The Misfit (Oakmount Elite #5)

29. Salem

TWENTY-NINE

salem

The dress Lee chose fans out around me as I slide into the rideshare car. The burgundy silk is a stark contrast to the worn leather seats. Every instinct in my brain screams about germs, about strange cars, about drivers I don’t know. But Chelsea’s last text burns stronger than my anxiety. “Meet me at our spot. Please. I need you.”

I didn’t see it until morning.

Didn’t check my phone that night because I was organizing my sock drawer by color and texture, needing everything to be perfect, controlled, orderly. While my best friend stood on those cliffs alone. While she made a choice I didn’t understand until much later.

“The Mill?” the driver confirms, eyeing my formal wear in his rearview mirror.

I nod, not trusting my voice. He probably thinks I’m running from a bad date, not running toward ghosts I’ve avoided for two years.

The night wraps around us as we drive, streetlights becoming scarcer until nothing but starlight and memory light the way. Chelsea loved the cliffs by The Mill. Said they made her feel infinite, standing at the edge of everything. I never understood that—how chaos could feel like freedom. Not until Lee taught me that some patterns exist in the midst of disorder. That sometimes the most beautiful things are the ones that don’t align perfectly.

Lee.

My hands clench in my lap, but I force the thought away. I can’t think about him right now. Can’t think about how he looked tonight, drowning himself in bourbon and self-hatred. Can’t think about how much I wanted to stay, to help, to fix everything.

Because that’s what got me into trouble with Chelsea, isn’t it? Always trying to fix things. Always thinking I could make everything perfect if I just tried hard enough. Always believing I could save people who didn’t want saving. Or letting people into my life who think they can fix me . I like to pretend I was normal before everything happened, but I’ve been counting and cleaning all my life. It just got much worse after Chelsea.

The dirt road to the cliffs appears, and I ask the driver to stop. He hesitates, clearly concerned about leaving a woman in formal wear at the edge of nowhere in the middle of the night. But something pulls me forward. Something stronger than memory or guilt or patterns. Something that feels like finally being ready to face the truth about that night. About Chelsea. About everything that came after.

Even if it breaks me all over again.

Even if it shatters every careful wall I’ve built.

Even if it means letting go of the last bits of control I’ve clung to since that night.

The cliffs rise before me, silhouetted against the stars that Chelsea loved to count. Time to face our ghosts.

“You sure about this, miss?” the driver asks one last time.

I am. For the first time since that night, I really am.

The path to the cliffs seems steeper than I remember, or maybe that’s just my heels sinking into loose dirt with every step. Chelsea and I used to run up here in sneakers, laughing and breathless, racing to see who could reach the top first. Now each step feels like penance.

My silk gloves catch on branches as I steady myself, gathering smudges of earth and green that won’t wash out. These were Lee’s gift—chosen with such care, such attention to my needs. Now they’re being ruined by this pilgrimage I can’t explain.

A branch snags the right glove, tearing the delicate fabric. The night air hits my skin through the rip, and suddenly, I can’t stand them anymore. Can’t bear these beautiful things that represent everything I’m losing, everything I’ve already lost.

With trembling fingers, I peel them off. The cool air feels foreign against my bare hands. How long has it been since I’ve felt anything directly? Since I’ve let myself be this exposed? The gloves go into my dress pocket, the silk crushed and dirty, like everything else about this night.

But something strange happens as I stand there, my hands bare in the darkness. The world doesn’t end. Panic doesn’t overwhelm me. The need to count and clean and control everything doesn’t consume me.

Maybe that’s Chelsea’s gift, finally reaching me after all this time. The understanding that sometimes we have to let go of our careful patterns to find our way forward.

Or maybe it’s Lee’s influence—teaching me that some chaos can be beautiful, that some disorder holds its own kind of peace. Even now, leaving him behind, he’s helped me find strength I didn’t know I had.

The path levels out ahead, opening to the clearing where everything changed two years ago. Where Chelsea stood alone because I was too busy organizing my life to see she was about to end hers. Where Marcus …

A figure stands at the cliff’s edge, silhouetted against the starlight. For a moment, my heart stops—the scene too familiar, too close to how I imagined that night hundreds of times. I haven’t been able to return to this spot since then.

Then I recognize him.

I wonder how often he comes here.

Like he can feel my eyes on his, he turns around, and in the dim moonlight, I swear I see a flash of surprise flicker in his eyes.

“Salem?” His voice carries none of its usual cruelty. He sounds younger somehow. More like the boy who used to make Chelsea laugh before everything went wrong.

We stare at each other across the clearing, two survivors of a tragedy neither of us fully understood. Both of us carriers of guilt that doesn’t belong to us. Both of us hiding behind masks that maybe, finally, it’s time to remove.

Like my ruined gloves, sometimes protection becomes a prison.

Like Chelsea’s choice, sometimes the hardest truth is that we couldn’t have changed anything.

Like this moment, sometimes the most unexpected encounters bring the healing we need.

“You’re a long way from the gala.” Marcus steps back from the edge, his formal clothes matching my own state of dishevelment. “Lee finally drive you to the edge?”

The attempt at cruelty falls flat, his voice lacking its usual bite. We stand there, measuring the space between us—space filled with Chelsea’s memory, with shared guilt, with everything we’ve never said.

“Why are you here, Marcus?” My bare hands clench at my sides, but I don’t retreat. Not this time.

“Same reason as you, probably.” He turns back to the view, shoulders tight under his jacket. “Can’t stop thinking about her. About that night. About how everything went so fucking wrong.”

The words hang in the night air, heavy with the truth we’ve both been avoiding. Below us, water flickers like fallen stars in the moonlight, and I remember how Chelsea used to say this spot made her feel closer to heaven. Here, the jump is too dangerous, the edge of the cliff jutting out too far above the river. Every time I hear about people swimming down farther and jumping these cliffs for fun, it makes me feel nauseated.

“I didn’t see her text.” The confession spills out two years too late. “I was too busy organizing my stupid sock drawer, too focused on making everything perfect to check my phone. If I had just?—”

“Stop.” Marcus’s voice cracks. “Just … fucking stop. I’m so tired. Tired of pretending. Tired of blaming. Tired of surviving. I know I’ve led you to believe that night was your fault, but it wasn’t. None of it was your fault.” The words are almost begrudging.

“I don’t understand. You’ve been making my life hell since I came back to school, and now you’re saying it wasn’t my fault?” Anger curls through me, low and simmering.

This asshole. I knew he had his own guilt, that he, too, suffered from her loss, but to hurt me, to make me feel ten times worse than I already did … It doesn’t just hurt. It burns. It angers me. I clench my hands into tight fists to stop myself from lashing out at him.

He tilts his head to the side, and I spot the sheen of tears trailing across his high cheekbones. “I know you’re mad. That you probably hate me. No worries, I hate myself, too. When you’re lost in your grief and guilt, you have to do something to make it through the day. You have to find a way to survive.”

“And bullying me helped you how?” I demand.

His shoulders slump, and he shakes his head. “It didn’t. I just hoped it would. If I blamed someone else, then I could stop blaming myself.”

Again, I find myself confused. “What do you mean? You make it sound like this is your fault, and if it’s not mine, then it definitely isn’t yours, either. Bad things happen sometimes. She made a choice, and we all have to live with that.”

“A choice I could’ve stopped her from making.”

“I could say the same thing, Marcus.”

He shifts back and forth in the dirt, casting little billows around his feet. “You want to know why she really came here that night? Why she really did it?”

My breath catches. In two years, we’ve never talked about this. Never acknowledged the truth we both carried. Chelsea was beautiful, funny, and kind, but a darkness lived inside her. She talked about dying and death more than anyone I know. I thought she used it as a form of coping, but … “Marcus?—”

“The truth is she caught me fucking Amy Peterson behind the gym.” The words rush out like he’s been holding them in forever. My heart lurches in my chest. He cheated on her. He broke her heart and pushed her over the edge. “I was young, stupid, and way too fucking immature for a girl like her. I didn’t realize the impact it would have on her. I didn’t think she would find out. She wasn’t supposed to be there, but I found out later that she was looking for me. Wanted to surprise me. Instead, she saw me being the worst kind of asshole.”

Understanding hits like a physical blow. All this time, I thought … we all thought…

“She texted me almost immediately,” he continues, voice raw. “Told me she knew. That she couldn’t handle one more person betraying her. That she was done trying to be perfect for me and everyone else.” He laughs, but it sounds like he’s in pain. “She texted you because you were the only one who never expected her to be perfect. The only one who loved her exactly as she was.”

The truth of that lands harder than any blame ever could. He’s right. I know that. I never tried to fix Chelsea. Never needed her to be anything other than herself.

Not until that last night, when I was too busy fixing my own world to see that hers was falling apart.

“I always thought …” I swallow hard. “I thought you blamed me. For not being here. For not stopping her.”

“No, Salem. I blamed myself.” His voice breaks completely. “I still do. And even while I carried that truth around all this time, I never wanted to face it. It’s always been easier to be angry with you than to accept the part I played in all of this. Easier to make you the villain than admit I’m the reason she stood on this cliff alone.”

We stand there in the darkness, two broken people finally facing the truth we’ve hidden behind masks of hatred and guilt.

Neither of us is truly responsible for Chelsea’s choice.

Both of us are carrying a weight that was never ours to bear.

Both of us are finally ready to let go.

Maybe.

All this time, I thought I failed her by not being there. By not saving her. By not fixing everything.

“You’re right, Salem. She made her choice,” Marcus says softly. “It wasn’t your fault for missing the text. It wasn’t my fault for being an asshole and cheating. Yeah, it didn’t help things, didn’t help her pain, but I’ve come to the conclusion that she made a choice in all of this. Just like I did, and just like you did. It was her choice. Her pain. Her moment on this cliff.”

“When did you figure that out?” My bare hands trail over rough stone, feeling texture directly for the first time in years.

“About the same time I saw you start wearing gloves. Start counting everything. Start trying to control the world because you thought you failed to control what happened that night. About the time you went to the hospital after finding her body and didn’t come out for a long time.” He meets my eyes steadily. “You didn’t fail her, Salem. Not any more than I did. We just… we just lost her. And that fucking sucks, but it wasn’t our fault.”

The truth of that settles into my bones, replacing guilt with something that feels like acceptance. Like forgiveness—not just for Marcus but also for myself.

“She would have hated what we became,” I say, thinking of all the masks we’ve worn, all the pain we’ve caused each other. “How we let her death change us.”

“Yeah.” Marcus’s laugh sounds wet with tears. “She would have kicked both our asses. You for hiding behind latex barriers, and me for being such a fuckface.”

“Yeah, I was weird before, obviously, but it was never the type of weird that couldn’t be controlled.” I stare down at my bare hands. “It hurts even more because if I’d been normal, maybe I would have been with her that night instead of at home separating my wool socks from my cotton ones. Or maybe if she hadn’t been so set on being your perfect girlfriend, she’d have been with me, picking on me for how I rolled up each ball.”

“She always did have a way of calling us out on our bullshit.”

We sit there in comfortable silence, letting two years of misplaced blame and guilt float away on the night breeze. Letting Chelsea’s memory be what it should have been all along—not a weight to carry, but a light to remember.

“I know I don’t deserve it, and I don’t expect you to accept my apology, but I want you to know I am sorry. I never should’ve blamed you.” Marcus speaks after a long silence, his voice carrying none of its usual edge. “It was just … easier, you know? To be angry with someone else. To make you the villain in my head. To pretend if you’d just answered your phone, everything would have been different.”

“You aren’t wrong. You don’t deserve my acceptance, but I’m tired of holding on to this pain. Tired of living in a past I can’t change,” I admit, surprised by how easily the truth comes now. “I blamed myself for far too long, thinking that if I could just control everything, nothing bad would ever happen again.”

“And how’s that working out for you?” There’s no mockery in his question, just genuine curiosity.

I think about my nitrile gloves, my careful counting, my measured spaces. Think about how Lee showed me that some chaos can be beautiful. Think about how my bare hands haven’t sent me into panic yet.

“I’m better,” I say, and I mean it for the first time in two years. “Not perfect. Not fixed. But I’m a little better every day.”

Marcus studies me for a moment. “Yeah, you are. I’ve noticed, you know. How you started smiling again. How you let Sterling close despite his mess. How you’ve been letting go of some of those barriers.”

“Until tonight.” The gala memories try to surface, but they don’t hurt like they did before. “Until I had to walk away from someone else who needed saving.”

“Sterling?” Marcus shakes his head. “He doesn’t need saving, Salem. He just needs to want to save himself. Just like Chelsea needed to want to live. Just like we needed to stop blaming ourselves.”

The wisdom in that surprises me, and I nudge his shoulder with my own. “When did you get so insightful?”

“About the same time I stopped being an asshole long enough to see what I was really angry about. Also therapy. Two years’ worth.” He stands, brushing off his formal pants. “You going to be okay up here by yourself? I can stay if you want.”

I look out over the cliff’s edge at the stars Chelsea loved so much and the view that used to terrify me but now just feels … peaceful.

“I’m okay.” I mean that, too. “I think … I think I just need some time with her. With myself. With everything I’ve been too afraid to face.”

Marcus nods like he understands. Maybe he does. Maybe we both finally do.

“Salem?” He pauses before leaving. “For what it’s worth, I truly am sorry. For everything after. For making your pain worse. For not being brave enough to face my own guilt.”

“I’m sorry, too,” I offer back. “For being an easier target than your own demons.”

He gives me a sad smile that reminds me of the boy Chelsea loved. The boy who made mistakes but wasn’t the villain I needed him to be.

“We’re going to be okay,” he says, and it sounds like a promise.

Like forgiveness. Like truth.

I watch him disappear down the path, leaving me alone with stars and memories and a strange new feeling of peace.

Chelsea would be proud, I think.

Of both of us.

Of all of us.

Even the ones still finding their way.

The night wraps around me like a gentle embrace as I sit at the cliff’s edge, bare hands pressed against cool stone. For the first time in two years, I don’t need to count or measure or control anything. The chaos of stars above me, of memories around me, feels almost peaceful.

“I’m better now, Chels,” I whisper to the night air. “Really better. Not just pretending. Not just wearing gloves and counting tiles to keep the world at bay. Like actually better. It’s been hard, my breakdown, losing you, but I can feel myself returning, little by little, and each day I catch a glimpse of the old me.”

A twig snaps behind me, and I know without turning around to look that it’s Lee. His presence feels different from Marcus’s departure—heavier, more significant. More terrifying in what it means.

“How long have you been there?” I ask, still facing the stars Chelsea loved.

“Long enough.” His voice is a little steadier.

He heard everything, then. About Chelsea. About counting. About why I build walls and wear gloves and try to control a world that can’t be controlled. “Salem?—”

“Don’t.” I close my eyes, feeling night air on my bare hands. “Whatever you’re going to say, whatever you heard, whatever you think you understand now … just don’t.”

Of course he doesn’t listen. His footsteps draw closer, each one careful and measured like he’s learned from me. He stops just short of touching distance, and I can feel him struggling with what to do next. The old Lee would reach for a drink. The new Lee … well, maybe we’re both learning who we really are.

“Is this seat taken?” he asks quietly.

I finally turn to face him, finding his eyes clearer than they’ve been in weeks. “Why are you here, Lee?”

He looks different in starlight—more real, somehow. More like the boy who brings me fresh gloves and less like the drunk heir trying to drown his demons in bourbon.

“Because,” he says, “some patterns are worth repeating.”