Chapter 32
Like I Was Never a Reason to Stay
Aria
“You’ve got to help me!”
Harper recoils when I plop down next to her on the red chair.
“God, Aria!” She tightens the bow of one skate before turning to the other. “What are you doing here?”
“I already told you.” Wrinkling my forehead, I pull a piece of lint off her tightly wound bun. “I need your help.”
“And that’s why you’re here at iSkate? Couldn’t it have waited?”
“No. It’s almost an emergency.”
She looks at the digital clock on the other side of the ice. “I’ve still got ten minutes.”
“Super.” I absently tuck my long hair behind my ears while Harper takes off her skates. “It’s got to do with Wyatt.”
“No way.”
I let her sarcasm slide. “It’s his birthday today, but he’ll only be coming back to the B I know almost everything about her. But for some reason, I’ve never learned why she’s so terrified of any kind of human closeness.
“It’s all good,” she says, pressing me away softly but definitively, then looking into the rink. “I’ve got to get back out on the ice; I’m already too late. Later, A.”
“Later.”
It’s a quarter past five. I’m sitting on the swing over the cliff edge off Ute Trail.
Our place. Wyatt’s and mine. The sun’s slowly going down.
In the snow in front of me are the two lanterns I brought, right next to my backpack with the bottles of champagne and glasses.
I’m softly swinging back and forth, tracing a pattern with my boots.
He’s not coming. And yet I planned everything down to the last detail.
There was no way anything could go wrong.
Just like every day over the last two weeks, he was supposed to get back to the B I just want to know what happened at fucking Silver Lake. And then I see a picture Wyatt sent her.
It’s of Gwendolyn. She’s making a spin on the ice; Buttermilk Mountain is behind her; the stars are twinkling above her. Under the photo, he wrote, Awesome, Pierce!!! Believe in yourself.
I’m ice-cold. I want to cry, but I’m empty.
Simply empty. The phone slips out of my hand.
Everything blurs before my eyes, while something stirs inside me, something too ugly, too dark for me to welcome.
It whispers to me things that I’ve suspected all along—that I can’t trust Wyatt, not when it comes to Gwendolyn.
The door opens. I flinch.
But it’s just Camila. She walks in and smiles. “Hey, Aria. You waiting for Wyatt?” When I don’t respond but just look at her open-mouthed, she adds, “You okay?” Her eyes wander to Wyatt’s phone. “Did something happen?”
“No. All good. It’s just…nothing. Later, Cam.”
The furrows in her forehead deepen. Camila looks like she wants to stop me, but I’m too quick and already out the door.
I literally run out of the B you just can’t—it’s over.
And then you let yourself fall, hopeless, deaf to the wounds, deaf to the pain, because you know they’ll heal. Of course they will, but how ugly will it be? How many scars will there be before there are fewer shards?
It’s too ugly. There are just too many.
That’s how love is.
That’s how it is.