Page 220 of Wrath

Ezra

He turns into the parking lot of Waffle House as he says that, and by the time he’s parked, my stomach’s doing somersaults.

“Dude, that’s a memory.” He laughs, looking surprised. “Did you know I played the cello in high school?”

“No,” I whisper. Tears shimmer in my eyes, making halos around the Waffle House street lamps.

“We spent lots of nights in my room,” he says softly. “Where the cello was. I would hold you from the back, like big spoon. As soon as you would let me hold you, it’s the only thing I wanted, too. Well, not the only thing…”

I try to laugh, but tears just spill down my cheeks.

He leans in and kisses them off. “It’s gonna be okay, angel. If you get your memory back, that’s cool. And if you don’t, we’ll just do everything all new now.”

I swallow and nod, wipe my eyes. “It’s so weird,” I rasp.

“Whatis?” Josh asks softly.

“Not remembering, I guess.” I mess with the hemline of my shirt, feeling like a broken freak.

“It’s kind of weird for me too, but it’s okay. It will really be okay.” I look at Josh out of the corner of my eye, and he adds, “Do you believe that?”

“Do you want that?” I whisper. “Are you sure?”

“I’m so sure. I never stopped loving you, Ez. Ever. All I did since you left was want you.”

He looks like he means it. I lean in and wrap an arm around his shoulders again. He brushes his lips over my temple. “You wanna get the food to go? That way, we can really talk. I’ll fill you in on so much stuff, and you can fill me in, too.”

I nod. Miller leans his head against his seat’s headrest and gives me a crooked smile. “Thanks for finding me.” His voice is just a little hoarse. “I hope it’s worth it.”

“It will be worth it to me. Can you believe that?” I quirk a brow up.

He nods.

We walk to the restaurant’s door, shoulder to shoulder, and while we wait on the food, we sit beside each other in a booth, and Miller rubs his knee against mine. I look at him, at Miller in the flesh, sitting beside me in a Waffle House at 2 a.m., and I just can’t believe it.

It was all real.

“What are you thinking?” he murmurs, leaning his cheek in his hand.

“That it’s real.”

He smiles, all blue eyes and freckles and those soft lips. “It’s so real. You want to ask me some stuff? Or you want me to tell you some stuff? Things we did together?”

I nod, and he takes my hand under the table.

It turns out to be a crazy story. We drive to a trailhead in a wooded neighborhood and eat our waffles in the dark car as he tells me how I tried to kill myself via a train trestle bridge, and how I taunted him for being gay and grabbed his dick on the roof.

When we’re finished with the food, we start down the trail, our eyes catching in the dark, and then our hands. He’s rubbing my hand as he tells me the rest. About my nightmares and the way I fucked with him when he would come to wake me up. He tells me about his seizure, how I took care of him that weekend, but I also said I wouldn’t mess with him again. He got confused, and then things fell apart, and then I got heat stroke or something like it, and he took care of me.

“You wanted to be with me. You were just scared,” Mills tells me. “And now I know why.”

I can’t talk because my throat’s so tight, so I just squeeze his hand and nod.

Apparently I told him I’d been inpatient before, and he saw the pill bottles I had left over from my first stint at Sheppard Pratt.

“Didn’t you think that was weird?” I ask him as we walk back up a hill toward the trailhead where his car is.

“Weird? Nah. I was always worried you would take the pills. Like, overdosing. And I didn’t like the idea of you being alone somewhere, inpatient. So that bothered me too, just to think about it.”

---