Page 4 of Born in the Spring

He wiped at them again. “Are you seeing him?”

My eyes dropped at the question, right as his finally turned to mine. It was a like question plucked from one in our past—do you see him when you look at me?—and back then, when he’d first asked me, he’d meant it literally. I didn’t know how to answer this time, because I’d already answered him.

Jasper wanted me to see him, and I did. I never saw the otherin one of them. They were their own, and they were their own to me.

“Are you trying to see him?” he asked next, and I glanced back up at another pain brought up from the past, that we were all holding to in a way. It was all we had left. It welled Jasper’s eyes again, darkening them with the parts that were only ours. “Because you’ve never looked at me this long.”

I still didn’t know what to say, but he only let the silence settle for a second.

“I always wanted you to look at me like you couldn’t look anywhere else, because I could look at you forever.”

A brush off was on my tongue, something I’d say to keep us light, the small smile I’d give him wavering at the corners, when he’d bare his heart to me. But now, he was baring only hurt, with a shame in his voice I didn’t remember hearing before.

“My brother’s dead,” he scoffed down at his lap, his voice choked and wet through a deepening shame. “And Istillwant to look at you forever.”

He spilled his pain while mine was lodged in my throat. Jasper spoke up. He never hid his feelings. And he never hid how he felt about me. And those feelings were now working against us.

I didn’t hesitate again to reach for him, prying my hand through his clenched fingers as I choked back, “I’m so sorry, Jasper.”For everything.

His hand shifted like he was trying to fully take mine, but it was a move to pull away again, leaving my fingers cold.

“And you’re doing that with me now, because you can’t look at him,” he added, before I could recover from him making the distance between us feel even bigger.

I couldn’t face the slope, but that wasn’t why I was facing him.

“I’m doing that because I want you to look back,” I said, a plea, a release of the weight. “You’ve barely talked to me. . .” I trailed at the lift of his gaze, out toward the slope, then he flinched away, back at his lap.

“You know this is my first time wearing a suit,” he went on, a sad statement that I was half relieved to hear, because he was talking. And thatwasa first. He never cared to wear one. “I thought the only way Shepherd could get me into one of these things was when. . .” He trailed now, and my instant response came through another breath, a jump to the only place I could land, the words like an attack on me, blindsiding my thoughts.

“When he got married?”

Jasper shook his head, the motion getting faster as the flinch returned to his eyes, then touched the rest of his face. “I would’ve died instead that day.” His tone was weak with the words, but the hitch in my heartbeat wasn’t.

“Jasper.” His name was a gasped scold past my lips.

“You heard the story they’re running,” he said back, going on before I could recover again. It was another sad statement, this one an attack on my conscience as I thought about it.

The story that had gone out to the public was Shepherd had a stressed ankle and he got back on the board too soon. Their parents’ doing. Even Amie approved concealing the facts. The part of it they knew. They didn’t know the real reasonwhy, and the next questions from Jasper were an answer to my suspicions. He didn’t know why, either.

“Why was he drinking? Why was he so upset? Why did he do it? Why didn’t I stop him?”

One plea after the other to understand, more hits to myconscience, until the last one, a hit at his.

“I could’ve stopped him,” he whispered through the guilt I didn’t want him to carry.

“I could’ve stopped him,” I stressed through a whisper back, the first time speaking of my own guilt. It ripped at me, and I had to leave it there before it ripped at me more.

“You weren’t even there,” Jasper argued, his tone soft, trying to free me of fault.

But I was there. I was the reason Shepherd was drinking that night.

But it was personal. To us, and now just to me. It was painful. And it was complicated. It hadn’t even begun to make sense in my own head yet, and I was now alone with it.

“It wasmewho was there.Mewho should’ve—” His voice broke off right as I cut in to try to fix this.

“It’snotyour fault, Jasper.”

He shot up off the bench, and as he started past me, I waited for his hand. Him not reaching for mine was the thought that overtook me in the couple seconds he rounded the bench and kept walking. Flashes of when we’d sit together—on the floor at night in the main lodge flashing the most—and him getting up first, holding out his hand, and me slipping mine in. It was a touch he wanted and a touch I gave him, but he’d release me once I was standing, a longer hold, in those situations, an intimacy reserved for me and his brother.

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