Our Hearts Knew Better (Our Hearts #1)

You Stole My House

Summer

It’s a downpour, both of us soaked, my clothes and what’s left of his sticking to our bodies, when we finally slow down at a destination.

We’ve turned for the third flight of stairs before it registers we’re climbing the fire tower, and that muscle memory has me stepping on all the non-creaking spots, though I wouldn’t be able to even hear them over the storm.

The tower does have an expanded section of roof to shelter under…but once we reach the top, Levi walks us right to the door.

I follow quicker this time with narrowed eyes and an opened mouth as he pries keys from his wet shorts pocket and inserts one into the lock…and opens the door.

I’m processing what this could mean when I realize neither of us are moving. I blink from the darkened space to Levi, who has his head angled down, toward me, but his eyes not on me, and with a big breath, he reaches into the shadows and turns on a light.

My lungs expand, too, as I blink back toward the space, now aglow.

“Welcome to my home,” Levi tells me, a low confession, as he presses his back against the door jamb.

“Your home,” I whisper, with the softest emphasis, as I step inside the fire tower— his fire tower—my hands clinging to his wet shirt.

I stall on the big rug so I don’t track in damp footprints as I take this in with conflicting emotions swirling in my throat, a squeeze of a gasped laugh and another painful punch that reverberates down to my stomach.

I drop the shirt.

It’s almost exactly how I imagined it at seventeen, just with Levi’s stylistic touches. There’s the kitchen area. The dresser. The bedroom area. And a couch space. Mini lights are strung along the tops of every window, with open cabinet spaces above them. There’s trinkets from the sea, and related to the sea, some I recognize as having been Elliot’s.

My perusal becomes blurred and not even a blink clears it.

It’s so cozy, like a hug I’ve needed since my real hug with Isolde. And though there’s no cat and no jungle gym for my cat and no bookshelf, this feels like mine.

But that’s not right.

“You stole my house,” I say, as a bit more than a whisper, an attempted teasing. He stole my house. He stole my heart. The thought blares through my head and through that heart still beating for him that he could even steal my loyalty if he had none of his own.

Especially with how he’s watching me now, standing back in front of me, still without a shirt on, and his face even more naked with relief, like we’ve been house shopping together and he’s been waiting tosurprise me with the one I wanted. His chest swells with how much he can see I love it.

“And you didn’t tell me…” I trail the accusation, a push back through the love.

“It wasn’t a secret,” he responds, simply and sensibly, almost feeling insulting, until he adds, “You just never asked me.”

I didn’t ask anyone. I would’ve been too tempted to show up on his doorstep.

And now, with a place like this ? I’ll need my own damn key.

Levi holds one of the towels now in his hands out to me, and I take it—but he doesn’t release it, the towel stretched between both of our grips.

I still at the slide of his eyes over me, his full intake of breath that seizes mine, and I stop my own eyes from tracking the water still dripping from his hair down his chest to keep close watch on that gaze.

And when it reconnects with mine, I see that similar torment I saw at his truck at the bay, the storm within the blue stronger than the one outside, moistened with more what if s.

What if he touches me?

What if I touch him?

What if we go back in time and correct our future?

What if he yanks, and my racing heart collides with his?

With a bob in his throat, he releases the towel.

My arm jerks some with the give, the connection breaking as we dry off like we’re mad at our skin.

He’s completely disheveled, mussing his wet hair, every muscle of his hard frame tightened, and I’m remembering when it was once my hands that made him this way.

“You’ll have to go back down if you need a bathroom,” he says, an apology in his voice.

I chew the smirk or scowl in my lip at the boyish nerves in his voice too. “You built a bathroom.”

He pauses his drying and nods, all soft and humble.

Even this place looks near brand new.

“How did this”—I swat around the space—“come to be?”

“I didn’t want to live at my parents’ anymore,” he says as he walks to the dresser, an underlying tone of that not being a manly thing to do, and my mouth curls into that smirk-scowl. “There wasn’t a house for sale…”

“How much did this cost you?”

He walks back to me, pulling a dry shirt over his head, this one white, clearly just a barrier. “I used my savings. That truck,” he says with a thumb pointed toward the outside. “I accepted it from one of my dad’s friends so I could keep saving. I located the original owner…” He trails off again, with a nod around the tower, the rest an easy fill in the blank.

“And,” he starts again, low, with a glance toward one of the walls of windows, “I have a good view of the bay here.”

The tightness in his throat around those words draws me close to him, the squishing sound of my wedges drawing his gaze to mine. “Your mom?” I don’t have to ask, but I do, and he doesn’t need to answer, but he does.

“Yep,” he sighs out, shifting toward me, a flutter in his lids as he breaks our connection again. “She’ll come up here sometimes and stand at the windows.”

My swallow is knotted, a pinch in the extra beats of my heart for Levi to have the hope of having his dad back. “You can look too.” I manage to keep my voice steady, encouraging for any small part of him that still wants to believe Elliot is alive out there, for the softening in the corners of his mouth when I do.

And when his eyes flutter back to mine, they’re wide with that hope, then hooded with fear, then hardened with resolve. The transformation almost happens at once.

“He’s gone, Summer.” He reiterates this with a flare in his nose, then he’s moving around me, away from this, to his wet shirt on the floor.

As he carries it to the hamper, my mouth loses its openness, my teeth fixing together as I squish more around the room—he’s been squishing around too—studying Levi’s collection of things from his dad, like I studied the collection of things from my mom back in Virginia, thinking again what both Elliot and Mollie would tell me to do if they were here.

I knew what to do last time, but I was steered away.

I shake away those thoughts, but only enough to rock them to the back of my mind.

“It’s unfair that we still need our parents,” I say low, half to myself, but for us both.

Levi is close enough to catch the words, saying low back, “I don’t think we ever stop.”

My swallow is in knots again as I come upon what appears to be a curtain draped down a space the size of a door, but I pass it over, remembering from my peek inside that summer it was just a random wall area, and Levi probably covered it to look better. The white of it even reminds me of a sail.

I stop when I spot a bike tire, attached to a bike, Levi’s old bike, that he seems to now have as decoration. Strangely, it works, but I snicker as I face him, where he’s leaned back against a desk. His gaze is glued to me, and I blame my shiver on still being damp.

“Couldn’t get rid of it,” I say as a tease.

He just shakes his head, and something in the way he keeps his eyes locked to mine makes me ask, “Why?”

This pushes his eyes toward the floor, then around the space, and I narrow mine, pressing a repeat. “Why?”

He drops his head back, his chest rising on an inhale, then swings his focus back over to me with a sigh. “I don’t know what to say. Everything I want to say, I shouldn’t say.” A small scrunch touches his face like even that was saying too much, and I stare him down, as he knows I don’t walk away anymore without answers to my questions. That’s why my throat closes around certain ones, but I didn’t think this one would damage me.

“It’s linked to you,” he tells me, and I feel the tear, as the rest of his words try to repair it. “I couldn’t get rid of it, because it reminds me of you. Of us, then, before…”

“Before you ruined us?” It’s not a question but my throat isn’t cooperating.

My feet are, though, starting me for the door to head back out into a more bearable storm. I feel sluggish, drained, but also on edge, and the slightest tap could tip me over.

“I need you in my life, Summer.”

I feel Levi’s tug like a string between us at my back, pulling me to a stop at the door, said like these are my final steps out of his life instead of just out of the tower.

“Then why wasn’t I?” I argue as I face him again, tipped over, then jolted back by the glossy war in his eyes. By his own steps he took, like the string was pulling him to me too.

I can feel the strain building, and I don’t want to be a breaking down, crying woman, cracks in my voice as I plead with another man. So the rest comes out almost robotic, breathy, in my attempt to stop that.

“I was still here for a year after. Why didn’t you try harder to keep me closer? It was no risk to you, right? You didn’t feel anything for me,” I say in an almost mocking way, and he winces, his jaw a little bob around a silent response. “Then when I was gone…why didn’t you push me more? Why didn’t you actually make up for being an asshole?”

“I’m making up for it now,” he pledges, like he’s been teetering and is finally balanced in another resolve. “We’ll be the friends we were.”

He could’ve stumbled over the label that became hard for us to be. I sense with everything that I could hear a lightning righted stumble.

“Because that’s what we have to be?” I might as well be naked in front of him again, testing and searching, one foot over the line.

But he’s meeting me there, a scuff at the barrier, his own testing and searching, the first being before we even made it to this tower.

“You have a life with my best friend,” he says, every word chosen carefully, like a reminder, and a warning. And a question that’s not up to me to answer, as his gaze holds to me, holding me here to be more careless.

“And who’s to blame for that?” Words pointing at him, shaping his face into lines of shame, a pinch of an apology he’s given me times before and nothing more. “And no, you can’t open this up, then try to use Adam to close it.”

I grab the doorknob, the jostling of it as loud as my pulse through the sudden quiet outside, needing to leave with these messy feelings, because I can’t put them here, on Levi, even though he’s who half of them belong to.

This is messy. No matter how washed we get by storms, by the bay, we’ll never be clean.

I’m half out the door, half still with Levi, when I meet his waiting eyes again, my traitorous and tired, rejected and yearning heart still a step over that line, grappling for him to keep this promise. Damp tendrils of hair stick to my face, other areas slowly drying to a frizz, as I try to appear not as disheveled and sound stronger than I feel as I say something maybe I shouldn’t.

“If you need me in your life, really in your life…prove it.”