Page 69 of Came the Closest

“Colton, about last night—”

He holds up a silencing hand. “Let me make one thing very clear to you about last night, Cheyenne. I don’t regret the kiss. I regret letting it happen like that.”

Confusion creases my brow. “What do you mean?”

“Fini, if you think I didn’t want to kiss you, that I wouldn’t have continued kissing you if we hadn’t been interrupted, you’re wrong,” he says evenly. “But I can’t let anything happen between us when there’s so much…” He pauses. His gaze flits heavenward, as if the sky can form words for him. “When we have no clarity.”

When I don’t know what we are.

“I’m not good at this, Fini. I’m not good at expressing myself with nothing but words.” He stops and shakes his head. Frustration chafes at the edges of his movements. “I wanted to buy you flowers or paints because they speak for themselves. Because they’d mean something to you.”

I fold the flyer and tuck it halfway under my thigh. I shift my body enough to look him directly in the eye. “Try me.”

“What?”

“Try me,” I repeat, more firmly. “Use your words. It doesn’t have to make sense, Collie. Tell me everything you’re thinking. Tell me what you’re feeling. I’m your best friend, right?” My smile wobbles around the corners. “You can tell me anything.”

Uncertainty tightens his mouth. An errant curl blows across his tanned forehead when he shakes his head, and he blows a soft exhale through his nose. When the words finally come, he really does just spill every last thought.

Unfiltered and unorganized and uncertain as they are.

It’s beautiful.

“Sitting in rush-hour traffic today, I thought about how I’ve never walked into a coffee shop where the barista knew my order just from facial recognition. Because I frequent the coffee shop, not because of my career. We don’t know more than what can be deduced in the two-minute ordering time, just that she wears a lot of bracelets, and I don’t ever change my order. But here, two of the baristas are my brothers’ partners. I would know that one of them reads when there’s a lull in customers, and one sets a double chocolate muffin back for my niece every Monday.

“That made me think about how this summer is the longest I’ve been in one place for almost a decade and a half. I like it even though I don’t think I should. Because what if I don’t like it when I have the choice to leave again?” He pauses only long enough to take a much-needed breath. “Then I thought about how I’ve never had a mailing address of my own. When I order something I always have it shipped to Graham’s house. But when I asked Gran to order the most ridiculous mushroom themed thing she could find as a wedding gag gift, I asked her to ship it here. Which made me think about how I’ve never kept a post office key in my truck. I’ve never walked in and opened the same little metal box for days, weeks, and years. Never thought there might be something exciting waiting in there for me. But even the thought of junk mail seems thrilling because I’ve never even had that, not to an address with my name on it.

“I think that, if I didn’t like to swim so much, I wouldn’t have taught Milo to swim. If I hadn’t taught him to swim, I wouldn’t feel more attached to him every time we go swimming. I wouldn’t poke his Pillsbury dough belly and I wouldn’t read the same book with him every single night. But I wouldn’t trade those memories for anything, and that scares me, because I’m not like Jordan is with Jolene. I’m not whole or complete or really even that stable, Cheyenne, so what if he eventually realizes that I’m maybe even more broken than his mother—our mother—was?

“Because the truth is that I’m just like my father and I’m just like my mother, and they were two very different people. They weren’t opposites attracting, they were opposites detracting. And even if I want to be different, I don’t know how to be. I don’t…” He squeezes his eyes closed and turns his face away. “Never mind. I doubt any of that even makes sense.”

He turns to face the sun, away from me, but the light is too much, because he then hangs his head. His chest heaves and his eyes squeeze tightly closed, his hands trembling in his lap and his jawline quivering.

“You don’t what, Colton?” I ask softly.

He shakes his head. He wants to run. I sense it in the tense line of his shoulders and in the way he shifts away from me. If it were up to him, he would have been in his truck already, taillights fading out of town.

But he’s not. He’s sitting still.

“Colton, you—”

“I don’t know how to love you, Cheyenne,” he rasps. Tortured eyes meet mine, those lake water irises clouded with fear. “I don’t know how to love you, or Milo, or anyone else. That’s the truth. Even if I want to, even when I do love someone, I don’t know how.”

And there it is—the truth he’s been running from his entire life.

“Colton.” I lift my hand to his face. I brush my thumb softly across the dark whiskers on his jawline and over the puckered scar near his lips. “You don’t have to know how. You just have to be willing to try.”

If not for me holding him steady, he would have shaken his head again. Vulnerability and denial are battling for control; they wage war in his drawn expression and well the tears in his eyes.

“What if I fail you, Cheyenne? What if I’m no better than—” Air empties from his lungs, and he sucks in sharply. “What if I’m no better than Stephen?”

“Colton Del Ray,” I say firmly, fighting tears. “You are not him. Do you hear me?”

He doesn’t. His breathing is shallow, and he says, “What if we get almost there? What if we come the closest, and it’s still not enough?”

“What if,” I counter, dipping my head to meet his eyes, “we are more than enough?”

He doesn’t have another comeback. I wish he could see himself the way I do, but I can’t make him. He has to make that decision for himself, and I’ll wait, even if it nearly kills me.

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