Our Hearts Knew Better (Our Hearts #1)

Hear Me Break

Summer

The ride back to Rosalee Bay felt much longer, the sun almost set by the hour Levi pulls over at the curb right outside Griffin’s house.

Tension has been steaming thick between us with everything unspoken, and not even the air conditioning can cool us off.

The engine rumbles through our pulsed silence as he…waits for me to climb out? Waits for me to go inside that house, back to being slurred over? Loneliness? Exhaustion? Pain?

Am I going back to that?

I have pieces of that right here in this truck.

“You talked about me with Bonny?” I finally manage to ask, my voice sounding like gravel from the strain of swallowing tears this whole trip back, seeking reasons for why they’re still within me that I can only get from him.

He makes a noise in his throat like he doesn’t want me to hear his own strain. “I talked about you with everyone,” he admits, then sighs, and that’s exactly how I take it; an admittance for why his relationships weren’t serious.

Me. Fucking me .

“I think I might hate you forever for making me miss ‘Blue Lullaby’,” I lie with a scoff, because I want to tell him I hate him. But I only wish I could.

Why can’t I just hate him?

Why can’t I just hate both of them?

A rush of wind blows through the trees, some gray clouds mixing with the fading sunlight, and I stare up at them as the storm starts in me.

“This should be my life, shouldn’t it?” I ask, having that answer myself, already rooted to my soul. “Here. You and me .”

Levi’s only response is a ragged shift of his breathing.

“Why did you have to—” The strain catches my words, another swallow, as I try to keep my focus on missing “Blue Lullaby” because of him instead of the past several years of my life because of him. “Why can’t you just be like Adam is now? Just push me away when I try to get close.”

I don’t regret my years with Adam. I regret the years I didn’t get with Levi. And that loss will always be a tender wound, my one instant sting if touched. And tonight, I can’t let up.

Levi cuts the engine and my heart jolts at the quick motion. “Because I’m tired too.” I whip him a look as he tosses his keys, a clang on the dash. “Get out.”

“What?” I snap out, my eyes bouncing over every one of his movements as he shoves and kicks his door open, halfway out as he looks back at me with his own swirling storm.

“Get out of the truck, Summer.”

He’s commanding in a way that has me doing what he says with stunned thoughts and a haywire heart.

I only manage to put both feet on the ground before he practically knocks me off them, stealing my breath as he boxes me in between him and the door.

“I never wanted to push you away,” he admits now, his unwavering gaze a magnet for mine. “Go to Adam. Ask him what happened when we were seventeen.”

What happened. . .

My eyes narrow. “Ask him ? You’re the one who hurt me then.”

“I know,” he says, low, my hurt, completely dug up and clear on my face, reflected in his. “But there are things you don’t know that I can’t tell you. You’re not the only one in a rough position.”

“I didn’t put you there,” I argue back, my grip on the door handle as his moves to the door itself, and I step in closer to him. “You wanted to be with me. Just say it,” I breathe out.

“Yes,” he breathes back, and my next one feels like bracing. “I still do.”

Those words knock the air out of me. I try to shove my way out of this corner, and he fights my going for the smallest moment before he lets me pass.

“You never fought for me. Not once,” I argue now, my voice dangerously calm, but I stumble in my spin on him, righting myself with rigid knees, feeling too many emotions, blindsided and affirmed, drowning in the sinking and swimming.

“I did ,” he presses, meeting me step for step on the grass and closing the space between us again. His mouth scrunches in defeat. “But I didn’t do it enough.”

“You’re back.”

Levi blinks, then lifts a look over my head.

I still, my breaths feeling like bracing again as my eyes hold to the rising and falling of Levi’s chest, his own deep, bracing breaths, before I turn to Adam, the rustling of grass under my shoes magnified to my ears.

But I didn’t hear any sound from Adam. He was quiet in his approach.

“What’s going on?” he asks now, with an edge to his tone that promises this is all about to get worse. Always worse, never better.

His eyes dance between us, but fix longer to Levi.

He knows and he heard. At least that last bit.

“Where’ve you guys been?” he asks next, to our stilled-mouthed stares, but I can’t speak, because if I do, the whole neighborhood will hear me break.

My world has just lost its balance, and I feel like I’ve blacked out, as everything I expected, deep inside, to happen is happening, but that I’m still unprepared for.

Levi finally opened his heart and told me I’m still there. He still wants to be with me. And Adam is pinning me— me —with a glossy-eyed accusation like Levi already has been with me. Like I have already been with him.

I’m the one doing wrong. It’s always me.

And when I look at Adam and see what he has become and what we have become, I am seventeen again. Looking and sounding and feeling as unrecognizable as he has been to me.

Everything is underwater, my heart upended, my body shaking for another release of guarded and grappling emotions.

“Concert,” I hear Levi answer.

“Yeah, I know,” Adam says, his eyes in another dance to Levi. “Your mom told me.”

Something in Adam’s voice, like another accusation, has me managing a glance at Levi, who appears to retreat to somewhere in his thoughts before he nods like he’s not surprised.

“I get busy and you use that to your advantage and swoop in again,” Adam says, still to Levi, the accusations unmistakable now.

He blurs in and out of my sight, my stomach suddenly clenched so tight, cutting off my air.

Busy. That’s what he’s calling his—

Busy?

“You swooped in,” Levi says back, lower, but more pointed, more emphasis on his best friend.

Adam seems to freeze, Levi holding him in a stare that lasts so many loud heartbeats before Adam shifts the stare back to me.

“Why would he fight for you?” He’s half breathless, a pinched, pained crease in his cheek. “You’re with me.” A claim so bitter and broken, with an underlying desperation that feels bigger than just this moment. Like we’ve somehow been here before, that I can’t and couldn’t have been with anyone else.

Go to Adam. Ask him what happened. . .

“Adam…” Levi says his name like a defense for me, and I’m dizzy in the back and forth.

Two different pains, the same sickly confusion.

Thunder rumbles, and the first drop of rain hits my cheek, blending with the tear that rolls down at the same time, the outside storm and mine, both snapping me forward.

I start stalking toward Adam, my shuffles through the grass magnified again, as are his and Levi’s voices, both calling out my name as I keep moving past Adam for the house.

Just—

“Fuck you both,” I call back, barreling through the front door and swinging it shut behind me.

My stalk away continues to lead me to the guest room for a moment to breathe, ironically, inside more walls that have seen more moments where I couldn’t.

Footsteps barrel in after me, and I spin to Adam as he follows me inside our walls, the walls we’ve built, with a flush in his face, his mouth open with a string of words waiting on his tongue, but they’ll have to keep waiting.

“Don’t give me shit,” I tell him, through a last gust of released air, my hands swatting up like stop signs. “You haven’t been here.”

He stalls his steps, like my hands have some halting power, then stresses, “I’ve been working ,” his voice more laborious than I’ve ever heard it.

“That’s not even what I mean,” I snap, my voice more frustrated than I’ve ever heard it.

“What the hell do you want from me?” he snaps back.

“I know what I wanted .”

My use of the past tense stuns us both for only a moment before Adam continues with the same pressing tone for answers that’s just his defenses I’ve heard all year, living inside their pollution, breathing them in like secondhand smoke.

“I’m going through a lot of shit—” he starts, again, like he’s the only one stuck beneath the pile.

“And it is shit,” I cut in with a press, too, another agreement for us both. “But you thought coming back here would help. You’ve always wanted out of this town,” I say, the true depth of my disbelief when we first talked about this at our old apartment coming out. “You hate your father. You don’t even ask how I’m doing with mine,” I chide him at the same time he chides with, “And you love yours again.”

We pause in that pain, our widened eyes on each other through heavy breaths, our shared ache of fathers, mine the one on the mend.

“My dad wanted this,” I say, softer, that part of me always softened to that part of him. “I’m sorry yours doesn’t.”

Adam scoffs with a headshake that I know is more toward his personal relationship to his father than to me, but this dismissive way about him puts me back in my own defensive mode. Especially after he adds, like an inarguable finger-pointing, “We’re not together in anything anymore, but you’re together in everything with Levi, huh?”

His cheeks drain of some color as his eyes slide off to the side, a look like longing at the bed as if he wants to hide from the words. His hiding place. Now all my brain can think whenever I see a bed he’s buried himself in, his simple stare in that direction.

Because it’s not simple, it’s not just a bed, and my understanding becomes buried in the threat of fight or flight.

“Levi’s the one who found him,” I say, half through my teeth—fight. “He’s the one who’s been here with him. Talking to him. What did you expect?”

“I expected you to trust me,” Adam throws back, the color returning to his cheeks as his eyes swing back to mine.

I blink, clearing the grim twist in his face, a fresh damp feeling on my lashes. We’re still in the same but opposing worlds, him bringing this back to being about why he needed to come back, and me still without those answers.

“Trust you with what ? What is it you’re doing? Nothing’s changed! You’re just making life harder for us both. I told you I can’t do this anymore, and the only difference is you actually get yourself out of bed and you smell better.” I’m practically hollering with how I can’t control my increasing emphasis on every word, on my feelings, and Adam gives the same back.

“Doesn’t that show you something? Doesn’t that mean something? I’m doing the fucking best I can—”

A noise pops out of me, some crazed laugh, cutting him off with that and a, “Stop.” I never want to hear that phrase again. It’s become a scrape to my nerves. It’s people’s excuse to do the bare minimum and have that be enough. I know what best means and this isn’t it. “This isn’t your best because you’re still miserable and you’re still making me miserable with you!”

Every muscle in Adam’s body seems to be straining as he stares at me, more gloss to his unblinking eyes, mine a reflection as I sigh through the start of my next words.

“You’re unreliable, Adam. You don’t care about anything. You don’t bother—” A heave in my lungs cuts me off and I press my hand to my chest like that will settle it.

“Well there you go,” he sneers out. “I lost everything. What have you lost, besides me.” There’s no question in his tone, only brokenness. But like him, for so long, my pieces are now all I can focus on. And as he takes his backward recoil to the bed, my vision blurs at his navel where his shirt rides up, as he retreats from me, always his pity party, that familiar fall snapping at my insides, then from my mouth.

“Yeah, just go to bed. Curl into a ball. Don’t listen to me,” I sneer back, breaks now in every word, no breakthroughs in him.

He sits up with a smack to the bed, his mouth open, but mine opens again first.

“And no, you didn’t lose everything . You still had me. I was a choice to lose.”

Adam’s eyes flare, like this is the worst of all I’ve said to him. “You think how I feel is a choice.”

“No,” I stress. “We don’t choose how we feel but we can choose what we do. I did. I still chose to love you,” I say, my voice catching on this use of the past tense, Adam’s eyes a slow blink toward the floor. “I pulled and I pulled at you. Got myself out of bed and dragged myself around with so much weight on my chest, but I did it. And it’s been just as hard for me. This isn’t just about you,” I stress again, again, again, again. “What you go through isn’t just about you when you have other people in your life. People you’re close to. People like me.” My hand finds my chest again, a thumping against bone that I don’t even feel from the ache underneath. “The one you hold against your hip. And you have to think about that. Think about me. But you don’t.”

Adam’s eyes lift to the dresser in front of him in another flare I can still see at the corners as he says with disbelief, “And you think about me.”

“I’ve always thought about you. It was all I could do!”

“Your expectations are too fucking high, Summer.”

My attempt at an inhale becomes knotted in my throat. He might as well have just walked away from me. He might as well have just given me silent treatment.

He gives me a glance, and I see some shame in his face, but not enough.

I can barely speak as I say, “Needing to be loved and considered is a high expectation?”

Adam springs off the bed. “You can’t put anything on me right now. I’m not strong enough!” He breathes through a heave in his lungs now, red lining his lids. And through the vulnerability we hold to each other in, through the rumbles of thunder and the pattering of raindrops above our heads, we see each other for how we’ve become. Almost strangers.

Right now. How much more is right now ? We’re past a year.

“Maybe,” I manage through a murmur, half talking to myself, feeling like I am, “I need someone who is. I need someone with high expectations.” Those two words put strength back in my voice. “I need someone I know I can count on, who doesn’t turn me into this .”

“You need someone—” He breaks off the word with a scoffed laugh. “Levi,” he says, like I’ve left blanks he’s trying to fill. “So did you do it?”

“Did I do what?” I hear the dare in my tone.

“Come on, Summer. You were alone with him, out of town…”

“No,” I say with a narrowed stare. “I didn’t. And I didn’t all the other times I’ve been alone with him.”

“You think he’s Mister Perfect. The someone who cares about you.” He reminds me of that heartbreak in a poking way that only makes me poke back.

Ask him. . .

“He told me to ask you what happened when we were seventeen,” I prompt him, and after the barest flinch, the slightest hint of apprehension, he looks almost eager to tell me.

“He gave you up. I wanted you too,” he says, with a small shrug and the barest flush of our own time together at seventeen before that’s gone too. “So he just handed you over to me. He didn’t choose you, Summer, and I did,” he emphasizes, and my gaze loses focus, my heart skipping beats as I try to process his hailed and urgent way of words, half not news to me, and the rest. . .

Too. Too.

I still do.

Somewhere sounding too far off, a door slams and Adam’s name is shouted—his dad—and Adam hazes from my sight as he leaves the room, leaves this, leaves us.

Footsteps pound somewhere, different places, around me, then my own join in as I stalk out of the house.

The earthy air from the rain, that has graced to a sprinkle, freshens my senses, clears me from a fog as I continue my stalk through soggy and puddled grass to pavement, where I halt behind the bumper of Levi’s truck.

It’s pulled off, concealed by bushes from the front of the house, like he climbed in and started to go, then hit the brakes and stayed.

He stays for me.

I wanted you too.

He handed you over. . .

My wedges scrape wet pavement, small splashes, as I approach the passenger side and climb in, my stare on the droplets speckled to the windshield as I slam the door.

My hands squeeze together on my lap, and I turn my head to see him staring intently at his dad’s picture before he shifts the same look to me, waiting. . .

I manage one word. “Drive.”