Chapter 20 #2
Going off pure instinct, I take my phone back to the glass door and slide it open.
Frigid air sweeps in with the breeze, but I don’t pay attention to the cold because adrenaline begins to pulse through my veins.
I switch from the aurora app to the camera and hold my phone skyward, gasping when the cottony cloud appears as a long stretch of neon green down the center of my screen.
Oh my god! This might be it!
“Ben!” I shout. “You need to come here! Now!”
He’s behind me in seconds, and I watch over my shoulder as he peers at my phone screen and his eyes go wide. “Holy shit.”
Then he’s gone again, rummaging through his camera bag at the counter and frantically pulling out equipment.
I follow him back inside and throw on my coat and slip my feet into my sneakers, my hands shaking as I attempt to tie them before I give up and run back to the deck with my laces flapping against the floor, afraid I’ll miss the show.
Outside, Ben’s hands hurriedly work to get his tripod set up.
“You good?” he asks, without looking up. I know he’s asking because it’s completely dark out here, and with his tripod set up in record speed, he moves to shut off the interior lights so they don’t interfere with his photos.
“I’m good,” I promise.
He leans back through the doorway and flips off the lights in the condo, plunging us into darkness.
When I look up at the sky, the thin cloud from before is gone, but now there’s a new one running horizontally over the horizon, splitting the sky in two above the city of Akureyri.
“Come here.” Ben motions me over with a hand while keeping his eyes on the display screen in front of him.
He steps aside so I can glimpse the screen, and when I see his photo of aurora—neon green stretched above the golden lights of the city, the scene reflected upon the inky waters of the fjord like a mirror—something deep-seated shakes loose in my core.
I’m here. In Iceland. Living a life I’ve always dreamed of. And I’m living this dream with Ben, who I love.
In this moment, I know. I can forgive him.
Whatever happened back then was between two teenagers, but we’re fully grown adults now.
I still may not have a clear way out of this scenario where I get to keep the job of my dreams and Ben, but maybe that’s okay.
Maybe this moment is the best life can possibly get, and maybe I need to quit goddamn thinking and enjoy it while it lasts.
“Ben.” I press a hand over my heart. “It’s incredible. I have no other words. You’re fucking amazing.”
He smiles, something unspoken passing between us in the still night.
Over the next half hour, aurora dazzles us with a show.
The lights grow stronger and become visible to the eye without a camera, and Ben and I are like excited children again, turning circles and searching the heavens above.
At one point, the lights are so vivid they consume the whole sky, greens and pinks dancing a waltz above our heads, a wavy mirage of moving color.
It’s so fantastically thrilling it’s almost scary.
The basic facts of human life, the grass is green, the sky is blue, flipped upside down in an instant.
The sky doesn’t look real anymore. Nothing feels real anymore.
“Ems, let’s take a picture.”
I join Ben in front of his tripod, where he pulls me into his arms. Instead of posing for the camera, he leans in and presses his lips to mine in a soft, slow kiss. I hear the click of the shutter, and I don’t need to see the photo to know it will be the most meaningful one ever taken of me.
When Ben pulls back, he rests his forehead against mine. “I’m sorry. I know I’ve been quiet today.”
My heart lurches. Surely he isn’t about to ruin the best moment of my life by turning it into the worst. Then again, he’s done that very thing before. “Are you regretting last night?” I bring myself to ask. “Did we go too fast?”
His head jerks back, eyes urgently sweeping my face. “God no! Is that what you’re thinking? Christ, Ems. I would never regret what happened between us. Ever.” He plants a hard kiss to my forehead. “But I need to tell you something. I’m just nervous.”
I don’t know whether to be relieved by his actions or fearful of whatever he has to say, so I choose the path of least resistance and lean into my anxiety. “Tell me what you’re thinking. Please? You’re scaring me.”
“You’re the one who’s good with words, not me. Maybe I can show you better than I can tell you.”
Ben picks up his tripod and camera with one hand and pulls me toward the door with his other. Back inside, he flips on the lights and leaves me standing in the living room while he sets his tripod down and goes off to rummage through a side pocket on his camera bag.
He quickly returns, displaying his open hand in front of me without saying a word. A delicate gold necklace rests in his palm.
“This isn’t?” I lift the chain and a dainty letter M charm dangles in front of me. “This can’t be the same one. Ben?”
“It’s the same.”
I shift my focus past the necklace. Ben worries his lower lip as he studies me. “Where did you…How did you…”
“I kept it.”
“All this time?”
He nods, once, scratches at the back of his neck. “I got the broken clasp replaced after you gave it back to me that day on my porch. I think even then I was hoping there was some small chance you might wear it again someday.”
I squeeze the necklace tight in my hand, the same way my heart is being squeezed inside my chest.
“Then when I started traveling, I took it with me on my trips. I told myself after all those times we’d talked about all the places you wanted to see, it was like I was taking a piece of you with me around the world.
But truthfully, I did it for me. That necklace became a comfort object or a good luck charm or something.
I don’t know. This probably seems weird. Maybe I shouldn’t have shown you this—”
He reaches to take it from me, but I pull my hand away. “Ben, tell me. Tell me the real reason why you kept this and why you’re showing it to me now.”
He drops his head and stares at the floor. “Ems, we have to talk about what happened that day.”
My stomach clenches, my body automatically rejecting the idea of reliving that heartbreak yet again. “No, we don’t. It doesn’t matter. We were young, and what happened is done. We’re different people now.”
Ben moves away from me with a heavy sigh, crossing the room and sinking onto the overstuffed sofa.
He leans forward and buries his hands in his hair, twisting at the root.
I follow, sitting across from him on the ottoman but close enough that our knees weave together.
I take one of his hands in mine and kiss his palm.
“I forgive you,” I tell him. “We don’t have to do this.”
“It’s important to me that you know what really happened.” He squeezes my hand. “Everything this time. All of it. The ugly truth. You and I both know we’ll never be able to really move forward until we talk about it.”
While there’s a chance he may be right, I’m terrified that what he has to say, the ugly truth, will destroy everything that’s developed between us on this trip.
A wrecking ball taken to a weakened heart that showed its first cracks fourteen years ago.
It’s one thing to convince myself I can forgive Ben if we ignore it and never bring it up again, write it off as two immature teenagers who made stupid mistakes.
It’s another thing altogether if he’s about to confirm my deepest fear out loud, that he was never who I thought he was back then.
He wasn’t my first boyfriend. He wasn’t my childhood best friend.
He wasn’t the keeper of my secrets. He was a teenage boy who got what he wanted from me and then discarded me.
But when I look into his eyes, all I see is determination, and I know there’s no more avoiding this conversation. “Okay. Tell me.”
He takes a deep breath, chest shuddering with its rise and fall.
“The night of your birthday, when we were together that first time…” Around us the condo is completely silent, as if it, too, waits with bated breath for Ben’s words. “Ems, up until last night that was easily the best night of my life. I need you to know that you were everything to me.”
The statement is so direct that it wrings the air from my lungs, my heart swelling in my chest.
“Marcus and Mason were like brothers to me, and your parents basically took me in. But it was you. For me, it was always all about you.”
My eyes burn with the tears I’m suddenly holding back, my voice shaking as I ask, “Why did you do it then? Why’d you disappear on me like that?”
He hesitates a moment, then says, “Because that night quickly turned from the best of my life to the worst.”
Dread clamps my throat like a vise, and I get the eerie foresight that this conversation is going to hurt even more than I could’ve imagined but for entirely different reasons.
“After I left your bedroom that morning, I was on cloud fucking nine. It was early, but I decided to head back to my house because I knew that if your brothers saw me that happy when they woke up, they’d finally figure out something was going on between us.
” He pauses, and I think my heart stops to wait with him.
“I could hear my father yelling before I even got to the door, and when I went inside, the house looked like it had been ransacked. Broken glass on the living room floor. Photos knocked off the mantel. My mom sobbing in the kitchen.”
My chest aches so intensely that I want to cover my ears like a child so I can’t hear the rest. But I need to know what Ben went through. I need to understand the cause of it all, and why everything went up in flames within the blink of an eye, within a beat of a broken heart.