Chapter Seventeen. Clara #2
There was no winning, though that didn’t stop Mom from trying.
She ushered me out after giving my arm a reassuring squeeze and closed the door firmly behind her.
She and West argued in his office for what seemed like hours.
Despite it all, he wouldn’t budge. She went home, fuming. My friends went home.
Reid didn’t.
We wandered outside. The assembly crowd had long since dispersed. We slowly walked along the road outside school when it finally hit me. It was over.
“I’m never—” I pressed a hand to my mouth because I couldn’t bring myself to say it.
I’m never leaving Woodhurst.
In a few steps, Reid closed the distance I always tried to keep and swept me up. Pressed into the warmth of his neck, the tears came. He gently rocked me there on the side of the quiet mountain road as everything I thought I had been building turned to rubble and dust at my feet.
“It’s a detour,” he breathed. “Not a dead end.”
I was terrified that the minute I let go of him, I would plummet into a level of low I had only seen from the outside. Into a hole so deep, no one could ever pull me back out. So I stood there and let myself need him the way I never let myself need anyone. Held him while I still had him.
After I calmed down, I pulled away, my thoughts careening in a thousand directions.
“What can I do?” Reid asked.
“Nothing. It’s over. It’s all over.” I wanted to cry more, but no tears would come. A strange, welcome numbing spreading all over my body.
Reid shook his head. “We can fight this. This is profoundly fucked up. These are impossible standards, Clara. It’s not your fault.”
“Impossible or not, those are the rules,” I said with a shrug.
He swallowed, pushed a hand through his hair. “The rules don’t make sense. This whole program doesn’t make sense! You can’t let them win—”
“I just lost my one chance at college, Reid. Whoever hates me enough to do that—whoever wanted to humiliate me in there, did. They already won.”
His expression flattened until he looked just like Coach. “When you’re on top, people are always going to try to take you down. You can’t just give up.”
My laugh was sharp and empty. “Oh, I’m sorry I don’t have the championship mentality right now.”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“Why are you even here?” I pushed.
His eyes pierced into me, an edge of warning to his voice when he said, “Don’t do that.”
“You just saw me kissing another guy.”
He balled his hands into fists and shoved them into his pockets. “Do you want me to care about something that happened before we got together?”
Of course I didn’t. But Reid was competitive. And he hated Josh. Why wasn’t he yelling? Why wasn’t he walking away? That’s what everyone else did.
“You don’t care that I hooked up with Josh?” I pushed again. “Or that everyone is saying I whored myself out so I could secure my Legacy?”
Reid inhaled through his nose, squeezing his eyes shut. His calm starting to crack. “I care that they’re spreading lies about you.”
“I lied to you, too,” I said, my voice pitching higher with the urge to drive him as far away from me as possible. “Remember? I told you nothing ever happened.”
He stayed quiet a beat too long.
“You can go, Reid. It’s okay. We’ve always said this isn’t serious.”
“Clara—”
“Just because we were hooking up doesn’t mean you owe me anything.”
Reid’s entire body went still as if I’d slapped him. A chilling, humorless breath escaping him. “Wow. Okay.”
But he needed to understand that my door had closed, while his was as open and golden as ever. I didn’t want him to tether himself further to my sinking ship.
He started pacing, visibly upset.
“I just meant I wouldn’t blame you,” I clarified. “Not that you’re only a hookup to me. You have to know that.”
He stopped, his scoff hitting me in the solar plexus. But he was eerily calm. It was much worse than if he had yelled. “How would I know that? You do nothing but mess with my head.”
I reared back. “What?”
“The second you let me in, you shove me out again.”
“I do not,” I shot back.
“No? Then what just happened? It’s the same thing that happened in my truck.”
My cheeks blazed thinking of that moment in his truck when he looked at me with so much tenderness I thought I might combust.
When I didn’t say anything, he stepped closer to me, thick gravel crunching under his boots. “You want me close,”—his voice went hoarse—“but you won’t even let me tell you how I feel about you.”
“Because I don’t want to know!”
My pulse jackhammered through me when his dark eyes flashed with that same determined look he got before a race. He closed the last of the space between us until we were a breath apart, his voice dropping low and rough when he said, “You already do.”
Fresh tears pushed through my lashes. I swatted them away, trying to think—trying to breathe.
His chest rose and fell, but he put a steady fingertip under my chin and lifted it, not letting me look away.
We stared at each other for a long time. He was never going to give up. The champion in him would go to any lengths. If I let this go on, he’d give us everything he had. Half stuck in Woodhurst with me.
But he deserved so much better; a clean slate. A real escape from the limits of this town and these terrible people. I couldn’t be the person who held him back.
The ends of his hair were starting to curl in the damp air, and the hollows of his cheeks were flushed. He pressed his forehead to mine. “Why won’t you let me in?”
I could’ve said, Because I don’t deserve you. Or Because you’re destined for things so far beyond my reach.
Or Because it’s not enough that I love you, too.
I cleared my throat and backed away. “I can’t do this anymore.”
His eyes closed slowly. I went instantly cold when he dropped his hand. “So you’re done? Just like that?”
My chest felt splintered when I said, “We were never going to work anyway.”
“Clara … This is something.”
I let my gaze trace every line of his face. To absorb what it felt like when he looked at me like that one last time. “I know it is,” I admitted, voice shaking. I had to keep myself from throwing my arms around him and instead try to help him understand. “But it isn’t everything.”
My heart was screaming at me that I was making a huge mistake as I watched him walk in a daze to the driver’s side door of his truck. The old metal creaked as he opened it, but he hesitated before climbing in.
Our eyes caught, and the corner of his mouth hiked up a little. “It was everything to me.”
All breath left my body.
I watched him drive off, too stunned to cry again. When it was clear he was gone, that I had really ended the best thing that had ever happened to me, I slowly sank to the ground, wishing I was better. Wishing I was stronger. Wishing love hadn’t found us.
Because it ruined everything.
Or maybe I did.