29. Buzz
BUZZ
NOW
“How do I ever trust you again?”
The question filled the room like smoke, taking the oxygen with it.
It moved through the quiet with nowhere soft to land.
Not on the couch where I had just kissed her until my whole body forgot the last eight years.
Not against the windows, where the frozen lake sat black and still beneath the snow.
Not in the firelight, or the old championship photo on the mantel, or the two abandoned glasses of bourbon sweating slowly on the low table.
It settled over me instead.
On my skin.
In my clothes.
In my lungs.
Lucy sat two feet away from me with her glasses back on and her mouth still swollen from mine, looking at me like she had finally run out of places to hide the hurt.
One tear clung to her lower lashes. Her hands were folded tightly in her lap, fingers locked together so hard the knuckles had gone pale.
I wanted to reach for her. That was the first thing my body wanted. The stupidest thing. The easiest thing. Put my hands on her face. Pull her close. Tell her I would never hurt her again like wanting something badly enough could become proof.
But the whole reason we were sitting there broken open at two in the morning was because I had spent too much of my life trusting instinct when I should have learned how to stay still and listen.
So I moved away. I shifted back on the couch until my shoulder no longer angled toward hers. Until there was clear space between us. Until my hands were on my own knees, empty and visible and not asking for anything.
Lucy’s eyes flicked down to the space I had made, then back to my face. The tear fell then, quiet and clean, sliding beneath the edge of her glasses and down her cheek.
It nearly killed me. “I don’t know,” I said.
Her mouth parted slightly.
The answer sounded too small for the size of what she had asked. I knew that the second it left me. I had been asked for a bridge and given her one broken board. But it was true.
I dragged one hand through my hair, then stopped because I could feel the old panic moving in.
The need to fill silence. The need to make the room easier.
The need to talk until I found the version of myself that could survive her looking at me like that.
“I don’t know how you trust me again,” I sighed.
“Not tonight. Not because I give you the right answer. Not because I explain something and expect that to undo what I did.”
Dottie snored softly at the far end of the couch, unaware that the entire shape of my life had narrowed to the distance between Lucy’s knees and mine.
Lucy looked toward the fire. “Explain what?”
I had thought about this moment for years in different ways.
In flashes that caught me when I was tired or drunk or driving roads I had no business taking.
I imagined telling her there had been a misunderstanding.
I imagined the relief in her face. I imagined anger, maybe.
Questions. An argument. Some sharp, terrible, honest thing that ended with the truth finally standing between us instead of the lie my silence had let grow.
I had never imagined how brutal it would feel to understand that the truth was not enough. I looked at the fire because looking at her was too much, then made myself look back anyway.
“Samantha,” I said. “My second cousin, technically, but my family doesn’t really split hairs once somebody has shown up to enough holidays.
” My voice sounded rough, scraped raw from somewhere deeper than my throat.
“She got a migraine at Mase’s party. Bad one.
Noise, lights, the whole thing. I was trying to get her meds and get her somewhere dark before she got sick. ”
Lucy blinked once. No gasp. No visible collapse. No easy release of eight years of hurt because I had finally handed her a fact that should have mattered that morning on her porch. Her face only tightened.
I kept going because stopping felt cowardly and continuing felt like digging with my hands. “It wasn’t what you thought.”
The words came out exactly wrong.
Too thin.
Too familiar.
Too late.
Lucy gave a small, broken laugh and looked down at her hands. “Right.”
“Luce.”
“No, that’s—” She pressed her lips together, and another tear slipped down her cheek. She wiped it away fast, almost angry at it. “That’s great. That’s really great, actually. Good. Wonderful. I spent years thinking you cheated on me at a graduation party, but it was your cousin with a migraine.”
“She’s my cousin,” I groaned, because apparently some terrible part of me thought repetition might help. It didn’t. “And I should have said that then.”
Lucy stood sharply, like sitting beside me had turned the cushion to lava. Dottie lifted her head, ears half-cocked, but Lucy did not look at her. She crossed the living room with one hand pressed over her mouth and stopped behind the kitchen island.
The island became a wall. Stone and air and eight years of damage between us.
I stood too, but I stayed on my side of the room. Near the couch. Near the fire. Hands at my sides, every muscle begging me to close the distance and every decent part of me finally understanding that closing distance was not the same as fixing anything.
Lucy gripped the edge of the island. Her shoulders lifted once, then fell. “If it was just your cousin,” she barked, and the word just broke in the middle, “why didn’t you fight when I asked you to?”
There it was.
Not the hallway.
Not the closed bedroom door.
Not Samantha.
Me on her porch in the morning sun with no sleep in my body and fear where my spine should have been.
I swallowed, but my throat stayed tight. “Because I was eighteen and scared and stupid.”
“You stood there,” she said. Her voice rose, then snapped back down like she had grabbed it with both hands.
“I asked you. I gave you the chance. I stood there and I asked you how any of us were supposed to survive the distance if I couldn’t even trust you for one night, and you—” Her breath caught. “You said maybe it was for the best.”
I closed my eyes.
For half a second, I was there again. The porch boards. The morning light. Her bare feet. The old sweatshirt swallowing her frame. The way she had looked at me like I was the last door in a burning house and she was still begging me to open.
Maybe this is for the best. The worst sentence I had ever said. The biggest lie I had ever made sound reasonable.
“I thought it would be easier,” I admitted.
Lucy went quiet. The kind of quiet that made every sound in the house seem too loud. The fire. The furnace. The soft click of Dottie’s nails as she shifted on the couch.
“Easier,” Lucy repeated.
“That’s not what I mean,” I stammered quickly, because I heard how it sounded.
Like I was trying to rescue myself from responsibility.
Like I wanted credit for suffering from the wound I made.
“I mean, I thought if you hated me then, if you left for Aldenmere angry enough, it would be easier for you than months of trying to hold on while I was in Fargo and you were in Boston and everything kept hurting worse. I thought we were going to break anyway.”
Her hand left the island as if the surface had burned her. “So you broke us first.”
“Yes,” I said.
“You didn’t give us the chance to try,” she whispered.
“I know.”
“No.” She shook her head once, curls shifting around her face.
“No, I don’t think you do. Because you got to turn it into some terrible, noble thing in your head.
You got to decide it would hurt less if I hated you.
You got to decide that breaking my heart was better than waiting to see if I would survive loving you from far away. ”
“You’re right,” I sighed. “I don’t get to decide what hurts less for you. I don’t get to decide what you can handle. I don’t get to make walking away sound like love because I was too much of a coward to stay in the fight.”
A tear slid down her cheek. This time she did not wipe it away.
The firelight caught in her glasses, hiding her eyes for one second, then revealing them again. Wet. Devastated. Still standing.
My girl had always been small enough that people underestimated the amount of strength packed into her bones.
She had been strong that morning too. I was the one who had not been.
“I should have told you about Samantha,” I stammered on.
“I should have pushed past you cutting me off. I should have said her name. I should have explained the migraine and the room and the meds and every single part of it until you believed me or didn’t.
But even if you had believed me then, I still would have had to answer for the rest.”
Lucy drew a shaky breath.
“I let you walk away,” I whispered. “That is the part I don’t know how to forgive myself for.”
Her face crumpled for one second before she caught it. “You said you loved me.”
“I did love you.”
“That’s not enough.” She sounded eighteen again when she said it.
“I know.”
“No, Ty.” Her voice broke this time. Fully. The sound hit the kitchen and seemed to make the whole house bow around it. “I believed you. That was the part that broke me. I believed you loved me, and you still left. Do you understand what that did to me?”
Standing here with the years between us finally stripped of all the excuses I had built around them, I understood more than I had ever let myself understand. Not all of it. But I understood enough to know that loving her had not protected her from me.
“I’m sorry,” I whispered. The words were too small. I knew that. But they were the only ones I had that did not try to dress the wound in something prettier. “I’m so damn sorry, Luce.”
She covered her mouth with one hand. Her shoulders shook once, hard. Not a sob. Not yet. Something quieter and worse, like her body had taken a hit and refused to go down.
I wanted to walk around the island.
She lowered her hand. “I hate that it was your cousin.”
That startled a breath out of me. “What?”