18. Resonance #2
“And what I saw—the emotions she’d never been able to hide when it came to you reflected in your expression. Jesus, Cole. I said something I thought was clear at the time, but after seeing you with her now, my words must have completely missed my mark.”
That conscious effort is a futile endeavor.
“I told you that night that she’s not a trial run—that she doesn’t give second chances, not even for you.
” He looks directly at me now. He must see the fear in my eyes.
It’s a living, breathing entity that hinges entirely on whatever he says next.
“I meant that she would only allow herself to be vulnerable enough for love once, completely, all in with no walls to hold her back, and if you weren’t ready to do the same, you needed to wait until you were. ”
He stands and drags his palm over his thigh, back and forth like he’s nervous.
“I meant that you were the best thing in her life, even if it hurt me that I couldn’t be that for her, and I meant that I trusted you, no one else, with her because of it.
” He pauses, scanning my face for a lie, a truth, the reason I broke everything good in my life. “I didn’t mean you should leave.”
The porchlight flickers in the salt air blowing in from the ocean. It highlights the pain he carries that matches my own—just for very different reasons.
He was never warning me away—he was giving me permission.
“Cole.”
I’ve been staring at the lantern for too long. “Yeah?”
“I’m sorry it came out wrong back then. I’m sorry you’ve been carrying that. I—Is that why you keep trying to pull away from us all?”
I shake my head, my thoughts not organizing quickly enough to speak.
“I’m not sorry I was watching out for her,” he says. “I’ll never be sorry for that. But if I made you think I wouldn’t approve—” He curses under his breath. “That was never the case. And every time I’ve tried to bring her up since, you shut down. I just thought, now, with you both together—”
“There were…other reasons,” I say, the words shattering like broken glass on a silent night. “For leaving. Our conversation wasn’t the only one.”
“I’ve wondered,” he says, like he has a theory on what went wrong but understands that those reasons belong to me. “But it was the one that made everything else feel inevitable, wasn’t it?”
It’s not a question—it sounds like a truth he just now understands.
“She plans to leave as soon as she fixes your accounting problem.” He rests his hand briefly on my shoulder—there and gone—just as Junie intends to do. “Just so you know what you’re working with.”
His footsteps shuffle across the porch, then the screen door to my home snaps shut behind him.
I focus on the shadows created by the porch light and the six years of wrong conclusions I’ve been wrestling with.
Junie’s bedroom light turns on, and I cross the driveway without deciding to.
Her stairs illuminate beneath my feet—the warm glow of a fix I made for her without being able to say why.
I knock once.
Two seconds of silence.
Then the door opens, and she’s standing before me in an oversized T-shirt I recognize from my hockey days at Brookline Heights High School.
She’s wearing my shirt—the one with my name and number on the back—the one I intentionally left in her room when I left Boston behind, and my heart trips over itself trying to reach her.
Her bare feet and bare legs call to the bare truth I want to set free.
My gaze trails up her bare thigh, past the oversized shirt, over her crimson-flushed neck and cheeks.
When I finally meet her eye, she steps back to let me in.
Her apartment is quiet and warm. She’s added some colorful succulents that will be nearly impossible for her lack of a green thumb to kill. There are throw pillows in turquoise and a happy yellow that’s a stark contrast to her normal disposition.
She may intend to leave, but she’s also been making this place a home.
Junie crosses the room, leaning against the bookshelf to put some space between us, which is how I know she understands that something has shifted for me. She’s always been fluent in a way I don’t say out loud. It’s the most inconvenient thing about her.
“There are still things I have to tell you,” I say. “Things that will be—” I search for a word that isn’t complicated. There isn’t one. “Hard. And I need you to know that going in.”
The sharpness in her gaze doesn’t frighten me anymore. It never should have.
“I’ve been carrying hard things my entire life, Cole.”
“I know.” I cross the room. Not all the way, just enough to be in the same gravitational field as her, where the air is charged with everything that’s always sat there waiting to be named. “That’s why I’m not adding to the pile tonight—not everything, anyway.”
She laughs. It’s not a happy sound. “One day, you’ll learn that it’s not your job to protect me from every inconvenient truth, Cole.”
No, it’s not my job to protect her from every pain point. Just the ones that could do irreparable damage to this beautifully broken soul.