Chapter 8
Esme
The entire time we’ve been up here, I’ve stolen glances at Wizard.
Part of my brain still can’t comprehend that we’re here at all.
We used to spend so much time together, but it’s been years, and this is different.
This doesn’t feel like it ever did. We’re not really friends anymore.
I mean, we are, but not like we were. We can never go back to that.
Everything is different. I am and he is, and even Hart and the rest of the world is all rearranged and changed. But it’s… more.
I don’t know what it is. I’m too tangled up inside to sort myself out, even after a long sleep, a hot shower, and a sandwich.
I keep feeling like someone’s come up behind me and pushed me off the top of a hill and I landed at the bottom, safe but winded, dizzy, and somehow not right. Missing something.
“We loved the stars.” I say it because it’s safe.
I lean back on the blanket and tilt my face up to the sky. The streaks of smoke are long gone, dissipated like the spectacular sparks and lights. I could almost smell the smoke and sulfur on the breeze earlier, but now it’s just Wizard and his complex manly scents that make my insides feel squirmy.
Wizard leans back too. He rests on his elbows, his screens on a dimmer mode beside him.
He can’t fully unplug, but he does tip his head back.
I try to be subtle about watching the way his unzipped leather jacket parts over his massive chest, about how his t-shirt hugs his body like a second skin.
My eyes keep gliding down to his worn jeans and the way his thick leg muscles flex beneath.
I jerk my gaze back to his face. My eyes land straight on his neck, on all the tendons and his bronzed skin, the thrum of his pulse, the way his swallow catches in his throat.
“After grade nine science class, we got so into astronomy,” he says gruffly.
My swallow sticks too. “I liked the myths and legends more than I liked the science of it.”
“But it’s all part of the science. Myth and wonder never used to be separate.
To call that proper science is judging people from another era with present wisdom, and that’s wrong.
” He says that the way our science teacher did, which back then, blew me away because the guy was a total freaking square.
He was passionate about the stars though, which changed my mind about him.
It was a small school, and we had him for the next three years of science.
I learned to appreciate the passion underneath his dorky exterior, even back then.
As an adult, I can really respect that the guy became a teacher. Not all of them were great, but he was.
“I wish…” I start, but cut myself off.
Wizard’s eyes slide over me like the caress of a flame running along my body, hot enough to make me want to jolt backwards, but not hot enough to burn me.
“What do you wish?”
Nothing that’s going to help. “The same thing everyone wishes. That they could go back. Change. I wish I could apply a whole lot of present perspective to my younger self.”
“I think that mostly you’d just love her.”
His soft reply makes my stomach clench so hard that I can’t breathe past it.
“You’d tell her that things would get rough, but that she’d be fine. That she’d turn out spectacular, and she’d find her way in the end.”
I slap my hand over my mouth to hold in a sob. Fuck. The stars glisten through a blur of wet. I can’t blink it away. The tears slip down out of the corners of my eyes and dribble into my hair.
I tilt my face so, so slowly. I expect Wizard’s calm certainty.
His steadfast strength. His beauty and his ceaseless goodness.
I don’t expect to see him scrub a hand over his face, starting at his forehead and continuing down.
When he catches me watching, his eyes quickly skitter away.
He twists to the side, but not before I catch his face crumple. He looks… wrecked.
“Hey.” I scramble up before I can think.
I’m across the blanket, moving his tablet and phones, shifting close until our shoulders brush and the length of my leg presses against his.
“I’ve been so focused on me. I’ve been selfish and a total asshole, not able to see more than a foot in front of my own face.
I never stopped to ask if you’re okay. You went through this too.
You’re still going through it. James is your brother. The club. The guys. It’s all a lot.”
He shakes his head and rifles a hand through his curls. “It’s not that. A little, but it’s not…”
There was something James used to say to me back in high school.
When he graduated and moved to Seattle and was probably sleeping with half the college while he told me he was waiting for me to get there too.
I thought it was just him being his asshole self.
He always poked knives into my friendship with Wizard.
About how close I was to his brother, and how, if I liked him so much, I should make his whole world and marry him instead.
James was someone who liked to find the weakest point of a person and pick it apart.
He was so fucking good at it. He used to sarcastically throw it at me that Wizard loved me.
I just ignored James. He was jealous of our friendship.
He didn’t understand what it meant to love someone fully, or that there were different kinds of love.
He didn’t know shit about anything, and I knew that.
I always. Knew. That. James just wanted to ruin the good things in my life, but I never let him come between me and Wizard.
What if James wasn’t wrong?
What if I couldn’t see it all these years? I was blinded by the very real love that Wizard and I shared. A love that ran as deep as anything I’d ever known. A love I’d trust my life to. The love of best friends. The love of a brother I never had. Two souls who just understood each other.
I felt that same love and acceptance from Wizard’s grandfather. They were my whole world. They were my safe people and safe places.
What if James wasn’t wrong? The question keeps slamming in my brain, but now it morphs. What if you were wrong? What if you were always wrong? What if you couldn’t see it?
“Esme.” Wizard’s voice is strong, but there’s an undercurrent of caution.
I crash back into myself and find him staring right into my face. I’m looking back. He can read everything flickering across mine, but I can also read his. His jaw clenches and his eyes widen. All the things I couldn’t see before are now so obvious that terror rushes through me.
Oh my god. Oh my fucking god.
I scramble up and back away. I bend over, trying to suck in air.
I’m going to throw up. I’m going to— I don’t know, I just can’t breathe.
No. No, no, no. This is all wrong. It can’t be true.
If it is, then it’s not just my life that I wasted.
All those years, it was his too. It wasn’t just me I hurt.
It was the best man that I’ve ever known.
It was me, for years, asking for advice on how to make a life with James.
Asking Wizard, who didn’t just love me like a friend or a sister.
Wizard always, always tried to make it better.
He was patient. Kind. Endlessly so. He shared his life with me.
His grandpa. His whole world. And all of his heart, including all the parts I couldn’t ever see.
I stab a finger at him, anger bursting out of me because I’m so scared, and anger is easier to reach for. “You called me a martyr! What about you? What the fuck?”
“Esme!” Wizard stands. He steps off the blanket and puts his hands up. I have no idea why he’s doing that. Why he’s slowly approaching, one step after another, like I’m a wild animal. “You’re gonna have a panic attack, and I don’t want you anywhere near the edge.”
I glance behind me. I don’t remember moving.
I’m not anywhere close, but if I kept going, I would be.
I freeze in place, my heart racing, my whole body quaking.
Was it ever uncertainty that was my problem, or was it always fear?
Was I scared to peel back the layers that I knew were there all along because I knew what was underneath could break me, or could I just not see it?
Was I truly that blind? I have no idea what it’s like to take a step forward with this knowledge. I don’t know how to exist with this.
“Esme,” Wizard urges. “Please. Come here. We can… talk.”
I take two steps forward so that he stops panicking about the roof dropping away, but I wrap my arms around myself and collapse into all the endless holes inside of me. Is this even happening? Is it real?
Wizard is so still. It doesn’t appear like he’s even breathing. His shoulders are hunched and rigid, like he needs to shield himself from me.
If he wanted to do that, he should have started nearly two decades ago.
“There’s nothing to talk about.” My stomach drops out and my voice escapes as half a sob.
This is more than the ground dropping out from underneath of me.
This is the whole world falling away. “You’re going to try to tell me that it’s not true, but if I look back and look differently, I can see all of it.
I missed it then. I was looking at friendship.
How could you not have said anything? How could you have suffered like that? ”
Wizard’s hands clench and unclench at his sides.
He might be still, half frozen on the outside, but on the inside, I know just how much is going on.
He’s fighting to keep the roof from dropping out under him too.
We’re nowhere near the edge, but we’re right on it, both of us straddling it, ready to fall.
“All those times James joked about you being hopelessly in love with me, so much so that you were ruined for anyone or anything else… it was all true. Please tell me you tried to move on. That you wanted to. That you have.”
“I have.”