Chapter Eighteen #2
As if she had any choice in the matter. “What are you talking about?” she asked. Thin words, really, for something that felt like the world was peeling back to reveal something utterly harrowing underneath.
“Things I should have made very plain a long time ago, apparently.”
“But none of it even makes sense. I’m a fucking mess, Miller.”
“That’s just another word for actually feeling things.
Actually being human, fuck. Is that what you’ve thought all this time?
That I was just indulging you? Or trying to make you happy at the expense of myself?
I was trying to make up for everything I did.
To show you how I really feel—that it’s okay.
That it’s not a bad thing to be passionate.
To be the way you are. That I wish I was like that—god, what I wouldn’t give to be like that.
Like you were all those years ago, like some great and glorious sun viewed from a prison cell in fucking hell. ”
He made a fist on the end of those words.
Raised, like someone trying to snatch a bullet from the air before it could hit his heart. Though somehow, she didn’t think it was his heart he was wanting it not to hit. It was hers. It was hers. Oh dear god, she knew it was hers.
She even knew where it was from.
She had heard it before, it was from one of his books.
“That’s the dedication at the start of Never Not You,” she said, voice so faint it felt like letting out a breath she hadn’t meant to. And as soon as it was out she wanted to gather it all back. Do everything over, not admit that she knew.
That way he could carry on pretending like he always had.
But didn’t want to anymore.
“Of course it fucking is,” he snarled. Then softer, and softer yet, as the realization of what he was saying seemed to sink through him. Ten years, and here it was. “Of course it is. Of course.”
And now it was her turn to not be able to speak.
She just stared at him, down this endlessly beige hallway. One of a series of them, like all the rest, completely nothing, completely dull. We should be on a cliff face overlooking a crashing ocean while a storm rages, she thought.
Though the wrenching emotional understanding remained the same.
“Oh my god. Oh my god, it’s me,” she said, voice too heartbroken already.
Say no, she thought at him. Say no, say no.
But she already knew he had no way to.
“Who else could it have ever been.”
“But you said you made her up.”
“I lied. I’m a fucking liar. Just another one of my tons of terrible qualities.”
“You don’t have tons of terrible qualities, Caleb, stop saying things like that.”
Too desperate, too loud, too angry, she chided herself.
She couldn’t help it, though. Her heart was being sucked into a howling void.
“That’s what you’re going to be mad at? I just told you about the bullshit I’ve been spinning for the last ten years, and you’re fuming that I maybe think I’m a shitty person?
Wake up, Daisy, I am a shitty person,” he said, while she was still flailing around from the last evil he had just done himself.
She didn’t know how to keep up. She was making mistakes, and knew it.
“Just not telling me you lo—that you liked me does not make you one.”
“Yeah, but that’s not all I did, is it. I also very much did not enjoy the way I felt about you.
And guess what that made me do? Come on, you can work it out.
You do it for a living—figuring out someone’s problem and smoothing it over.
So tell me what my problem was, Daisy. What did I need to make my life easier? ”
Do not go with his framing, she ordered herself.
But dear god, it was hard when he was so fierce. He was bulldozing her now, and she knew it. Getting closer, chest heaving, fists clenched—the works. Full-on trying to force her to accept something, in a way he hadn’t for an age.
And she knew why, too.
The only thing that mattered more to him than her comfort was making himself the bad guy.
“You tried to tell yourself that you were too awful for me, that it was a lost cause, that making yourself vulnerable with me would be a terrible mistake because of those facts,” she tried, and he laughed, he actually laughed.
“Oh no, no, no, don’t give me an out like that.”
“But that’s what it is. That’s the truth.”
“Bullshit. I purposefully made everything you did and everything you said sound rotten, so I didn’t have to suffer a single feeling for you. I crushed you to spare myself,” he said, and oh, he was very close to her now. He was using his height, his shoulders near looming.
And it should have worked.
For a second it almost did. She heard the words and her heart sank. Looked up at him, and sort of quailed. He was, in that one heartbeat, the asshole she had once thought of him as, back in college.
Then she caught that fractured light in his eyes.
The way he was straining, like he had to force himself to stay where he was.
A million tiny details she’d unearthed throughout the journey they’d had together. And now a million more she was remembering. Seeing afresh. The door opening, the restaurants, the music, the affection, all suddenly turned on their heads.
He didn’t do them because he was playing a game. He did them because the game meant he could get away with them, she thought. Then answered, in the rush of feeling that followed.
“But that isn’t true, though, is it. You’re lying. That’s a lie.”
“What do you mean that’s a lie? You know it isn’t.
I’ve seen it in your eyes a million times—that hurt when I dismissed everything you are.
Everything you love. I mean, for fuck’s sake, Emmett, I made you throw away your stories.
You don’t even write anymore. All you do all day every day is fruitlessly try to help dipshits like me. ”
“I stopped writing because I didn’t believe in the things I wrote.”
“Right. Because of me. Because I made you see how thin and mean the world really is. I made you believe that’s all you could ever dream of. Just the cruel reality, and never the possibilities, the hopes, the wonder of what could be.”
“Everything else in my life did that, Miller. You were the only one who didn’t try to.
Because you can tell me this, you can tell me you did it to purposefully hurt me and crush me, but I can see now that you didn’t.
You didn’t do that because you had feelings for me.
You did it because you just didn’t believe in it yourself.
Because you don’t believe in the wonder of what could be. ”
“Oh, gimme a break. That’s not it.”
He snorted, rolled his eyes.
But she saw those eyes return to her, right at the end.
Uncertain, waiting for an explanation he clearly didn’t want to hear.
But maybe he did at the same time. And she had it.
She had it for him. She knew now what to say.
The veil had lifted and there it all was: the truth.
“But Miller, if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have been shocked when I told you on that stage that you’d hurt me.
You would have known you had,” she said.
And he went to say something directly after she had.
She saw him do it—he took a breath, the words were almost out.
Then slowly, slowly they sank back down inside him.
And as they went, she saw the understanding sink through his dark gaze, through his body.
It made his chest hitch; he took a step back.
While her whole world spun on its axis.
“You didn’t think anything you said mattered to me, did you,” she said, and he tried to shake his head.
He tried, but she could see him already failing.
“You thought I was sure of myself, that I was certain I was right, that romance was real and good, okay. That passionate was the right way to be. While you just dwelled in the darkness of being sure it wasn’t, confused how anyone could be like me.
Maybe even wishing you could be the way that I am.
Trying to be. Yeah, I see it. That’s what all your books are, aren’t they.
Striving to get to where I was,” she said, almost outside herself now.
Like someone who could do a magic trick, but only when it wasn’t one that would help her. A million problems for everyone else solved, and she hadn’t even been able to see the solution for herself when it was right in front of her face.
And she was right, too.
“I don’t—” he started to say.
Though she could see he was too caught to pull the rest off.
His gaze seemed to turn inward, like he could grasp it now.
Which of course only made it worse. Her face crumpled before she could hold it in.
And her voice wavered like fuck when she tried to explain.
“Oh god, I’m right, I’m actually right, I’m really right, for the first time I’ve got it right.
You were just drowning and I didn’t get it.
I thought you just hated me, I thought you hated love, and you were just looking for a way into it the whole time,” she said, half of her still caught in the mindset that she must hide her emotions from him.
Half of her knowing she didn’t have to.
He didn’t see the tears streaking down her cheeks and curl his lip.
He seethed at himself. Only ever at himself. “Even if I was I should never have made it your problem.”
“So you’re still going to beat yourself up, then.”
“Maybe I fucking deserve it, did you ever think about that?”
“I think you should fucking see that the only thing that stood in your way was believing you did. Like me, like me always so sure that you found me too much, like everybody else did. Always sure that every word had to be an insult, instead of something that you simply struggled with, that you didn’t think you could be, that maybe you even told yourself you didn’t long for. Until it was too late.”
She put her face in her hands then.