. Come eat with me.

Come out of there.

Come be with me.

I’m not going to be in that bed. I can’t live my life inside a room and let everything and everyone pass me by.

I glance around the open floor of this apartment, basically one room, and the knot in my throat presses against my windpipe.

It’s happening again, anyway.

I’m alone again. Ignored. An adult now, and it’s happening again, and I’m still getting blurred vision over it.

Adam doesn’t respond and he doesn’t open the door.

This is fine, I tell myself, letting the steam fog my face, a chant I use to ward off another breakdown. It’s been a bit since I’ve had one.

I push myself up from the table and take the habitual steps to the bedroom door, cracking it open to see Adam on his stomach, his face turned away. I fix my focus to his back, watching the lift to show he’s still breathing.

Then I take my stalled breath to feel myself still breathing too.

Adam remains in his world while I go back to mine, the one still trying to orbit after the damaging collision.

I clear the table, carrying the untouched stew toward an undecided destination, my feet halting between the island and the sink. I stare at the steam, the perfectly fine and fresh food, that would’ve been delicious and comforting, until I’m not really staring at all, stilled with a dimmed focus.

I’m aware I’m not moving, but these states are hard to come out of, almost a comfort in themselves, a stopping of time, a stopping of thoughts. It might only be for a few seconds, but every second feels so long.

My breathing picks up and my heart thuds against my ribcage, every time, when I snap back into myself.

My filled hands clench around the bowls as an ache builds in my clenched teeth.

The snap sends me to the trash and the bowls inside, both landing with thumps and clangs near the bottom.

I walk backward to rest against the sink— this is fine —and stay in this next state until the sounds around me—traffic on the street, the hum of the fridge, the drip of the faucet—are again louder than my own.

The start of a video is paused on my laptop. I set it on the island to play some low music as I cooked, and I had to fight having a stranger’s company.

I slap the top closed on the girl about to eat a plate of fettuccine alfredo and strawberry cake as I round the island to the living room, swiping up my phone from the table.

The couch calls to me next and I fight that too, pacing around instead, attempting to walk off emotion.

I pass the small table that has a vase of fake pink camellias and honeysuckles Isolde sent to us after we moved in, and those few bridge figurines of my mom’s. I trace my finger along the arch of one, thinking what I know she would tell me if she were alive.

Don’t be afraid, Summer.

I wince to think about her watching over me and have a shameful second of being thankful she’s not here to see me now.

I then pass my shelves of books, tracing my finger along one as I eye the spines, small specks of dust flying. I haven’t kept up with everything .

These are my trophies, the reading I’ve accomplished, since I haven’t read anything that wasn’t required since high school, since I got a life of my own.

And I’m pulling off a favorite now, bringing it to my corner chair and flinging my thin blanket over my lap.

My bag of dried pineapples that I snack on while I’m working—all I usually do in this chair—still sits at one of the legs, and I pop a couple into my mouth. I love how they’re made. They taste like the sea.

I’m only a few sentences into the book when my entire face suddenly stings, my body tight and shaky, right before I slam the book shut.

A tear falls on the cover, then more come, and I can’t stop them as I spiral into the breakdown, a defense immediately putting the blame onto leaving my hair wet to curl on top of my head. The style makes a difference, they say, and I say this one too. I can be harsh and tough, appear sharp-edged more with my hair straightened. Curly is the girl naive. Straight is the woman who knows better.

I don’t know anything.

I have a few absolutes, but they’ve been abandoned too. Trying to be the established person you’ve become in a similarly old way of living, you’re guaranteed to lose your mind a bit inside the Deja vu.

So how much longer until I do?

If I’m going back to books, back to fiction , it’s because I hate my reality. I love reading, but those adventures have been tainted by how they started.

Not reading means I’m too busy living.

Not reading means I’m happy in my surroundings.

Not reading is a good thing. . .

The thud of the book slipping from my lap to the floor gives sound to the one in my heart as I muffle my cries into the blanket. This is the easy part, curling myself around my knees, pressing harder until my face and lungs hurt and I have to force in silent gasps of air just to breathe.

I’m not this person again.

But I am.

I’m giving up my life, again.

I discovered myself, and I’ve been losing her.

I got a life I wanted, and I’ve been losing that too.

I used to be brave. . .

I find my phone that had fallen through a crack—with me, like I knew I’d have to call her, my big breaths rapid, then calming once she answers.

I sniffle and she’s quiet, waiting, and I just start talking.

“I do love him.”

Clarissa sighs. “I know. But were you ever in love with him?”

I switch my phone to the ear that didn’t hear that. “He was my future when I needed a future,” I say, bringing the blanket to my mouth, muffling the strain in my voice that seems like it’s bouncing off the walls. “We were supposed to be it.” I gave so much of myself and my time…my life. “I don’t know what to do,” I confide, letting go, through another welling of tears. “I miss…so much.”

She crunches something that sounds like a chip but is probably a crouton in my ear. “You do know what to do. But you’re scared. You need security, and everyone besides me, the best friend in the world who loves you more than anyone, has taken that from you at least once.”

My nostrils flare at her playfully smug words, my attempt at a smile through the sting.

And love. Love likes to be stolen from me. I really needed love and Adam was the one ready to give me that.

Now…still needing love, always needing love, fucking promises kept. . .

“He’s my first almost everything,” I say next, low, still just talking, because Clarissa, the best friend in the world who does love me more than anyone, is letting me do that.

Another crunch. “ Almost everything. You deserve wholly. One hundred percent.” I’m nodding against the blanket, some of the fuzz rubbing against the phone, trying to believe that again. “And you and Adam aren’t bad together, okay? But you don’t have to settle just because you’re not bad together, and because he won’t leave you physically.”

The force of my back against the chair jolts out my next breath. “I didn’t settle for him,” I cut in quickly, sensing when she’s about to be on a roll, and now, where she’s rolling, the double-edged sword of how well the two of us know each other.

“You’re a romantic who’s needed to be loved and wanted and you think if you let this go, there won’t be another out there. And you don’t want the time you give to be wasted. But you love the other boy too. And yeah, I’m making the L again in the air with my crouton.”

“I knew it was croutons,” I mutter with a brief feeling of lightness in my chest.

“You fell hard and fast for a different guy when you were seventeen and he fell hard and fast for you too.”

My chest is heavy again as I pick at the blanket. The same thinness as the one he’d covered me with on the Gilligan the first time I got drunk.

“And you deserve to know what happened,” Clarissa tells me, lower. “Normal people don’t whiplash someone’s heart for no reason.”

My splayed book on the floor pokes at my periphery, putting a tease on my tongue. “You’re the perfect side character.”

“You can’t see me, but I’m bowing.”

I smile but it’s just lips. “I hope you get your story one day.”

“Bitch, I’m living it.” She puts on the defense and my chuckle is wet. “When are you going to go back to living yours?”

Rosalee Bay. That’s where my story started.

That’s where the other boy, whose name begins with an L, still lives, leaving his permanent mark like he left on me, making the town his oyster.

Who’s waiting for me? Not my sick father, who decided to settle in one place after I myself vacated it. And who transitioned from my dad to my father, because he did more than donate his sperm, but he still didn’t earn the title of Dad.

I remember opening my college acceptance letter—Adam’s school, so we could stay together, but it was a good option for me too—and I squealed and shoved it into his face with a dance…expecting pride for his daughter’s success. Still expecting too much.

I’ve since sent him other things over the years, other successes, a conflict between making him proud and showing him how much better off I am without him.

Who else isn’t waiting for me? Not that boy my heart still beats for, I admit, years after he broke it.

Adam wasn’t my first kiss. He wasn’t my first love. He wasn’t my first heartbreak. But he was my first everything else. All because his best friend let me go.

Levi’s always been in my mind, I admit again, dead center after my feelings should’ve died.

Adam gave me sympathy when he found out what happened, then when we started dating, I assured him I didn’t have feelings for Levi anymore. I tried not to. I wanted to make that statement as powerful as the one he used to break me, to make myself whole again, complete for Adam.

It’s been an ongoing, underlying attempt.

People who knew would say what Levi and I had was a fantasy, but again, that’s not my genre. Everything between us was as real as those beats of my heart, never ending, no time of death.

We didn’t speak to each other for a while after it happened. I personally couldn’t. And I didn’t want to ruin my first relationship by pining in the presence of and for my boyfriend’s best friend. Levi was still around, but even in my space, he gave me space. Until I sucked it up and we were able to hold on to a form of our friendship.

And that book near my feet…I don’t care about that couple’s life. I care why ours had to go so wrong. Even more so, I admit again, when things are wrong.

“You can’t change what happened,” Clarissa continues to my body rocking thoughts, “but you can change what will happen. Get out of Virginia. Do it for teen Summer. Let me use my vacation time!”

I groan something like a laugh as I drop my head back. Apologies to teen Summer, but adult Summer can’t just leave. I have responsibilities that hang over my head with the gray clouds.

I’m a tech editor for an independently owned company. They bet on me. People and clients, who count on me. They’ve never let me down. And when people who’ve never let you down are counting on you, you don’t have a right to let them down. And it’s people’s time and money. It doesn’t matter if I don’t feel good . No one feels good. Life doesn’t feel good. I might feel hand-picked in my troubles, but I’m not.

“Don’t be down on yourself,” Clarissa tells me now through crunching, “for thinking back on possibility. On what you could’ve had instead. What you should’ve had instead.”

“How many croutons do you have left?” I ask to distract myself from that thought of what happened , from the answer to why I was taken this direction, having someone else to blame who isn’t me, and still needing his answers.

“About half,” she says. “Want me to push you one through the phone? And don’t get off track. You know why you’re going back to that summer.”

I lift my head out of my building neck cramp. I’m reflecting on that summer, because they’re mirrored. And I have to break the glass. I’m going back to remind myself I can change. I can make change, like I did then. I can be brave in the midst of abandonment. I can tell my mom I’m not afraid, I’m run down.

I’m so run down.

“Okay, that’s part of it, but that’s not all of it,” Clarissa stresses, showing her psychic abilities, right as my thoughts shift back into tiredness, my blurred and aching eyes finding the vase as she teases what this really means. “Twelfth letter of the alphabet…”

The honeysuckles here are fake.

Here only has half of my heart. What’s left of it.

Eventually, releasing the rest of this breakdown for a momentary snapback, I thank my best friend, telling her I love her, and wipe at my face, sweeping away sticking tendrils of hair.

With a sigh, I pick myself and the book up, and put both back on their shelf.

As much as that town became a home, as this one did, resentment and pain reside there too. Pick your battles. Nothing’s waiting for me in Rosalee Bay.

I lean my back against the closed bedroom door, my head slowly dropping back too.

Adam chose me. The fight isn’t there, it’s here.