Our Hearts Knew Better (Our Hearts #1)

You’re Not the Only One

Summer

Levi didn’t ask me to stay, and I’m trying to reconcile with having wanted him to, and trying to pace back to my boyfriend through something tight and tumbling deep in my stomach, my emotions almost as wild as the passing storm.

A Summer storm.

My breathing is heavy in the room, competing with the fan, when I rush back in, the door clicking shut loud enough to stir Adam. The one I should be running away with.

My body bounces with the feeling to run.

Adam’s stirred groan fades as he presses his head into his pillow, and I practically pounce on him, kissing up and squeezing along his back, as the desire chants through my head. Run, run, run .

He groans again, this one sounding closer to a moan the more I explore winding paths of his skin.

He shifts when I reach his shoulder, pushing at the bed. “What—” I’m shoved away in his flip to lie on his back, his hands patting at the bed, then his face twisting down at his palms. “Why are you wet?”

My laugh is crazed at the question, at how suggestive it sounds with how I’m trying to touch him, to get him to touch me.

“I went for a walk,” I breathe out, bending down to kiss his chest. “There was a storm.” Another kiss from me, another slight recoil from him, from getting my wet on the bed.

I stand at a slow pace in my seduction, staring down at Adam’s hooded attention, and strip for him at the same slow pace. Until my impatience catches up to my fingers and I speed up. He also starts to fall back to sleep, and the faster I go, the more clothes I let fall to the floor, the more I see the whites of his eyes again.

He reaches his hand out to me and I sigh into the grip of it, falling into him in a straddle through the sheet, crashing into his chasing kisses, tasting the loss we’re always trying to find again in these moments.

We’re moving, his hands in my hair, my hands in his hair, then both scraping down each other’s skin, when I realize he’s not getting hard.

My mouth, fingers, and hips are doing too much for him not to be hard right now.

Then he’s slowing, his mouth and fingers coming to a stop before they’re off me completely, a sigh deflating his chest as his head leans away into the pillow.

I watch his eyes slide off to the side, that tight and tumbling feeling in my stomach, that I realize hasn’t disappeared, now a deeper plunge when he tells me two simple words that are too complex for us.

“I’m tired.”

“Of me?” There’s a crack in my snap, a broken down woman, who will not fucking cry, because I can think of so much I’m tired of too.

“You know it’s not you,” he attempts to amend, but he’s still not looking at me. And he’s shifting again like I need to get off him.

So I get off with a swing of both legs. My feet slap against the floor as I collect a dry pair of panties and my sleep shirt, a hum my first response.

“I don’t know that,” I throw back, my second response, thinking the last time we were close like that was back at the apartment.

“Summer.”

My name is a fight, and I spin on him, ready, my vulnerabilities he just turned down covered.

But the fight leaves him, his eyes closing toward the ceiling as he says, “Every day is so long.”

It’s spoken to himself, but vocal enough for me to hear, to feel isolated on my own island, when all of his feelings and all of his numbness, all the lows, all the rare breaths I get from the rare highs— all of it is mine too.

“Yeah, they’re long,” I agree, my fight not leaving me, putting us back on the same ground, a punch and plea like air.

Adam’s eyes hold mine a long moment, then he gives me a nod and a soft blink. “I’m just tired,” he reiterates. “And it’s the same hell I have to get up at the ass crack of day to deal with,” he adds, a complaint at the time, over me waking him up. “I need sleep.”

You’ve been sleeping for a year!

“And when you get back,” I start. “We could go out—” I move closer to the bed with the thought, the far off idea that we could be an actual couple again, and Adam props himself up by an elbow with one quick motion, letting me know just how far off I am.

“You know what else I have to deal with every day? Showing my face.” He points a sharp finger at said face as he forces out the word, a shake in the motion and his voice. “Showing my failure to a town of people who expected something from me. People who watched me grow up and knew I was on my way to being somebody, and now I’m a nobody having to hear their apologies every day , Summer. I can’t go anywhere else around here than I have to.”

I almost crumple at the pinch of pain he holds me here with, at hearing the hatred he has for himself.

But my knees lock, every time, to stop myself from being dragged to the same hell.

“We didn’t have to come here,” I say, a low argument, because that’s all I’m really capable of anymore.

“We talked about this,” he says back with a sigh. He might as well tell me to use my memory because he won’t be repeating the conversation that, for me, has more than one outcome.

But I also can’t deny the pull I’ve had to come back.

“This will be good for us,” he does remind me, though. “You have to trust I know what I’m doing,” he adds, looking at me with those same sure eyes that knew I trusted him every time he would ask when we were seventeen. The exact same.

But we’re not the same.

“Stop putting so much pressure on me,” he continues when I say nothing. “I feel so bad .”

“Well,” I start through the sting in my lids, grabbing for my phone on the dresser and trudging back to the door, “you’re not the only one.”

****

All I can do is continue to cry into the phone when Clarissa picks up.

“Oh dear,” she says through thick sleep in her voice, and my laugh is a sob. “Hey. What’s going on? Do you need me to come down?”

I adjust my ass on the dry patch of porch step and suck in all my wasted tears that won’t change a thing, finding my voice. “No, it’s…” I shrug at the universe, my hand a slap against my leg. “Same ole.”

“Well, you have my ear,” she says, her voice strained through a stretch.

I wipe my cheeks, soaking my palm with more wetness, my face puffy feeling and my chest a bit clearer from the release. “Run away with me.”

There’s shuffling on her end, like she’s already collecting a change of clothes and shoes, but she teases, “It’s a little early. Can I shower and eat first? I also have to let Maisie know.”

“You can let her know on the road,” I tease back. She works at a design firm and her boss Maisie kisses my best friend’s ass instead of the other way around.

Clarissa crunches on one of the candy mints she keeps by her bed. That’s what I heard, her digging through the drawer. “Want one?” A tapping sound fills my ear as she attempts to send me one through the phone, and my laugh is another sob, but softer.

“Okay,” she starts after swallowing her mint, and I suck in and hold my breath. “You have to break up with Adam.”

My breath releases as a gust and I immediately say, “No.” I know what I need. “I have to be fought for, Clarissa.” I give another shrug to the universe, this time with a middle finger attached. “I’m sick of feeling like I’m fighting on my own.”

“And you need the security.”

“Security,” I repeat low through my teeth, rubbing at my forehead. “I need someone who loves me.” Tears build again from the back of my throat and I swallow them down, hurrying to add, “And despite everything, Adam does love me.” He just doesn’t love himself right now.

He doesn’t love life right now, and I’m often sitting in that boat. Though I’d rather be in another one.

“Even if you don’t love him?”

“Stop saying that,” I scold at those words, but it’s weak, repeating, “I do love him.”

“You love him, but you’re never gonna get over the possibility of that twelfth letter because you love him too.”

My laugh this time is a groan, my feet slipping to the lower step.

“You have to talk to him,” Clarissa advises through crinkling wrapper paper, and my spine straightens with an ache for how I’ve been slouching out here.

“He has to talk to me,” I say with a finality that won’t accept an argument. I’m not giving myself to Levi like that again. Putting what’s left of my stupid heart on the line. I can’t. I have to protect myself.

It’s his turn to move.

“He has to prove himself.”

Prove it.

My saying those words to Levi, giving us both the chance to be the friends we were, fills me with more anticipation than I’ll admit.

Clarissa yawns, then makes a noise to shake it off. She hates yawning and sneezing. “Then what happens? If he proves himself? What if he proves what you want him to?” She calls me out so easily, and with a loud crunch too. “Then you’ll be together?”

I snicker, tucking my legs back up. “You’re almost worse than I am with the questions.”

“Well, that’s how you get answers.”

“I have the answers,” I sigh out. “I have…” I swallow down more building tears, always fighting the breakdowns. “If I get pushed down any more than I already am…”

“I know,” Clarissa says, the murmur like her hand reaching for mine. “I do know, okay? You just have to be happy. You deserve that.”

They say your comfort zone will kill you, and when I was growing up, I wholeheartedly agreed. I still agree to an extent, but I’m not a kid anymore. I’m not as hopeful and impressionable. I’ve been in the real world. I’ve seen things I needed to see. Now this is my life. And I have a responsibility.

“Thanks,” I murmur back, not knowing what I really deserve right now.

“And if you want to give both your boys the chance to learn from their mistakes…” Clarissa clatters a mint between her teeth in her pause. “I suppose I have to let you.”

My sigh is silent but loosening. Until a thought tightens me again.

“I actually have a third boy ,” I start, then tell her all about the revelations with my father.

I already told her about Levi helping him, to which she responded with a, that boy loves you , that fed my madness.

So it’s no surprise when Clarissa encourages me, as Levi did, to let my father in.

I always wanted that perfect father-daughter relationship. Us closer, our love stronger. Us against the world.

That might be a bit farther from hogwash now, but the world has also been doing too much, and nothing he does now can undo what he did then. He’s my father . The man who raised me. The pain he gave me will always be part of me, just as he is, as thick and dark as our blood.

We end this call so Clarissa can get some more sleep and so I can most likely stare at the ceiling as I try to do the same, with no decision made there, saying our love you s and making a promise to talk again when it’s day.

My pulse is slower and my eyes completely dry when I close myself back in the room, so I ease into bed, watching Adam remain still as I lie back beneath the sheet.

I press the back of my hand to his shoulder, the heat from his body a cold comfort.

It’s quick, and as I pull away, I feel two things: him shifting around and the slide of his fingers through mine.

And as our hands fall entwined between us, another tear slips out onto my pillow as I close my eyes toward the window.