Chapter 74
CHAPTER SEVENTY-FOUR
MICAH
Wind raced up the cliffside, ruffling Mason’s clothes and hair. He was aware of my presence probably the moment I stepped foot on the trail, but he had yet to turn and face me. Pale moonlight filtered down on both of us, casting shadows that made this moment feel like it was already a memory.
I’d purposefully tracked him down…again.
This had become a constant for us. This chasing, finding, needing more but never knowing how to verbalize it. Being too afraid to verbalize it, like when we sat across from each other at the diner yesterday.
But the cliff provided a distraction, the same way it had with Dakota.
It was often easier to be truthful when surrounded by unavoidable forces of nature.
A tangled forest, a two-hundred foot drop, the strong scent of the ocean rising on the breeze and soaking my lungs.
I approached where he sat, keeping my distance, keeping my silence, but at least I hadn’t rehearsed an escape plan this time.
The cliffs fell away into nothing but darkness, the ocean only revealing itself whenever a wave broke white against the rocks below. Clouds drifted slowly across the stars, swallowing them for a while before letting them reappear somewhere else.
“Couldn’t sleep?” Mason finally asked.
The simplicity of the question filled me with relief.
I was standing a few yards to the side of where he sat, his feet dangling off the edge. A few clumps of dirt and rock crumbled off behind his heels, cascading down to join the ocean. He looked just as lost as I felt.
“Yeah,” I answered, even though that wasn’t the truth of why I’d come here. It was more complicated than some mild insomnia. Mason knew that without me telling him.
Honestly, I wasn’t sure whether I was here to forgive him, apologize, or finally admit what I wanted.
But there were only so many ways to postpone the inevitable. Every silence was another decision, another moment where I purposefully kept my walls up and my words vague.
“Dakota’s asleep?”
“At her place.” I pretended not to know why she sometimes claimed to need space, but I wasn’t stupid.
She wanted me and Mason to talk. And I’d been avoiding it for long enough.
It felt like every time I tried, every time we touched any real topic, I froze.
But I really didn’t want to keep fucking doing that. Not with him.
Ash.
He knows me.
“Do you think this could actually work?” Mason asked as I sat down—not right next to him, but slightly closer. The pine trees behind us whispered whenever the wind changed direction, the ocean always answering with its rushing waves.
“With Dakota?” My heart had started beating harder, and I couldn’t control it.
“No.”
I could feel him looking at me, but I kept staring at the ocean, my inhales becoming uneven.
When I didn’t reply, he continued, clarifying, “With us. You don’t think it would ever work again, do you?”
With us.
There weren’t any safe or easy answers to a question like that.
It felt like everything would be revealed in whatever words I strung together. And if I finally said everything—if we finally said everything—there would be nowhere left to hide.
I rolled my shoulder, trying to stretch out some of the tension in my muscles, pressing my tongue against the inside of my cheek.
We’d spent decades speaking around our shadows. Around our fears. Around our love. Around every truth that might’ve changed us if only we’d said it sooner.
I was especially guilty of this.
I flattened my palms to the Earth, feeling the dirt and pine needles beneath my hands, the solidness of the cliff. The same cliff I’d launched my broken body off of just to get to Mason. Rain pouring down my face, over my freshly-dark wings, pain radiating through my bones.
How many more decades of silence could I survive?
Did I even want to do that anymore?
“What answer are you hoping I’ll give?” I finally said, the wind rushing in the fill the space after my question. It smelled like rain was coming, the earliest hints of it lacing the breeze. A storm, maybe.
“An honest one.”
I swallowed, feeling the knot in my throat, fingers curling into my palms. “Will you be honest, too?”
“I’ve been honest, Kill. Ever since you died.”
My head turned, my eyes finding his like a magnet. My mouth was dry. Why else had I come out here if not to be truthful with him? Why else did I keep chasing him if I never wanted to actually catch him?
This is it. The end of the tracks.
Speak or die.
“Do you still dream about me?” I dared to ask, my breath caught somewhere beneath my ribs.
Am I still the only face that finds you while you sleep?
It was a confession more than a question.
Because suddenly, painfully, I knew exactly what answer I wanted him to give. Somewhere between the words leaving my mouth and the charged silence that followed, I’d unveiled my own truth.
I wasn’t asking about dreams. I was asking if there was still a place for me inside his mind.
I was admitting that I wanted there to be one.
I remember you. I still think about what we used to be. I still know things about you.
“Yeah, I do,” Mason said, looking down at his hands. “After you died, too. Almost every night.”
“I’m sorry,” I whispered.
“I don’t know how to exist in a world where you aren’t,” he said, quiet enough that if I chose not to answer, it could’ve been played off as if I hadn’t actually heard him.
But I had heard him, and I did want to answer.
I want to. I need to. For once.
I struggled to find my words, my tongue hung up on every year of history I’d built with Mason Ashborn.
The physical distance between us was becoming unbearable.
I needed to move closer, but I couldn’t.
My mind kept searching for the right sentence, something careful enough that it wouldn’t change everything between us.
But there weren’t careful words left anymore.
It was pointless to keep searching for them.
I’d spent years trying to learn to live without him, finding pursuits to distract myself with, clinging to ways I could swallow my depression like a pill I pretended didn’t exist. I had engineering, a career, a lab. I found Dakota. I built a life that looked whole from the outside.
But sitting here, listening to him say those words, I could no longer pretend those things had replaced him. They hadn’t. They never could. Without Mason, I was a shell. Enough time had passed now that I could admit it to myself.
I’d mistaken survival for living. Distance for strength. Convinced myself I was capable of living this painful lie forever.
But I wasn’t capable of that.
Forever is a long time.
A long time with him, yes.
But without him, that time stretched to infinity.
Forever was unbearable in his absence.
I don’t want to survive without him anymore.
If we broke again, it wouldn’t be my choice. I wouldn’t be the one to leave this time. I’d already done that once. I knew now it had nearly destroyed us both.
If there was another goodbye waiting for us, it would have to come from him.
I was surrendering.
“You didn’t deserve the way I left you,” I admitted lowly, my eyebrows pulling together. “Nor the way I treated you when I saw you again. It doesn’t matter what happened in the past, because you didn’t deserve that.”
“I did,” he contested.
“You didn’t.”
“How can you say that?”
“How can you disagree? Don’t tell me you haven’t been angry with me because of it for the past two decades.” My jaw ached from how tightly it’d been clenched.
“I didn’t know then what I know now.” He laughed once under his breath, but there wasn’t any humor in the sound.
“But that—”
“This is never going to work,” he said too quickly, cutting me off, his gaze lingering on the horizon instead of me. My stomach tightened. He hadn’t even given himself time to think. “I only asked because I thought you’d agree.”
“Don’t do this.”
“Do what?”
“You promised me honesty,” I gritted out, anger infiltrating my tone, my bruised heart slamming on my ribs to the point of bloodshed. “This isn’t honesty.”
“It’s not?”
“Don’t make me look. Don’t make me fucking check to see if you’re lying.”
Mason got to his feet, stepping away from the cliff. I joined him. He knew I could search his emotions if I wanted, see exactly how affected he was by me, by this conversation. There was no point in lying or pretending as if he’d asked about us solely to have a reason to end us. It was bullshit.
“Fuck you. Stay out of my head. I don’t know what—”
“Ash,” I snapped. “Are you walking away? Are you saying you’re done?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying.” He abruptly stopped walking after only a few steps, but remained facing away from me. His shoulders rose and fell with his harsh breathing.
If I don’t say it now, I’m going to lose him again.
“Well…” My voice almost disappeared. “I would want it to work.” I cleared my throat, hands shaking. “I do want it to work.”
His head dropped forward and his shoulders stopped moving as he held his breath, not moving at all now. His hands hung motionless at his sides.
I’d wasn’t sure I’d ever seen him so still.
I approached him, instinctively raising my hand to lay my palm on his shoulder—but stopped. My hand hovered in the air, a mere inch from his body.
Then I slowly let it rest, tension seeping out of my body at the warmth of him, even through his clothes. His shoulders began to move again with his breath, almost stuttering like he was struggling to breathe evenly. I couldn’t breathe evenly, either.
“You don’t need me, Micah. Not in the way I need you. You’ll never need me like that. I’ll always be a burden.”
“I do need you.”
I encouraged him to turn with the pressure of my hand. He did, stepping to face me. His eyes were shiny, just like mine. For once, I wasn’t trying to blink it away.
“But why? I make you worse. I make her worse.”
“You asking me why I need you is like asking me why I need the other half of my fucking soul.”
His eyelids fluttered shut for a heartbeat.
“I’m not the—”