Chapter 30
I got David into bed and crawled underneath the sheets with him. The night was quiet, most of the campus either asleep or abandoned thanks to the upcoming weekend.
David rested his head on my chest, tightly fisting my shirt as he tried to calm his breathing.
“I’m sorry,” he murmured after almost half an hour of silence. “I’m so sorry, Yara.”
I frowned, my heart aching at the pain in his tone. “You have nothing to apologize for.”
“I do.” He held onto me tighter. “I never meant to be like this in front of you.”
“If you can’t be like this in front of me, then who else?” I buried my fingers in his hair, trying to distract myself from the blur of tears in my eyes. “We’re together, aren’t we?”
He remained quiet. The hum of the heater turning on, filling the cracks in between our conversation.
“Aren’t we?” I repeated, feeling a little more desperate as I nudged the top of his head with my nose.
David readjusted, pushing himself up so that his head rested beside mine on the pillow. “I want to be.”
I tucked my hands underneath the side of my face, trying to make out the outline of him in the darkness. “So then, we are.”
“Is it that easy?” He spoke so low I wanted to reach out and touch the curve of his lips to feel the words.
“Why wouldn’t it be?”
“Because nothing ever really is.”
“We could be,” I whispered. “Don’t you think?”
The hope in my voice couldn’t be hidden, nor could my uncertainty. The decade between us had proven one thing and one thing only: we were very good at being each other’s villain.
No hint of fondness had snuck its way in between us until this semester. The ground on which we tread was untested. We couldn’t stake promises here. He was too logical to stake dreams. And I was too cowardly to stake hope.
Instead of answering, David kissed me. It wasn’t hot and desperate like the ones before. This kiss revealed an ache for something deeper, a longing for something that may never come to fruition.
I answered the pressure of his lips with evidence that I wanted him, this, and us, that I would never hold what I saw tonight against him. His pain wasn’t something I stocked up on to be used as ammunition any longer.
“I think this part of me,” he said against my lips. “Will be difficult for you. If you see me like this enough times, you’ll get lost in the dark along with me. We can’t help each other if we’re both lost.”
I shook my head, rejecting his reasoning. “I’d rather be lost together than alone.”
“I’d rather be alone than hurt you anymore than I already have.”
My eyes stung at his confession. “So… what the hell does that mean? Are you… are we…”
David pulled me into his chest. It wasn’t until my cheek pressed against his shirt that I realized my tears had finally shed. The damp cotton softened underneath my confusion.
“Let’s sleep.” David rubbed my back, trying to calm my trembling. “We need rest.”
“I can’t sleep.” I gripped his shirt, pulling it closer to my nose so I could breathe every bit of him in. This may be the last night he let me do it, the last time he let me in.
“I don’t know how you could right now,” I said, resentment sharpening every word on my tongue. “How could you even consider sleep after what you just said?”
“I’m not taking this lightly.” David matched my tone. “I’d never take this lightly—”
“Then why would you say something like that?” I pulled out of his grasp and sat up.
My hands shook as I shoved off the blanket, the heat of the bed too much to manage along with my anger.
“Why would you ever say something like that and expect me to close my eyes and wait for the resolution tomorrow? David, do you understand what you’ve done to me this year?
I can’t wake up without wanting to hear your voice.
I can’t read a book without wanting to know what you’d think.
I can’t laugh without wanting you to do the same. ”
I sucked in a breath, so ashamed at how quickly I’d fallen or how deeply these feelings for him had rooted within my core. Uprooting would take years. Healing the wound would take longer.
“Yara,” David said firmly. He’d sat up too and cupped my cheek, turning me to him.
A sliver of light from outside outlined the edges of his face.
Seeing the hurt in his eyes was as sharp and painful as laying my hand on a burning stove.
“Every part of me belongs to you, which is why the second I heard you on the other side of the door, I needed to be okay. I wanted to be okay because I can’t stand the thought of you feeling like you need to fix me.
I’m not whole, and I can’t expect you to take that on. I’m not worth being with—”
“Stop trying to make the fucking decision for me,” I snapped. “You’re not the smartest in the room just because you can process and accept logic. Just because you can siphon off emotion. And you don’t need to be fixed.”
He shook his head as he brushed away a few rogue tears on my cheek.
“Then tell me I’m broken too,” I challenged.
David frowned and didn’t say a word.
“Go on,” I continued. “Tell me I’m broken. Tell me my anxiety disqualifies me from finding someone who’ll care for me. Tell me my hair-picking makes me impossible to love.”
His jaw ticked, upset over my bait. “You’re not. It doesn’t.”
“Then what makes you so different? So unique that the rules change for you?”
He looked ready to protest, but let out a low, exhausted chuckle. “You won’t ever make this easy.”
“I promised you, remember? I never will.”
Something broke within him at those words. David closed the distance between us, his mouth crashing against mine. We found ourselves on our backs again, legs entangled in the cotton sheets.
“I need you to know that I’m going to give this my all,” he said, breathless and resolute. “And maybe that won’t be enough, but I will do it.”
I didn’t know if he meant us, his recovery from his disorder, or surviving the rest of this season. Either way, I nodded and told him, “I know.”
I woke to the chill of early morning seeping through the windows and the tempting smell of bacon. David stood with his back to me, shirtless, in the kitchen area as he transferred a pancake to a stack. The second I rustled underneath the covers, he looked up.
“Morning.” David’s smile was small, but it lit up his eyes in such a way that they provided far more warmth than the mountain of blankets I was under. He clicked off the burner and stacked one last pancake before coming over.
“I was going to make you something,” I whispered as he crawled back into bed beside me.
“Got to wake up—” He took his time kissing me. I tried to pull back because of my morning breath, but his groan in protest was too convincing. “—earlier than this to beat me to it.”
“How are you feeling?” I pulled back to get a good look at him. An image of him scrubbing away at the sink flashed across my mind. David’s brows tightened, probably thinking of the same thing.
“Be honest,” I told him when he shook his head, ready to brush the question off. “It’s just me.”
He kissed me again, parting my lips gently to offer a hint of tongue. I lay back down with him on top of me, my thighs wrapped around his waist.
“And don’t distract me.” I laughed against his mouth.
“Demands, demands,” he tsked, his body relaxing into mine. “Is this how every morning is going to be with you?”
I stilled at the thought of getting so familiar with David’s bed and feeling like it was as much mine as his. My stomach fluttered, wanting that vision for the future so badly.
“Every,” I said, trying to keep my voice light and gaze without too much meaning. Too much desire.
“Good,” he whispered into my ear before playfully nipping at the lobe and sitting up. “Want me to make you a plate?”
“Only if you talk to me after we eat,” I bargained. “Really talk.”
David brushed his thumb across my chin before nodding and climbing out of bed. “Alright, Daredevil. You win this round.”
“I’ve won them all.”
He chuckled. “What’s this revisionist history?”
“A victor’s right.”
“You mispronounced ‘wrong.’”
I laughed. David came back to bed with one plate, which we shared, and a glass of orange juice for just me.
He cut the pancake into triangles before I could touch it.
And he made sure the bacon stayed out of the syrup.
I kept looking up at him between bites, my mind just now catching up to the fact that I wasn’t just on good terms with someone I’d routinely argued with for years.
I was in bed with him, having breakfast, and wishing time would slow to a stop because the minutes were already moving too fast for my liking.
“What does really talking sound like?” he asked after dumping our dishes in the sink. David came back to bed with a warm, wet washcloth. I froze when he reached for my hand and carefully wiped the sticky parts of my fingers.
“Like you telling me what happened,” I spoke quietly because being too loud could risk waking yesterday’s fears, and I needed them to fall asleep for good. “Why it happened?”
“It’s… a lot goes into it.” He cleared his throat, still focusing hard on cleaning me up.
“I can handle a lot. You’ve seen my family,” I reminded him. “I handle a lot.”
He smiled at me but shook his head. “I don’t know how to do this. Talk to someone I like in a romantic sense.”
“Just start with what Weston couldn’t tell me,” I tried with a gentle squeeze of his hand. “Start with the coaches’ freshman year.”
Red stained his neck, branching up to his cheeks. “Freshman year?”
I nodded. “Just the parts you can share. The parts that aren’t too hard.”
“It’s all hard.” He stopped wiping my fingers, pulling his hands back into his lap where he stared.
I allowed the silence to wash between us, waves lapping up all his hesitation. If it took hours, days, months, or years, I would wait. However long it took for him to feel safe enough, I would wait.
David eventually took a deep breath. He tossed the towel inside his bathroom door and leaned horizontally across the bed.
His gaze was trained on the ceiling as he said, “As a freshman on the football team, you expect a bit of hazing —it’s technically not condoned, but that doesn’t really matter.
Not if no one speaks up. And we’re conditioned not to speak up.
Especially those of us who have little left off that field. ”
I bit my tongue and ran my fingers through his hair, brushing it off his forehead.
He closed his eyes as he continued, sinking himself into a dark world because maybe that made sharing this with me easier.
“There were two particular staff members who fed into it with the senior guys. They were younger, so the line between staff and player was blurred. Lukas was one of them. I was… they were… it was the most bruised I’d been in a long time.
Far worse than anything my aunt’s boyfriend could have done. ”
My gaze flickered to his chest. White scars crisscrossed his skin like the pattern of a chain-linked fence. I remember him telling me not to push him. How it was a trigger. I pressed a kiss to his forehead, and when I pulled away, his eyes were open and on me.
“I didn’t tell anyone for the first few months.” He rubbed a hand over his face. “Very… pathetic.”
“Afraid,” I corrected in a hard tone. “Hurt. Mistreated. Not pathetic, David. Never pathetic.”
“What kind of person stands there and lets someone…” He sucked in a breath and shook his head, no longer meeting my gaze. “Hurt them. Hurt them over and over and over.”
His chest rose and fell more quickly as he spoke. I brushed circles across his cheeks, trying to keep him calm.
“A person who’s trying to survive in the only way they know because they’ve been doing it this way all their life.” I cupped his cheek and turned him back to me. “Being quiet was how you learned to protect yourself. You don’t deserve blame for that.”
“I just wish I could have been better.”
My jaw tightened at the thought of those men taking advantage of their power and wielding that power against the man who lay before me, a man who was brilliant, thoughtful, and vulnerable. The man who’d closed himself off in fear of being hurt again by those he wanted to trust the most.
“You didn’t have a job or a family you could count on,” I said. “No power. No expectations. David, all you should have had to worry about was playing a game you loved and finding yourself at university. You should have been worrying about crappy cafeteria food and shared bathrooms.”
He laughed through the hurt and covered his hand over mine.
“When I look at you, David,” I said. “I see a guy who fought tooth and nail to be here, who didn’t let the external or internal stop him from being extraordinary.
I see a guy who opened himself up to me even though his past told him that was the most dangerous thing to do.
David, I don’t see what anyone did to you.
I see only how incredible you’ve become. ”
“I want to believe that.” He squeezed my hand and kissed the palm. “I really do.”
“You will,” I promised. “One day you will. For now, I’ll believe it for both of us.”