Our Hearts Knew Better (Our Hearts #1)

We’re All Mad Here?

Summer

He’s not gone yet.

Levi pulls over beside Adam’s car, still here, the force of it jolting us forward, then we’re both climbing out of the truck, stalking with loud feet and loud breaths through Griffin’s front door.

We clear the main rooms, then I’m halting at the hall entrance, Levi’s hands coming to grip my arms to stop himself from ramming into my back.

Papers and articles, with Adam’s face on them, from his days on the field, are scattered around the floor. Some are bent, torn, and some have shoe prints.

I try to step around as many as I can, as does Levi as he follows me, in the short walk to the guest room.

Adam’s gathered his bags onto the bed, finishing packing what he unpacked over the course of our stay here, balling clothes and shoving them in. He’s also changed clothes, now wearing a pair of jeans and a hoodie. A hiding wardrobe in this heat.

And that’s how I know this is something worse.

“Adam,” Levi prompts him, a question in his voice.

I follow up with a low, “What happened?”

Adam pauses his movements, turning his head toward his shoulder, toward us, then continues balling and shoving. “I failed.”

“What happened?” Levi asks now, with a step forward, more of a press.

“We came to verbal blows,” Adam says with a spin around to face us.

“You and your dad,” I press now when he takes another pause, my body rigid in the waiting, feeling like I’m the bomb that might detonate if he doesn’t give an actual answer.

And he does, speaking almost too fast for me to keep up.

“I was trying to take him down and everything he’s worked for and get myself out. He found out and that —” His eyes catch a quick flinch of a glance on the papers and articles, that I notice Levi has just stepped out into the hall to clean up, knowing Adam can’t look at them, his shoe prints having walked all over them, as if they’ve not been there. “He wanted to remind me of when I was somebody and now I’m nobody without him.” He forces out those last two words, laced with bitterness, trying to be strong within his dad’s verbal violence. But I hear the cracks, ones I’ve moved in and out of too.

And my numbness settles in. I say his name, trying for some comfort, but it doesn’t come to me, my chest suddenly weighed down, a fatigue spilling in and hardening around me like a strange kind of protection.

The sound of shuffling and crinkling behind me pauses as Levi steps back in to say for us both, “First, fuck him and everything out of his mouth.” Then he adds a conclusion that couldn’t even make it through my shut down head, his tone a mix of scolding shock. “Second, you were tampering with his company?”

“Yeah, I never know what I’m thinking, right?” Adam throws back. “What else would I be doing? Actually working for him?” He spits this out like both Levi and I should’ve seen it, but he’s the one who kept it in, wrapped in a bow of lies.

This’ll be good for us.

And I should have seen it. I knew better. I knew this wasn’t right.

I feel slapped in the face, and I exchange a look with Levi, my eyes automatically drifting and finding his, our connected gazes my only salve for the sting.

“I was trying to get some retribution,” Adam continues. “Level shit out. Correct it. Something —”

Levi’s jaw jerks and my next swallow is knotted over Adam’s desperation.

“We have to leave here,” he reminds me, but said mostly to himself, as he turns back to shove in the last of his things. “Well, I have to leave,” he says, a knowing in his voice that I won’t be leaving with him.

My heart beats, and beats, and beats, probably a hundred times or for just a few seconds, before Adam angles his head toward me. His stare drifts up to mine in a sad, silent plea that then has me exchanging another look with Levi, with a small gesture toward Adam.

Levi nods, then finishes cleaning up as he leaves me and Adam to have a moment alone.

Adam sighs, his stare back down on his bags. “I saw you were gone…and I was thinking how I can’t do this without you. I can’t—You—You’re—” His stumbling breaks move me closer to him, but when he spins to face me in a step back, I don’t move any closer.

“But I have been,” he says now with a scoffed laugh, and my mouth opens with more arguments for my side, but he shows me I don’t need to give the defense. “And so have you. You’ve been doing this because of me and without me.”

My eyes immediately well as I manage through a whisper, “And we can’t do it anymore.” I blink, then clear my throat after a big breath. “We can’t do this. We can’t be this.” More tears come and I stop fighting them. “I lost you, Adam. And I wasn’t getting you back.”

His own eyes gloss over, another reflection of us. “It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d bounced back, would it?” he asks, but already resigned to the answer. “You would’ve still left me for him.” There’s a trailing eventually in his words. “There was always gonna be something there.” He shakes his head, a purse in his lips that splits apart with his sharp inhale of, “It’s always Levi.”

A familiar ache finds my chest for what I now know, my own it’s always everyone but me .

“For a long time, Adam, it was you.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be,” he acknowledges, then tries for some lightness, his old way of protection, a smile that appears more like a sneer. “So how pissed are you at me? Really. You know everything, right?”

I nod through another big breath. “Probably as pissed as you also have a right to be at me.”

He holds my stare a moment, then grabs for his bags, and my pulse does a little jump of worry. “While you were gone…I knew what was happening. And I shouldn’t be mad. But I am. I’m mad at every fucking thing.”

“I’m mad too,” I say, both countering him and giving him company with the feeling. “At everything.”

His bags are held at his sides, one foot toward the door, as he tries again for that sneered smile. “We’re all mad here?” He doesn’t wait for me to respond before he starts for the hall.

I start too. “Where are you gonna go?”

Adam stops, stopping me, my body already in this muscle memory to keep some space between us. “Where I should’ve gone,” he says, low, to the hall. “I was going about this wrong.”

My eyes narrow on his back, my pulse doing another little jump. “Adam, what—”

“Don’t worry about it,” he cuts in, on the move.

The part of me that isn’t so tired, so numb does worry about him.

But the part of me that already let him go, I truly acknowledge, my heart having released him the moment I lost him, lets him go now.

“You’ll find your someone,” I whisper, for him, to an empty room.

Levi

I leap up from the steps, where I’m waiting, at the banging of the front door opening, floundering over my feet as I pivot around to Adam.

Just Adam. No Summer.

It’s our minute.

He gives me one look as he keeps his hustle, making off with his things, a snub I half deserve, but I’m on his ass for the half that doesn’t. A half-assed pleaded defense for myself, because this time around, I’m righting a wrong on my heart, the bind he put me in the reason I developed this weak point in my moral compass, that summer the turning point for us.

“Adam,” I say, forgetting my defense as I do, my voice tensed from that bind, still a way of holding everything together, when I already let this one go, this one, where it wasn’t just me gripping the rope.

My best friend has already slipped from me. I finally have my girl. I’m not bound to seventeen anymore.

And I just want him to stop . Stop running. Stop beating himself up before he gets himself beat up. He might not know that’s where he’s heading, but I do. He’s going to end up in harm’s way, because he’s never been above that, somewhere I won’t be able to land both hands on his chest.

“You both got everything you wanted, didn’t you,” he says, like it’s a fact, his own binds in his voice, when we’re stopped at the car, but not stopped enough.

“Not at all,” I say as he opens the back door, his bags a solid thunk by the tire. He sighs as he tosses them on the seat, knowing he’s way off, trying to bluff in narrow-sightedness.

He rests one arm on the top of the door and the other along the roof as he glances at me, his features smoothing out to show the actual fact. There are no winners here. We’ve all lost something we’ll have to carry in our chests for the rest of our lives.

Which leads me back to his with my own sigh.

“I can’t be sorry for being with Summer, but I am sorry you—”

“Then you can stop there,” he cuts in with a step back and a slam of the door. “You’re not sorry for being with Summer. You don’t have to add salt from a different apology.”

We hold stares as I let him remind himself that he made the first cut.

And with a huffed laugh, he says, “Yeah, I know I’m a big screw up,” with his features screwed up the same, and I feel my fingers roll into a fist, like a warning for me being in harm’s way as I picture myself kicking his father’s ass for ever scarring him with those words.

I lunge for him, my fist a grip on his arm, when he makes for his escape to the front. “ Hey . You’re not a screw up. Stop listening to him.”

“I’m listening to me,” he argues, shoving me off, with more force and strength than he did the last time my hands were on him, a lead for me to shut up so he can let out the more there, and my body knows to steel itself. “You always seemed to get everything I couldn’t. What I wanted wanted you. You were even better at ball than me. And I was damn good,” he stresses through a stiff jaw, like the world needs to get the message and fix what he lost. “And I would’ve made it, but you still had to be just that little bit better,” he says, with a backhanded mash-up hit of kudos and criticism to my chest. “You got the whole family unit. The good parents. The good life. Good shit to offer. Summer was more like me. But I didn’t have the good shit, did I? And now I have less than that.”

I have less than what I had, too, like a mother who’s looking forward to her dead husband, my dead dad, walking through the door and eating the food rotted in the fridge.

“You feel better?” I manage to ask instead of adding salt that’ll just make him more bitter.

“Loads,” he mutters out, shaking his head, and my hands find the insides of my pockets to keep them there.

“You know, you should be thankful you even made it out of that crash alive.” My dad wasn’t so lucky. The thought burns from my stare to his, a mellowing of his features saying he understands my point, but his words are still the reverse.

“You ever get tired of being you? Of dealing with it? Being so happy all the time?”

“I’m happy all the time,” I repeat, my jaw stiffened now.

“No, I know you better, but your count your blessings pep talks? That’s happy people shit, and that’s not me, and so easy for you to do, because you still have some. And yeah, I could then, but what blessings do I really have?” He’s not asking for an answer. His answer is none . “That’s where I’m at. And that I can’t leave.”

“So where are you going?” I prod, shifting closer as he shifts for the driver side door. “What’s the plan now?”

“Who cares,” he carps out as he swings the door open, pausing as he stares inside the car. A pang billows up my chest as I see us as kids, on the Gilligan, the night he finally opened up to me about his family, him in much of the same woundable state, saying much of the same sensitive words about the first people who should’ve loved and cared about him.

I realize, although I’ve known deep somewhere, in Adam’s way, he was always trying to hold everything together too.

And now he’s feeling like Summer and I aren’t the people who care about him anymore, either, but we are.

“We care, Adam,” I tell him, low, angling as if I can meet his eyes from his position, then giving that up and just saying what I need him to hear. “You don’t have to go.”

He’s quiet a few beats before he says, “You really have no idea if you think that.”

“I don’t think—” My groan cuts me off as I step through the distance and grip the frame of the door to keep him from shutting it as he drops onto the seat. “I know what this town is and does for me and what it isn’t and doesn’t do for you,” I say, my voice hoarse as I amend, “I don’t want you to go.”

He starts the car and my hold on the door starts to slip, feeling the first nick at the space he’s going to leave behind if he drives off, even as I clutch tight enough my hand cramps with this reminder that he’s already slipped.

“You don’t want to get past this…” I mutter, the nick now in my voice.

His hands are white on the wheel as he pushes himself back against the seat. “I want to get past all this. This town. My dad. You and Summer.” His voice lowers on us, then he huffs a laugh. “The fucking season. Everything.” He finally looks at me, and before he lets out the rest, I know I’m not going to listen to it. “I don’t want to know you anymore. And I don’t want you to know me.”

Adam reaches for the door and my hold slips away, all the while I’m telling myself, that’s too bad . I feel it in my face, in the pang, and the shift in his tells me he catches the read, but again, his words are his guns.

“I won’t forget what you gave up for me,” he says. “The years with Summer.” My throat clogs as I think about the time Summer and I lost together, making it hard to swallow. “They were some of my best,” he adds, low, and I feel myself nodding, because we can’t take it back, and I would honestly wish Summer’s light on everyone. “Now you can have them.”

He shuts the door, and after a few more beats, he lowers the window with a cryptic sort of smile aimed at me. “Now I broke her heart. Go fix it.”

I broke her heart. Now go fix it.

That’s what I gritted out to him after I let Summer go at the bridge, and as he drives off to hell knows where, I know I’ll never be the one who breaks Summer’s heart again.

And when Adam lets me, because he’s still my best friend, I’m going to fix everything that’s gone wrong with us too.