Chapter 11 #2
I look up. “That sounds exhausting. What about the mountain?”
“Somewhere I had to cross to reach a better place.”
The weight of the comment sinks through me without even knowing the whole story. “And the coordinates?”
He goes still for a moment, not frozen, just quieter in himself. “Where I was standing when I decided I was done being someone else’s property.”
My breath catches. There’s a split second where I forget the noise around us—the crowd, the music, the torches, all of it. It’s just him and that sentence and the cold little echo it leaves behind.
He pulls his arm back again, telling me without words that those are all the pieces of him I get for now.
“That’s not small,” I say quietly.
“No,” he says. “It isn’t.”
I turn my cup slowly between my hands, watching the condensation gather and slide over my fingers.
Around us, the luau keeps opening wider into the night, torchlight deepening, laughter rising, music warming up somewhere beyond the stage.
But I’m stuck on his words and the hard, controlled way he said them, on the picture they leave behind.
A place. A decision. A line he crossed and never went back over.
“I get it,” I say. “The past being a thing you carry whether you invited it along or not.”
North reaches across the table and lays his hand over mine again. Heat flashes through me so quickly it feels mean. His hand is big, rougher than it looks, and the weight of it settles me and rattles me at the same time.
Then his grip tightens slightly, just enough to turn my hand over in his.
My breath catches, because there it is. The scar, faint now, pale against my skin, easy to miss unless someone’s actually looking.
North stares at it for one quiet second, then lifts his eyes to mine.
“Did someone hurt you?”
No circling or soft lead-in, just the question. My first thought is of Daniel, but I know he’s talking about the cut running up my inner wrist.
The past rolls toward me so suddenly that it doesn’t feel like memory at all but as though somebody else’s life is brushing past. A locker slamming, girls laughing. Chris with blood on his knuckles. The smell of bleach and dust in the dark.
I should pull my hand back, make a joke, point us neatly back toward cocktails and torches and anything that isn’t this.
Instead, I meet North’s stare, and the way he’s watching me, steady and unflinching, makes the truth feel a lot closer than I want it to be.
“Not just one person,” I say, and my voice already sounds wrong to my own ears. Thinner and less defensive. “School.”
North doesn’t interrupt. His thumb drags once, slow and grounding, over the inside of my wrist.
“I was bullied,” I say and try to smile, but it feels forced. “Pretty badly. For years.” I attempt to laugh this time, but it dies before it gets anywhere. “No real reason. I talked too much. I was awkward. Easy target, I guess.”
The words come out flat at first, the version I’ve told myself often enough that it almost sounds harmless. Then the rest of it starts pushing up behind them.
“Chris, my brother, and Clio, my best friend, stepped in when they could,” I say, staring at our hands because looking at him now feels too exposing. “He got into fights over me more than once. But before that…” I swallow. “It was mostly just me trying to stay out of their way and failing.”
North’s hand tightens slightly around mine, enough to tell me to keep going.
“There was one night,” I say, and now my voice is quieter, rougher, “when they locked me in a supply closet after school. I was there until the next morning. A janitor found me.”
Saying it out loud pulls me straight back into it. The dark, the panic. My throat giving out from screaming. My knees tucked to my chest while everyone else went home and ate dinner and slept and lived their lives.
I can feel the shape of that fear clinging to me even now.
“There was a video too,” I say. “Me using the bathroom. I didn’t know anyone was filming. It got passed around the school, and after that…” My mouth goes dry. “After that, I stopped feeling like a person there. I was just the thing they laughed at.”
The table in front of me blurs for a second, and I blink hard and hate myself a little for it.
North says nothing. He just keeps holding my hand as if he knows better than to fill this with anything cheap.
“I still do this,” I say, glancing down at my wrist. “When I’m stressed, or if something catches me off guard, I reach for the scar without thinking.
Like touching it proves I made it past that version of me when I tried to escape it all.
” My laugh comes out shaky and small. “Which is not exactly my hottest confession of the evening.”
North goes still for a second, then looks straight at me. “They locked you in overnight,” he says. “And filmed you. And nobody stopped it.”
I shake my head once.
“People love saying kids are cruel like that explains anything.” His mouth hardens. “It doesn’t. That was deliberate. They wanted to humiliate you.”
I look down at our hands.
“You were a kid,” he says. “You should have been safe and protected.” He pauses, then adds, “None of that shame belongs to you. That belongs to them. Fuck, I’m so sorry, Adelaide.”
Before I can say anything else, he lets go of my hand, then stands, drags his chair around the end of the table, and sits beside me instead of across from me.
He’s close now, his thigh near mine, his shoulder brushing mine as he settles.
Heat rolls off him in waves, along with that intoxicating scent of pine, woodsmoke, and salted caramel, and my pulse starts tripping over itself all over again.
“I know that,” I whisper. “Logically, I know that.”
“And I know that wasn’t easy for you to say out loud.”
My fingers tighten in my lap.
He reaches for my hand again, slower this time, giving me every chance to pull away. I don’t. He turns it over in his palm, his thumb brushing once over the inside of my wrist before he lifts it and presses his mouth there.
The kiss is brief.
It wrecks me.
My breath hitches down to my lungs so hard it almost hurts, and suddenly, I have to blink because the tears are there, old, stupid, and unwelcome, pressing at the backs of my eyes the way they always do when the past gets too close.
But this feels different. Sitting here beside him, with his hand around mine and the ocean breathing just beyond the torches, it’s as if he’s pulling some of the poison out of me.
Standing between me and that old darkness and telling it, Not tonight.
When he lowers my hand, he keeps hold of it. “It means everything to me that you trusted me with that,” he says. “You didn’t owe me a word of it, Adelaide.”
I swallow hard.
He’s watching me with that same unshakable focus, but there’s nothing hard in it now. “You didn’t deserve any of that,” he says. “Not one second of it. And it doesn’t get to own you now just because it marked you once.”
I let out a shaky breath and scrub quickly under one eye with my free hand before anything can spill over. “You’re making it very difficult to be cool right now.”
“Be uncool, then.”
I laugh, broken around the edges but real.
His thumb strokes once more over my wrist. “You don’t have to make yourself smaller with me. Not to make it easier or prettier. I can handle the ugly parts.”
My throat tightens all over again, but this time it isn’t the same kind of hurt. It’s relief, which is almost worse because I don’t know what to do with it.
“You say very intense things for a man wearing a Hawaiian shirt,” I manage.
That gets the faintest curve from his mouth. “It’s one of my favorite shirts.”
Another laugh slips out of me, steadier this time, and I lean back a little in my chair, still holding his hand and trying to get my breathing under control while the worst of the ache eases its grip.
“Better?” he asks.
I nod once. “Annoyingly, yes.”
“Fantastic.” And somehow, with the warmth of his hand around mine and the dark blue ocean beyond the torchlight, I believe he means it wholeheartedly.
“Let me show you something intimate from me.”
The words alone have heat flickering low in my stomach.
North releases my hand and reaches up to undo two buttons of his shirt, then pulls the fabric aside at his left side, just under his arm. I lean in without thinking, narrowing the small gap between our chairs, his scent close to making me pass out, but then I see it.
The scar is brutal.
Healed, yes, but badly. The skin is puckered and uneven, pulled tight in places, the kind of wound that never had proper hands on it when it mattered. It runs long across his rib cage, pale and ugly and deeply wrong against the bronze of his skin.
My whole chest tightens. “Is that where you were stabbed at sixteen?”
He stares at me, not flinching from my reaction. “My father did it because I laughed during a church session.”
For a second, I can’t do anything except stare at him.
All the hot, dark tension between us, all the flirting and the steady glances and the way my body has been responding to him all night, it doesn’t disappear. It just deepens, turns into something heavier and more dangerous. Something that hurts.
“We were part of a religious community,” he explains, and the faint contempt in his voice says exactly what he thinks of that term.
“But it was a guise, as it was really a cult with clean shirts and good manners. My father liked to call it discipline. Everyone else liked to call it faith.” He buttons his shirt back up.
“When I asked for help, they handed me back to him. I learned early on that nobody was coming.”
That wrecks me, and I feel sick to my stomach. I see him suddenly—younger, smaller, standing there hurt and furious and abandoned—and something in me tears wide open at the image.