Page 157 of I Was Always Yours (RCA: Royal Crown Academy)

The words are barely out of my mouth before he slams a hand down on my shoulder and shoves me back into the wheelchair.

“Sit the fuck down,” he growls, guiding the chair down a ramp and towards my car.

“I can drive myself home, thank you. You don’t have to stay.” I say, politely. “Three months ago you probably wouldn’t even have used the epipen.”

He tenses, pausing as he opens the passenger. His back is coiled tight as he turns around to face me. A raindrop hits his face and slides down his cheek as he stares at me with depthless eyes.

“You have no idea how wrong you are.” He says, shaking his head.

“If you think I’m going to let you leave me like this, you don’t know me at all, wild girl.”

The words filter from out of nowhere into my consciousness like invisible ink being revealed under a warm light. They stun me.

The way his voice shook when he spoke, the fear in his words, the use of the nickname he hasn’t used since we were kids.

He was terrified of losing me, that much is clear all of a sudden.

It starts raining in earnest as he picks me up and places me into the passenger seat. He shuts the door and I exhale a shaky breath, my head falling against the seat as I watch him return the wheelchair.

If he feels even half as strongly about me as those words made it seem, then why can’t he open up to me? I don’t get it.

He gets in the car and I stare at the side of his face as he pulls out of the parking and starts driving home. He turns his head slightly and meets my gaze, his eyes questioning why I’m staring at him.

“At some point, you’re going to have to decide if you want me or not. You can’t walk out on me one day and then act like my doting fiancé the next.” I stare out the window at the falling rain. “I thought we were done.”

He waits a couple of beats before answering.

“Couples fight, don’t they?” He asks.

I turn back towards him. “Is that what we are? A couple?”

He places his left hand on the wheel as his right reaches out to gently stroke my cheek. His eyes soften as he touches me, his lips parting on a soft sigh.

“Yeah.”

My fingers close around his wrist, pulling his hand away from me.

“Real couples open up to each other.”

He doesn’t answer and we drive in silence the rest of the way back to my apartment, the sound of the rain hitting glass the only noise permeating inside the car.

He parks and the doors automatically unlock. I unbuckle and reach for the handle but he presses a button on his side and locks my door.

“I couldn’t say his name for years after he died.”

I turn slowly back towards him, my throat already tight based on those ten words. His body is half turned to face me, his arm placed on the steering wheel as his head rests in his hand. His eyes are far away, like he’s traveling back in time.

“I thought about him every day. Every time I saw someone my age with blond hair, every time someone asked me if I had any siblings, every time I got a B on homework I knew he would have gotten an A on.” He chuckles softly. “Every day, hundreds of little triggers that reminded me of him, that made me chant his name in my head so repetitively, it almost sounded like a song.” He pauses and looks out the window.

“But when it came to saying it out loud it felt like putting a gun up to my temple and asking me to press the trigger. Like saying his name would open up my very own Pandora’s box and reveal all the shit I’d been carrying since he died. My mum’s drinking. My dad’s hostility and resentment. My hatred of you. My grief. My general sense of being unanchored and lost in a world where I didn’t have him or you.”

“So, I buried him in the same box inside me where I buried you, and I stuffed it far away, under so much shit, so that I would never have to think about it again.”

He looks back at me and a small, sad smile curls the corner of his lips. “But I know now that you can’t try and manipulate fate like that, because four years ago when you sauntered back into my life like you’d never left, like I’d never pushed you out, so did the memories of him. I started being able to talk about him with Rogue and Rhys, to let myself think of him and look at pictures of us. It’s been slow going, but it’s been nice.”

He clears his throat. “But you and him, that’s still hard for me to talk about, even to this day. So, it’s not that I didn’t want to talk about it, it’s that I couldn’t, not with you. After today though, I realized that I’m holding on to things that don’t matter. Because I almost lost you and all of a sudden I was back there, learning about Astor’s death. Except somehow this was worse, because it was you.”

His hand is back on my cheek and this time I let him.

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