Page 61 of The Very First Night

“You really hurt me,” I say, my voice cracking.

Elijah nods. “I’m sorry.”

“Wow, twice in one day.” I notice the bite in my words, but I do my best to own them fully. He doesn’t deserve my kindness, even if it’s my natural instinct to give it to him.

It’s a weird feeling, the cognitive dissonance that is necessary to love someone who you also hate deeply. How does that even work—is it really that there is still love there, or is it just the memory of who I thought he was?

God, I need to get a new therapist.

“Can we be adults about this?” he asks.

Yeah, fuck no. This man doesn’t deserve my kindness.

“Get out of my room.” I try with the little might I have in my body to be stern, unmoving, as I point to the door behind me, but he doesn’t move. “I said get out.”

“We need to talk.”

“We talked.”

“You’re not listening to me!” He raises his voice.

“What? Can’t handle me not doing as I’m told?” Crossing my arms over my chest, I hold my ground.

“That’s not what I fucking meant and you know it. You’re twisting my words.”

“No, I’m really not. Get out.”

“You’re acting like a child.”

“Don’t care.”

“Please.” Elijah’s voice breaks through the tense air, pleading and desperate. He reaches out and takes my hand in his, his grip gentle but firm.

My mind tells me to pull away, to not give him a chance, but I’m frozen in place. It’s as if his touch is a spell over me, rendering me unable to move or speak.

“Fine,” I snap, “talk.”

He doesn’t let go of my hand, nor does he say anything. I just stand there, my hand in his, as he looks down at me.

Then he says, “I’m sorry. I don’t say that as a means to manipulate the situation or get you to talk to me; I’m just sorry. I was horrible last semester.” As if he expects me to provide him with some sort of comfort, he pauses. However, when I don’t say anything to reassure him, he keeps going. “I should have talked to you. I’ve never been good at that—talking. When everything happened on spring break with my parents, I freaked out. It wasn’t right, but it’s true. I didn’t know how to handle it, so I didn’t. I should have. I’m sorry.”

“Did they know about me?”

“Huh?”

“Did your parents know about me when that happened? Because it didn’t seem like it.” Understatement of the fucking year. His dad’s words are still seared into my brain when all I’d like to do is scrub that day from my memory.

Elijah sighs. “Kat, don’t do that.”

“Do what?”

“Make it into a bigger issue than it was. It wasn’t about that.” As if those are the exact words I need to grow a goddamned back bone, I yank my hand away. “Kat, c’mon.”

“No. You don’t get to talk to me like that. Like you get some kind of ownership of what happened.”

He glares at me, the loving and pleading man from before nowhere in sight. “You changed.”

I know he sees it as a bad thing—like the summer from hell that he so graciously gifted me by leaving campus without a word ruined me but somehow wasn’t his fault.

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