CHAPTER TWENTY-FIVE
EIGHTEEN YEARS OLD
· · ·
Morning comes.
And Cassian is still here.
I don’t move for a while.
Just lie there.
Watching him sleep.
Like an absolute normal person and not at all like someone who has been cataloguing every detail of this boy since he was eight years old.
· · ·
He’s still here.
I don’t think he’s ever been here in the morning.
Not like this.
Not with sunlight.
· · ·
I should be embarrassed by how much that means to me.
I’m not.
I’ve been embarrassing myself over Cassian for ten years and I’m frankly too tired to keep it up.
Something terrible brought us back together.
Something earth-shattering.
Something that left a hole in my chest so big I can feel the air moving through it.
· · ·
And somehow — God help me — I’m breathing easier than I have in two years.
What does that say about me.
I’m still working on that question when he stirs.
Opens his eyes.
Sees me watching him.
· · ·
Grins.
And beats me in the face with a pillow.
Romantic.
Truly.
This is everything I imagined.
· · ·
Before I can recover he’s on top of me — wrestling, laughing, elbows everywhere, exactly like we’re ten years old again — and I am trying very hard not to think about the last time we were in this exact position and what happened after.
I fail immediately.
The wrestling slows.
The laughing goes quiet.
His hands find my face instead.
· · ·
And it’s easy.
That’s the thing I keep coming back to.
How easy this is.
How easy he is, this morning, with me.
Less guarded than I’ve ever seen him.
Like something got knocked loose last night and he hasn’t put it back yet.
· · ·
Like he’s trying to be present for me.
Like he’s trying to be what I need.
I appreciate that with every small, shattered piece of myself.
Because I need a distraction.
I need to feel anything other than the thing sitting on my chest with its full weight.
And I’m terrified of what happens if I’m alone for even a second with my own thoughts.
· · ·
Is that why he’s here.
Does he know me that well.
Am I still the open book I spent two years trying to close.
He’s watching me.
The ease on his face shifting slightly.
His eyes moving over mine.
· · ·
“What,” he says. Not a question.
I realize I’m frowning.
I touch my own face like I’m checking.
“Cassian.” I don’t even know where to start. “Why are you —”
· · ·
Three knocks on my door.
“Ro.” My dad’s voice.
“Come down. Have breakfast with me. Please.”
Cassian goes completely still.
I shove him under the covers.
He goes without argument, which is a miracle.
The door opens anyway.
My dad.
Still in yesterday’s clothes.
Eyes red but dry now, the specific exhaustion that comes after you’ve run out of tears.
He looks at the suspicious Cassian-shaped lump under my blanket.
Then at me.
· · ·
Finger guns.
“Bring Cass too.”
He closes the door.
I stare at the ceiling.
I want to die for completely different reasons than last night.
Progress.
· · ·
Breakfast is burnt.
My mom was the cook.
She took that with her too, apparently.
My dad stands at the stove with the specific expression of a man confronting his own limitations in real time.
Cassian takes over without being asked.
Which is how we end up with scrambled eggs that are at least technically edible and toast that is only slightly on fire.
· · ·
We eat at the kitchen table.
The three of us.
Her chair empty.
We laugh sometimes.
We cry sometimes.
We tell stories about her — my dad starting them, me finishing them, Cassian filling in the parts we’d forgotten.
· · ·
I watch my dad’s face when Cassian talks about her.
The way it opens up.
The way having him here reminds my dad that she had room for everyone.
That she built a life so full of love it spilled over into the boy next door.
He belongs here.
He always did.
After — the chores start.
Because apparently when someone dies they leave you with an enormous amount of shit to do, which feels like a final joke from the universe.
One last thing to get through.
Funeral arrangements. A wake. A service.
Flowers.
Someone has to decide about the flowers.
· · ·
My dad sits at the kitchen table with a legal pad and a phone and the specific face of a man who is functioning because he has to.
Going through the motions and what is expected from him with a mind-numbing emptiness.
I should stay.
I should sit beside him and help him make these calls and be the son he needs me to be.
I know that.
I just — can’t.
As if he knows — and he probably does, he’s always known —
Cassian’s hand finds mine under the table.
I look at my dad.
He looks back at me.
Something passes between us that doesn’t need words.
He nods.
Small. Certain.
Go, it says.
I’ve got this part.
Go.
I’ll spend the rest of my life trying to make that up to him.
For leaving him alone with all of it.
I hope he forgives me one day.
But he waved us off in that way he has — big and certain and with a bad joke I don’t even remember — and so I go.
· · ·
Back to my room.
Cassian behind me.
I head straight for my desk.
The pill bottle.
The familiar weight of it in my hand.
I’m about to dry swallow — a habit from the months when getting up to get water felt like too many steps — when Cassian grabs my wrist.
“The fuck is that.”
“Anxiety medication.” I give him a look. “You’ve apparently lost the ability to read in the last two years.”
“Fucking asshole.” He’s not smiling. “How long. And why do you have that much.”
· · ·
He takes the bottle.
Turns it over.
Looks at me the way you look at someone when you’re trying to measure damage.
I let him look.
I’m too tired to pretend.
I’m all parts that don’t fit together anymore.
· · ·
“I did what I had to do,” I say. “To get through it.”
“Ro —”
“You weren’t there.” Flat. Not angry. Just true. Just facts stated without emotion.
“You don’t know what that year was like. You never explained anything. You just left and blocked me. And I had to figure out how to keep existing with no explanation and no —”
“I know.”
“Don’t do that. Don’t just say I know like that makes it —”
“I did it for my dad.”
Silence.
He says it quietly.
Not looking at me.
Jaw tight.
Like it slipped out and he immediately regrets it.
· · ·
“What does that mean?”
Nothing.
The door behind his eyes swings shut.
Just like that.
I watch it happen and I don’t know whether to push or let it go.
· · ·
I let it go.
Because some part of me knows — has always known —
that whatever is in there isn’t something he can say yet.
Maybe not ever.
· · ·
“You think I’m okay?” he says finally.
Still not looking at me.
“You think I’m happy? I pass this house every single day. Every single day for two years I’ve walked past this house and —”
He stops.
Starts again.
Differently.
“I thought you could do better. That’s — that’s what I kept telling myself. That you deserved better than whatever I am. That if I stayed I’d just keep —”
He gestures vaguely at me.
At the pill bottle still in his hand.
“Doing this to you.”
· · ·
“So you left.”
“I thought you’d go to college. I thought you’d get out of here like you always wanted and you’d be okay. I thought —” He exhales. Rough. “I’m so fucked up, Ro. You know that. You’ve always known that.
And you just — you keep looking at me like that anyway and I didn’t know what to do with that. I still don’t.”
I stare at him.
· · ·
“So your solution was to disappear.”
“My solution was to stop being the thing that was making you worse.”
“You were never —”
“Ro.” He looks at me then. Finally. His eyes dark and exhausted and carrying something I still can’t fully see. “Look at the bottle. Look at what I did to you.”
· · ·
I look at the bottle.
Neither of us says anything.
“I’m not —” I start.
Stop.
Start again.
“That’s not because of you. That’s because of everything. That’s because my brain has been doing this since I was eleven years old and you don’t get to take credit for all of it.”
· · ·
“I know,” he says.
“But you’re not totally wrong either,” I say quietly.
He nods.
Once.
Like that was the honest answer he was waiting for.
We sit with it for a second.
Both of us on the floor.
Both of us holding something we don’t fully know how to put down.
“You don’t get to decide what’s good for me,” I say finally. “Even if you’re right.”
“I know.”
“And you still haven’t answered the question. About your dad. What does that mean?”
He picks up the pill bottle.
Sets it on the desk.
Out of my reach.
Doesn’t answer.
· · ·
“Cassian —”
“What’s with all the questions?”
“How about you answer one. Just one. Pick your favorite.”
He looks at me for a long moment.
Then he lunges.
I squeal — actual, undignified, full squeal — and scramble off the floor, trying to put furniture between us, knocking into my desk chair, absolutely losing the structural integrity of this interaction —
He catches me in about four seconds.
Of course he does.
Those arms.
I stop fighting.
Let myself be caught.
We end up back on the floor.
Of course we do.
The floor and I have an established relationship at this point.
I look at him.
He looks back.
“Are you still sleeping with Abby?”
He closes his eyes.
“Oh my god.”
“I’m serious. I will fight her. Tell me right now. Does she know about last night? Because I have nothing to lose today, Cassian, I genuinely —”
“We just had a very serious —”
“A yes or no question, Cassian. Very simple. I’ll wait.”
“No.” Flat. Final. “It’s been done for a long time. Since the movies, basically. It was —” He shakes his head. “It doesn’t matter. It’s over. It never even started.”
“Since the movies.” I stare at him. “You mean since you watched me kiss someone else and lost your mind about it.”
“I didn’t lose my —”
“You knocked your seat back so hard the whole row looked at you.”
“That’s not —”
“Cassian.”
He says nothing.
Which is an answer.
· · ·
I feel something settle in me that I probably shouldn’t feel right now but do anyway.
“Okay,” I say. “Good.”