Chapter 30
SIX YEARS AGO || DECEMBER
Cloud Nine isn’t so far when you feel like you can fly.
It’s possibly the cheesiest thing I’ve ever said or thought, but it’s true—Dominic makes me feel like I could float away happily, lifted by dreamy, cheerful balloons.
I do my best to stay firmly planted on the ground, of course, because I have grades to maintain. But my mind and my heart race far ahead, and no matter how I try, I can’t seem to stop them.
I’ve fallen completely in love. With him, with the life we could build together—I’ve fallen in love. And I want to live in this pocket of time forever, until someday rolls around and we’re not encumbered by secret dating and student life.
Someday we can marry. Someday we can start a family. Someday we’ll grow old together. Promises I make myself but am too scared to say out loud.
Because both of us have grown more stressed as the semester wears on, but it’s taken a toll on Dom especially.
He retreats into himself, distance where before there was closeness, and all I can do is wait it out.
He doesn’t seem to feel the same relief I do as our classes wind down; if anything, he looks worse, circles under his eyes and a gaze that darts away from mine.
His avoidance births a fear that nibbles at me from inside, with sharp, frantic teeth and haunted dreams.
“Just tell me what’s going on,” I say one snowy day when we’re holed up in the library, studying for different classes across the table from each other. He’s doing all the right things—holding my hand, smiling, laughing—but they’re strained, and behind his eyes there’s a wall.
“Nothing’s going on,” he mutters, half distracted as he thumbs through a few pages of notes.
But he doesn’t ask what I’m talking about. He doesn’t need to.
“You’re a liar,” I say under my breath, loud enough that he can hear me; a rare flash of genuine laughter finds his lips before it fades away, and he’s gone again, retreated behind the wall in his eyes.
It’s the last laugh I hear from him. We’re supposed to meet for lunch the next day, but he cancels; later in the afternoon he calls.
“We need to talk,” he says.
I blink and grip the phone tighter in my hand as those four words travel down the line. “What?” I say—as though I didn’t hear him perfectly. As though asking again will somehow change what he said.
“We need to talk about something,” he says, slower and clearer, which is just as well because I’m not operating at full capacity as of two seconds ago.
“Okay,” I say faintly. I drift to my bed and sit down, nearly missing and slipping off the edge of the mattress completely. “Uh, what is it? Let’s just talk now.”
“No,” he says in a heavy voice.
Bad. This is bad.
“In person would be better,” he goes on.
But I’m already shaking my head. “What can you say in person that you can’t say over the phone?” I say. “Just tell me now.” Then, glancing around at the notebooks spread out all over my comforter, I add, “I’m kind of busy anyway, so—”
“I’m at your front door, Reese.”
My heart sinks from my chest to the pit of my stomach, and it makes a horrible dying sound as it falls. “Oh,” I say. I swallow, but the growing knot in my throat doesn’t budge. “Okay.”
He looks horrible when I open the door. I mean, I love Dom. I love him. But he looks awful. His hair is a mess, like he’s been running his fingers through it on repeat all day. The dark circles under his eyes have intensified, and his gaze looks everywhere but at me.
I step back silently to let him in, and he crosses the threshold with a finality that I might be imagining. He doesn’t come further in like usual; he remains by the door.
“So,” he says, his hands hanging by his sides.
The word hovers between us and then expands, noxious gas that fills the room with alarming speed. A sick feeling creeps into my stomach, poison.
“So,” I say hoarsely, waiting.
He swallows. Pushes his fingers through his hair. And then he begins to pace.
I watch him with wide eyes and shallow breaths, my hands sweaty as they twist together. Back and forth he goes, three or four times before I finally lose my mind.
“Dom!” I say. The knot is still growing in my throat, and although I try to tell myself this might not be what it looks like, I’m not hopeful. “Just say it.”
He stops in place, turns to me, and meets my eye for the first time since arriving.
“You didn’t get a ninety.”
I blink in confusion. “What?”
He speaks again—and I fall, headfirst, into a raging, swirling vortex.
“You didn’t get a ninety,” he says. “You got an eighty-nine. I changed your grade.”
It starts with as a faint ringing in my ears that grows, escalating into a dull roar, until I’m questioning what I’ve heard.
“What?”
And that’s when the mask drops.
The version of Dominic I’ve been seeing for the last month, the smiles and laughs that weren’t quite genuine—everything is stripped away as I look into his eyes now and find nothing but pain.
Horrible, terrible guilt, with a self-loathing that makes me want to cry. And he’s speaking again, his lips are moving, but the words are coming slowly to my ears.
“I changed your grade”—he looks like he doesn’t even know who he is—“just enough for you to keep your A”—tears pricking my eyes from sheer mental overload—“your scholarship”—what’s happening right now?
—“you knew it when we studied together”—and everything is collapsing, a dying star about to explode—“just missed it on the test—”
I wave my hands at him, backing up absently until my legs hit the couch. I sink down on the arm of the sofa as my brain tries to process. “You changed—”
“Your grade. I changed it. I changed your grade.” Over and over again he says it, bewildered, like he can’t believe it.
I can’t believe it.
What’s happening right now?
The words must leave my mouth, even though I don’t realize I’m saying them, because Dominic strides closer and rests his hands on my shoulders.
“I changed your grade,” he says. “I’m your TA and I dated you.” Then he steps away and runs his hands through his hair again.
“What—” I break off, swallow. “What are we going to do?”
His shoulders slump further, which I wouldn’t have thought possible. I’ve never seen him like this, and it’s horrible to witness—especially as the panic leaves his eyes, only to be replaced by nothingness.
“I turned myself in,” he says dully. “I told Professor Sallow.”
And the living room is stupidly still, completely stagnant—the fake flowers in the vase by the window are just propped there, doing nothing, while a bomb is exploding—
“So—what?” I say as question after question presents itself, all of them promising pain. “We—what? Are you—”
My pointless stuttering and stammering die, because I don’t know where to send them or what to say. The roaring sound in my ears is growing louder, panic clawing up my sternum, climbing my ribs like a ladder, and the bright, golden future I hold in my heart begins to wither.
“I told him you didn’t know,” Dom says. “But…” His shoulders lift into a weak, helpless shrug, and his gaze is still staring but unseeing.
I wish I could focus, perform mental triage, but my thoughts are too frightened, too scattered. A roulette wheel of new fears, new issues, new possibilities, and the only one that emerges above the rest for long enough to grasp is that I’m losing him.
Right in front of my eyes, I’m losing Dominic, the only person I’ve ever fallen in love with, the one who makes me feel like I’m not alone.
Because for so long I’ve been so lonely, even surrounded by people who come and go, but he’s the one who helps me feel the sun—and he’s vanishing, disappearing, and he’s going to take that light with him.
I have to keep him. I need to keep him. How can I stop him from leaving?
My eyes widen as an idea occurs to me, absurd to say out loud. Wild to even be thinking, in fact. But I can’t deny it’s been on my mind; putting words to the thought is only one step further.
So I look at Dominic, and when I speak, I can hear the breathless panic in my voice. “We should get married.”
His already still body freezes completely, and then he pulls his gaze from the floor to look up at me. My heart falls when I see his expression—furrowed brows and faint confusion, like he can’t have heard me right. “What?”
That’s okay. I can explain. “Let’s get married!” I nod and get off the arm of the sofa, grasping his arm tight. “Marry me. Please, Dom. Marry me.”
His eyes widen and flood with an emotion I can’t name, a light that vanishes almost immediately. The furrow between his brows returns, and the question in his eyes turns to something like incredulity.
Like—
Like he’s never seen me before.
“Wait. What?” he says again. “Why would we get married?”
I blink at him. “Because we love each other.”
He shakes his head and pulls his arm out of my grip. “No,” he says with a sigh. “That’s not what I—” He breaks off, still bewildered. “What could marriage possibly solve?”
Why is he not understanding how good this could be?
“We could stay together,” I say quickly. “We could be together.”
“We could stay together anyway,” he says.
The baffled look in his eyes is spreading over his already confused face, and he’s still looking at me as though he’s worried about my sanity.
“Although”—he sighs again and looks away—“I’m not sure we should.
” He runs his hand down his face. “I’m not sure we should have dated at all, Reese.
” His mouth sets into a grim line. “Do you not understand how serious this is?”
“Of course I do.” Impatience twists with panic in my chest, because I don’t like where this is headed. I don’t want to lose him. “But are you just going to give up?” I swallow the knot in my throat. “Have you really never thought about our future?”
His jaw tightens, but he doesn’t answer. I can see him hurtling miles and miles away from me, even though he hasn’t moved.
I grab his arm again. “When you love someone, you put in the work,” I say. I can hear the desperation in my voice, and I hate it, but I don’t know how to make it leave.