Page 63 of From You to Me

I didn’t want to reopen our past or deal with it.

What Evelyn didn’t know was that my heart always belonged to her and always would. But it was just that I didn’t have a heart anymore. It died the day she left me.

Trusting her again scared me. Deep down, I was terrified because if I fell for her lies once again, this time I wasn’t sure if I would ever be able to get back up.

And fear was an emotion that I no longer associated with.

The man who I was today was not the boy who gave up everything for her.

And I wasn’t willing to go down that road again.

That road already crashed and burned me.

CHAPTER 14

EVY

The gray, gray clouds beckoned me. Gibran Alcocer’s “Idea 15” reverbed through my earphones, going straight to the happy cells in my brain. I couldn’t help the smile that curved up my lips as I watched the pearls of rain sliding down the car window.

A sight so melancholy that brought me nothing but immense joy. Fitting for the city that we coursed through. London—the land of Shakespeare and William Wordsworth, a land of great minds and a land that always rained.

And God, was it beautiful.

A flash of memory floated through my mind.

“Will you take me to London? I want to see the rain there!” I exclaimed, a joyful glee spilling from my lips.

He raised a brow. “You do realize that people go to London to see anything but rain, right?”

“I don’t care about other people. I want to see the rain.” I pouted.

I squealed when he lifted me in his arms and dashed out in the actual rain in front of us.

“Jay, what are you doing?” I shrieked against his hold.

He spun me to him in a heartbeat and cradled my face. “I might not be able to take you to Japan or London to show youthe rain, but one day I will, I promise,” he said, pressing his forehead against mine.

My heart leaped at his words. We were drenched, soaking wet from the cold rain, but none of it mattered because it was just us again.

“I love you.”

We kissed as the rain thundered around us. We didn’t care—we kissed and kissed until there was no me, no him, just us.

I wondered if he remembered the cabin in the woods too.

Pinpricks of awareness shot through the back of my neck; I twisted my head to lock on a piercing gaze that was fixed on me. Almost as if he knew exactly what I was thinking.

My eyes drifted back to the blurring downpour outside, the pristine homes of London wet from the ringing rain.

In a way, he did keep his promise. He was the reason I got to see the rain in London.

It’d been a week since Rome, and things between us had remained strictly professional. The line had been drawn; I might still be the two-faced phony who missed a part of him, but I was also glad. It was a freeing feeling, almost like I was spinning in the air now that the truth was out there.

I’d been carrying that weighted burden for years, wanting to scream it out of my lungs to the one person I thought would care. But he didn’t.

We were so crumbled, destroyed, and dead beyond repair that it was almost impossible to go back to us now. And as bitter as it may be, I had to make amends with that fact. Maybe this was the closure I had been searching for the past six years.

The skid of the car through the gravel halted my thoughts.

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