Chapter 37
Thirty-Seven
Scarlett
23 Years Old
Remembering her past with Colin was one thing, but rehashing it was another altogether. She didn’t want the song and dance of why it didn’t work out, despite the literal song and dance she was in the middle of with Colin’s hands on her hips. The conversation was moving into dangerous territory, one that would definitely leave her crying and doubting her ability to trust anyone. Their breakup hurt bad enough the first time. There was simply no point in reminiscing on the details of what she used to think was the best night of her life.
“As it turns out, Maryland was actually devoid of sex,” Colin said, bringing her back to the present.
She shouldn’t have been shocked that that was the commentary he was going with to remember their time on prom night and the morning after. While she was thinking of how naive her younger self had been to believe that she would get to brush her teeth beside the love of her life every morning, Colin was reminiscing on how they didn’t have sex in Maryland as planned. It shouldn’t have made her bitter, but she had had enough, so she pulled away from his arms.
“I’m going to check on the silent auction forms.” When Colin moved to follow her, she pressed a hand to his chest to stop him, the barest prick of a tear starting to form in her waterline. “ Alone .”
He froze in his spot and flicked his eyes over her face. “Scarlett?” he asked, incomprehension written so clearly into the groove between his eyebrows. “What did I do? I thought we were having fun remembering.”
“It’s never going to be fun for me to remember a lie, Colin,” Scarlett snapped, her voice a little louder than she would have liked. Her head jerked around the room to see a few faces looking in their direction, and her cheeks heated. “I just need… a moment.” The word she landed on felt underwhelming compared to all the moments she wanted back. All the moments she wanted to forget, to not care about any longer. All the moments she didn’t get to have because nothing had ever been real. She managed to make it to the exit on quick feet before her vision was truly blurred from the tears, calling out a quick “I’m fine” to Harper and shooing her away as she made a break for it.
It was raining when Scarlett made her way outside, racing down the stairs to the cobblestone path leading up to the community center. Tears streaked down her face as she mentally berated herself. When would the ache in her chest finally stop? Even when it was manageable, it was still there, ready to hurt her all over again. She wiped at her face in irritation, sniffing and looking up at the sky as if to shout at it for making this night worse. If there was ever a time the weather deserved a “fuck you,” it was now. Well, now and also during every natural disaster that had ever happened, but she was the natural disaster this time around. She knew full well that she shouldn’t have accepted a dance with an ex-boyfriend she had never fully gotten over. An ex-boyfriend who had looked at her when she was crumbling and taken a hammer to her heart anyway.
“Scarlett.” She almost thought she had imagined Colin’s voice, she was so in her own thoughts, until she saw him at the other end of the cobblestone path. Standing there, his hands in the pockets of his long coat.
“What?” Her voice was exasperated and raw as she wiped at her face. “What more could you possibly want from me, Colin?”
“Want from you?” he asked incredulously. “I-I just want to fix whatever I did, Scarlett! I want to know how the fuck I made you cry again so I can figure out how to stop doing that.”
“Well.” Scarlett sniffed. “You had no problem making me cry five years ago.”
Colin ran a hand through his hair and closed his eyes, misery washing over his features. “I didn’t like it then, either.”
“It’s fine. I shouldn’t be crying, anyway.” She turned away from him as the rain picked up.
“Let me give you my jacket,” he urged, stepping forward and pulling his arms out of the sleeves. All she responded with was a petulant shake of her head. “It’s cold, Scarlett. Your dress is beautiful, but it doesn’t even cover your shoulders.”
“You’re the one who doesn’t like wet clothes,” she reminded him. “Put it over your head like an umbrella, and maybe you won’t get wet.”
The fight on Colin’s face lasted longer than she thought it would given the discomfort forming in his features. Wet clothing irritated his skin, and he couldn’t control that any more than he could control his reaction to loud sounds. For some reason, watching him give in and hold the jacket above his head gave her a small bit of relief. The relief didn’t show, however, because a shiver wracked her body, a clear tell that she was cold. It wasn’t at all warm out, and she should have thought twice about leaving the gala with her jacket still on the back of her chair. She would deserve an award if she could make it home with her jacket instead of absentmindedly leaving it here.
“Stand with me, at least. Your teeth are chattering.” Colin stepped toward her, and she let him, already feeling his body heat. “I’m sorry,” he whispered.
“You’re sorry,” Scarlett repeated, as if the words had no meaning at all. If she was being honest, coming from Colin, she wasn’t sure they did.
“I upset you. I don’t know how, but it doesn’t matter, because I did.”
“I’ll get over it.”
Colin shifted the jacket to better cover her. “Get over what? What did you mean when you said you don’t like remembering a lie? What part of that memory was a lie to you?”
“All of it,” Scarlett whispered, shaking her head.
“Was it because you didn’t come with me to Maryland?”
“It was because you never loved me.” Her voice was barely a murmur at this point, scared to be near him and scared to move away. A violent shiver zapped up her spine when Colin stepped in so close his face was only a few inches from hers.
His eyelashes fluttered shut and fanned out over his cheeks as his face wrinkled with a pained expression. “Is that really what you think?”
“I don’t want to think about it at all.” She was putting up a hard boundary, and she set her hand on his chest in a stop position to make it clear.
Colin’s eyes flew open, ripping down to where her hand was. Scarlett swallowed and went to pull it away, only for Colin to drop one side of his jacket in favor of grabbing her wrist and placing her hand back on his chest. Inside the community center ballroom, she was safe, and she didn’t have to worry about touching that went beyond dancing. Now that she was alone with him, the line felt blurred, and touching him felt terrifyingly personal. His heartbeat felt familiar under her fingertips.
Colin readjusted the jacket, still holding it over his head. “I like it when you touch me. I feel less unsettled.”
It was typical that while he could feel comfort from her touch, what she felt was more complicated, confusing, and definitely unsettling. There shouldn’t be a flip in her chest where there once was, and she felt almost guilty at its presence, like it was a betrayal to her younger self, who had gone through torture to get over him. The years of agony she had endured before she knew she didn’t need him to make her place in the world. But having him here now felt electric. To feel so loved despite knowing that Colin would never love her and never did. With his gaze on her lips in the present, she decided what he must have been feeling was pure lust, and they had had plenty of memories to fuel those thoughts.
“Tell me I can’t kiss you, Red.” She must have stepped even closer to him, because his lips were so close that his breath was dancing across her nose. His eyes were closed again, but he had clearly bent down a bit to reach her. She wasn’t short, but he still had height on her.
“You can’t kiss me.” The words came out low and sultry, the antithesis of what they meant. but Colin nodded and opened his eyes again, straightening his spine to pull back just as Scarlett rose to her tiptoes. “But I can kiss you.” Her face tilted up in time to catch the surprise on Colin’s face before her lips crashed into his.
He swayed into her, the heat of his body molding to hers and his mouth slanting harder against her lips. It was everything at once. A roiling fear in her bones that said she shouldn’t be kissing him. A fire licking up her spine and combating the chill, telling her to keep going, to take anything she could from him.
The warmth of his tongue slid along the seam of her lips, and she opened to him, gasping into his mouth and begging for every kiss with her body. It had been so long since she had had this—not just a good kiss, but that indescribable feeling that felt like freefalling while rooted to the ground. Their first-ever kiss five years ago had that feeling, despite it being awkward and hesitant. There was no hesitation now, though, as Colin dropped his hands so his jacket cocooned them together in darkness. His mouth was greedy, biting and sucking on her bottom lip as she frustratedly kissed him back. She wanted it to be awful. She wanted her hands to not know to grip his arms tighter because he liked the pressure. She wanted that dull ache in her core to stop spreading for him. It shouldn’t be this good. It shouldn’t make her feel alive. His fingers tangled in her hair and splayed across her back shouldn’t feel so right when everything about this was wrong.
A soft beeping noise Scarlett at first thought she had imagined was what finally pulled her free from him for a moment. “Ignore it,” Colin said, kissing her again.
“What—”
“My watch,” he mumbled against her neck, dragging his lips down her throat.
“Your… watch?” she asked breathlessly, the feeling of his lips against her skin further distracting her.
“Mm-hmm,” Colin hummed, muffled by her collar bone. One of his hands moved to cup her breast, and she leaned into it, gasping in desperation. When she finally looked down to see the glowing face of the watch on his groping wrist, she giggled at the illuminated message there: a high heart rate notification, alerting Colin that his pulse had unexpectedly spiked. The spark of joy she got from seeing that felt juvenile, maybe because the last time she had felt this way was when she was eighteen.
Sometimes her past felt like a faded sepia-toned memory she could never replicate on canvas. But now, as her past and present collided, everything was in screaming color. Red: her nickname and her underwear once folded neatly on a nightstand. Blue: eyes that slid over her body like the rainwater. Pink: the heat sprouting across her cheeks as he leaned harder into her just as he had done every time before. Green: the ivy climbing up the brick wall behind them and the color of her chemistry binder back in high school. Black: the darkness behind her eyelids and the depression she had slipped into when he left. Gold: the dress she was wearing now and the joy she had to find without him.
“How are you better than I remember?” Colin groaned. “God, I missed this.”
And that was all it took. I missed this . This, not her. Sex was still the driving force for him, and she had deluded herself into thinking that she was more than that, even for just a moment. Not just something to put his hands on. Not just someone to warm his bed when he was bored or sad.
She shoved him off her and untangled herself from his jacket. “I can’t do this.”
Colin came out from under the cocoon, too, letting it fall to the cobblestone below. “Red?” he asked, his confusion evident in the disoriented way he looked around for an answer.
“Don’t call me that,” Scarlett practically shouted.
“I’m sorry.” Both hands raised in surrender, he stepped forward, a worried expression replacing the confused one. “Did I hurt you?”
It was a loaded question, because if he meant physically, of course the answer was no, but in every other way, he had practically broken her.
“I can’t be your little experiment again.” Her voice cracked.
Colin’s jaw dropped open slightly, working with an inward thought. “We don’t need to do the experiment again. We know what we like.”
Tears came in full force again. “What I like is when the person I’m sleeping with actually likes me back. I want to be in love, Colin. I deserve that, and you aren’t going to give it to me.”
“Why not?” Something resembling a flash of anger passed through his eyes, and his voice rose. “I’m not allowed to love you because I’m autistic? Is that it? I’m not good enough for you?”
“You aren’t allowed to love me because you don’t!” Scarlett shouted.
His arms flexed at his sides, nose scrunching in clear frustration. “I loved you then, and I love you now. Not a single thing has changed.”
The fat tears rolling down her face picked up speed as her dress started to soak through in the rain. “No, you don’t.”
“Yes, I do.” Colin’s voice was all sincerity, but it didn’t matter how true it sounded when she knew the real truth and had witnessed it firsthand. “I never said I didn’t love you, Scarlett.”
“In all the ways that mattered, you did,” she whispered.
“No.” He adamantly shook his head as if he could erase everything he had said back then. She wished he could so she could forget, too. “You know me. I say exactly what I mean. I know what I feel and what I’ve felt since I told you on Prom night five years ago. I love you.”
Righting her dress and sniffing back more tears, Scarlett straightened her spine and willed herself to be stronger than the eighteen-year-old girl who had fallen in love so hard and fast that she didn’t ask any questions or expect anything in return. In the strongest voice she could muster, she responded with what she should have said on Prom night and every other time he had ever said those three little words. “I don’t believe you.”
Feet moving her down the cobblestone and back to the gala, Scarlett found what little will she had not to turn around when Colin called after her.
“You will, because I’m staying.”