2. 2
He releases my wrists, but he doesn’t step back and neither do I. His brown chukka boots kiss the toes of my strappy silver sandals.
“You look the same but different,” he says on an exhale.
He doesn’t get to say it that way, like he’s so surprised that I’ve changed. He walked away, and I grew up. That’s what people do. They get older. They get perspective. They get over shit.
Everybody but me.
Because he walked away without a word, left me on read and blocked me. Left for college and never looked back. Because unlike every other sixteen-year-old in the world, I was right —I was never going to love another man.
I dart my hand out, shove it into his front right pocket, and snatch out his phone. He startles, but he doesn’t try to get it back. I tap in his password. 12-8-13. Terry Bradshaw’s number and my birthday.
It still works.
I open his contacts and scroll to the Ms, expecting any second for him to yank it back, but all he does is watch me, a strange expression on his face, bemused and desperate and tormented all at the same time.
There I am. Mira-baby. He didn’t delete me.
I unblock myself.
His notifications light up with my undelivered messages, and I shove the screen in his face, too close for him to read, but I don’t care.
“You’re a fucking coward, Wyatt Foster.”
He grabs my wrists, gently lowering the phone between us. His eyes catch on my hair. “You cut it shorter now,” he says.
It’s longer than it was right after he bailed when I chopped it all off and dyed it brown, and it didn’t make me feel the slightest bit better. “I hate you,” I say.
“You’re even prettier now.”
“Fuck you.”
He has nothing to say to that. He never could argue for shit. When we’d fight, he’d just get quiet and wait until I wasn’t quite as mad, and then he’d drag me onto his lap and wrap his arms around me and silently feel sorry at me until I decided he’d suffered enough. But we were kids then, and he hadn’t ripped my heart out and blown town with it yet.
“You could have at least said goodbye,” I mumble even though it wouldn’t have been nearly enough. “You could have been man enough to say it to my face.”
His breath catches on the inhale. Direct hit. Plus ten points for Mira.
My chest aches harder. I don’t want to win. There’s no winning.
“Was it even hard for you?” I ask, my voice catching, too.
His eyes close for a second. His whole body is braced for impact, like he expects me to sucker punch him at any time. He lets one of my wrists go, but he keeps his fingers curled tightly around the other.
He takes his phone, taps open the Notes app, and presses it into my free hand.
“What?” I ask, my fingers automatically curling around the case so it doesn’t fall as he lets go.
“Read,” he says.
I huff and lift the screen close to my face. I left my glasses at home.
It’s a bulleted list. I see his spelling hasn’t improved any since high school.
skwerrel on windersill w/ penjamin
t swift not so bad
lemoncello fried banana at nihao on boston street is FYRE
I scroll. The list keeps going and going—things he saw, notable events, things he likes, things I would like. I love limoncello.
the beemer died October 5 rip – dear killed it, dear survived
i miss your shampoo
back at the gym – day 1 – max squat 250
i miss your weird baby toes
My thumb cramps by the time I finish scrolling. My nose is burning.
“You saw a squirrel with a vape pen on your windowsill?”
“Yeah.”
“When?”
“Yesterday.”
I glance at the last item on the list.
macroeconomics is dumb. i miss you.
“When did you take macroeconomics?”
He has to think for a second. “Freshman year of college.”
My fingers tighten around his phone in a death grip. I feel like each note scooped out my insides like a melon baller, and now I’m a ghost wearing a sheet, and the only thing holding me up is the fumes from an old anger that I never really had a right to at all.
He would never have left me if he hadn’t been driven away by who I am.
“I want to be mad,” I whisper.
“Mira—” He exhales, my pain echoed in the word, but before he can say anything else, a voice calls out from right behind me.
“Mira?”
I startle backwards. Alex strides right up to stand beside me, smiling at Wyatt like he’s the interloper.
“Alex Anderson,” he says, sticking his hand out.
Wyatt immediately shakes his hand, his country club manners still ingrained. “Wyatt Foster.”
“So how do you know our Mira?” Alex asks, wrapping an arm around my waist and pulling me close.
My body tenses, shouting that he’s not the right one, but neither is the businessman in front of me with Wyatt’s face and Wyatt’s dad’s fashion sense. He’s a civilian. We might belong together, but he doesn’t belong in my world any more now than he did when we were kids.
When Wyatt saw behind the curtain, he ran, and like Mom always says, it was for the best. People are who they are. You can’t wish them into being someone or something else.
I want to be mad, but I can’t be. I have to watch him go. Again.
I force myself to relax and snuggle into Alex’s side.
“We’re old friends,” Wyatt says, his eyes locked on mine.
“ Were ,” I say, clutching my old hurt tightly to my chest. I can’t let it go now. I need it to get through this next part.
“Oh,” Alex says, all laden with meaning, like he has any clue what’s happening here. I’m staring down a part of me I haven’t seen in eight years, and forcing myself to be mad that he’s still upright and functioning, directing fucking analytics, when he should be as broken as my ability to trust and feel and be happy.
“You left,” I remind Wyatt—and myself. It’s a fact and an accusation and still—after all this time—a shock, like I’m the hero in the movie driving away from the scene of the shootout who looks down and sees blood seeping through his white shirt.
Wyatt left me—and if he thought of me a hundred times a day like I thought of him—there’s still nothing he can say to that. Nothing has changed. Nothing is different.
Wyatt keeps his eyes locked on mine, blazing with a feeling I can’t understand, until I drop my gaze to the gummy, black floor, dusted with the glitter from a hundred cheap, cardboard snowflakes.
“Let’s get out of here,” I mumble to Alex.
“Yeah, sure, absolutely,” he says. “How about we go to the upstairs VIP? My buddy said come up and see him when we got here.”
“Sounds good.” I look at Wyatt one last time and cock my head, pretending my lips aren’t quivering and my stomach isn’t bottoming out. “Are we done here, Wyatt? You don’t have anything else to say?”
I wait.
Because I’ll always wait for him. Just a little longer.
Alex is the one who calls it, gently guiding me away. I don’t look back, and Wyatt doesn’t stop me.
History repeats.
I’m hardly paying attention as Alex leads me around the bar and down a hallway lined with stacked boxes of booze. The stairs to VIP are in the employees only area?
Hold up.
Alex’s hand wraps around mine like a vise as he shoves open an exit door.
“Where are we going?” I ask numbly as he drags me out onto a metal fire escape overlooking an empty alley and a windowless industrial building.
Oh, no. Oh, shit.
My body takes over. I pitch my weight backwards and jerk my arm away, but his grip is too strong, and he has momentum as well as at least fifty pounds on me.
I grasp futilely for the handle on the exit door as it slowly swings closed on an empty hallway.
Where are my men?
I sent them away, but how far did they go? This is the first time in my life that they actually give me space when I ask for it?
“Help!” I scream. “Someone help!”
Alex hoists me off my feet, half dragging, half hauling me down the stairs as I flail and scream. The building behind us thumps with bass.
I never realized how softly I scream. The wheels screeching to a halt in the alley below easily cover the sound. The side door of a white van flies open. Three men in black ski masks pour out with guns drawn.
Semi-automatics.
With silencers.
Fuck.
“Here, boss.” One of the new men passes Alex a weapon, and he immediately presses it to my temple.
“You’re going to be a good girl, right, Mira?” he says. Where did that accent come from? Those cheekbones, a dude named Alex, a blond Nico—they’re with the Russians.
I raise my palms slowly in the air. A heel broke off my sandal on the stairs, so I balance on the ball of one foot like a ballet dancer.
He didn’t put a bullet in my head already, so this is a kidnapping. I have time. I need to think.
Where are my men? They would’ve fallen back, but when they saw me on the move, they would’ve followed. I glance up at the exit door.
Alex chuckles darkly. “They’re not coming, princess. Daddy Dearest needs to stop playing favorites with who he takes on vacation with him. Favoritism hurts feelings. Makes enemies out of friends.” He smirks. He wants me to see that he’s a clever villain, but bribing a weak man isn’t exactly next-level strategy.
Director of Strategic Analytics . What the hell does that mean? Why won’t my brain focus? I’m in trouble here.
Alex is propelling me toward the van. Don’t let them take you to a second location. That’s the first rule, right? My gaze careens from the van to the fire escape to the green dumpster against the brick wall two yards away.
The gun’s muzzle digs into my skin. I am so screwed.
I stumble, whimpering as my ankle twists.
Alex chuckles again and hisses in my ear. “You’re going to make us so much money, princess. While we wait for Daddy to pay up, you’re going to play the market for us like you do for him, and then after he delivers, we’re going to mail your cum-crusted body back to him in pieces.” He brushes a hair off of my forehead with the gun. “But don’t worry—I’ll leave you a few fingers and an eye ’til the very end so you can still make those big trades.”
He bares his wolfish white teeth at me, and it occurs to me what really annoys me about his type. They’re so invested in being the main character, they don’t pay attention to their surroundings.
Like, for example, the exit door at the top of the fire escape creeping open.
I get ready to drop to the ground. Please let it be one of my men. Don’t let it be some busboy ducking out for a smoke. I’ll use whatever distraction I can get, though. I’ll take a bullet in the back over whatever Bratva bullshit Alex has planned any day.
Above us, a hinge creaks.
Five pairs of eyes—and the barrels of four guns—tilt thirty degrees upwards.
Wyatt Foster, in his fucking checkered shirt and fleece vest, steps out onto the metal landing. My jaw drops, followed by my heart. I draw in a breath to scream.
Wyatt sees my face. He sees the man with a gun to my head.
He vaults over the railing of the fire escape.
I blink.
He lands on Alex in a thud of flesh and crack of bones. The impact throws me onto my ass, the concrete skinning my palms. The heelless sandal falls off my foot. I scramble back like a crab.
In a way, I’ve never seen Wyatt like this, but in another way, I have, a long time ago, on the playground in the middle of our cul-de-sac. He moved faster than you’d think a stocky kid could then, and he does now, too.
He dives for the gun that went flying when he tackled Alex into the ground, and as he rises with it, he hooks his arm around my shoulder and pitches me behind him in the direction of the van, pivoting so that he stands between me and the four men leveling their semi-automatics at us.
I land on my side against a wheel well. Wyatt calmly shoves his left hand in his vest pocket and raises Alex’s Beretta.
And then, as cool and collected as he could possibly be, Wyatt puts a bullet dead center between each man’s eyes.
One.
Two.
Three.
Four.
The first body is still falling when Wyatt squeezes off the last shot.
I blink up at him. Where the hell did he learn to do that?
He engages the safety, lowers his weapon, and immediately turns the pastiest shade of gray I’ve ever seen.
“Shit.” I scramble to my feet, stumble to my lost sandal, and shove my foot in. “We need to go .”
I grab Wyatt’s hand. He’s gaping down like he’s never seen hands before. He’s in shock.
“Come on!” I shout at him and try to drag him down the alley, but he’s always been too heavy for me to budge. “Wyatt, please, move your feet.”
“Mira?” His brow knits. Sweat pours off his face, soaking his collar.
Another screech of tires rings out as a familiar town car swings around the corner into the alley. Wyatt raises the gun again, his arm perfectly steady and the whites of his eyes so wild that he looks downright rabid.
I quickly lay a hand on his arm. “It’s okay. It’s Grandpa Ray,” I say. I’ve never been happier to see the guy in my life.
Grandpa Ray skids the Lincoln to a halt behind the van and hoists himself—rather than leaps—from the driver’s seat, but the hands wrapped around his gun are steady as he approaches us, kicking weapons away from the bodies crumpled on the concrete. His joints are a little stiff these days, but he’s still got it.