Page 112 of Our Hearts Knew Better

“You have something I used to see in mine when I looked in a mirror.”

Deadeyes? I’m not dead. I’m…overwhelmed. By more than I can handle.

I sigh, remembering how easily I would chat up strangers, revealing my wounds, telling them my dreams and desires. “You ever just…not want to be alone again?” I start tothisstranger, my stare drifting past her shoulder toward the break area, finding…more strangers.“Not want to hurt again? Want tostophurting?”

Greta follows my stare, one turn, before she looks back at me, her blue eyes studying me closely. “I know keeping your heart guarded cages you.”

Don’t I know that too.“We know the same thing,” I say with a wet laugh, my emotions spilling up into and saving my dry mouth.

“This is what I did when I didn’t want to hurt anymore.” She lifts both her arms, and when I look down, I see two thick scars, one down each of her wrists.

Not a joke.

“I’m—” I say through a gasp, shaking my head, wondering what kind of hurt this woman knows to make her hurtherself. “I’m not going to do that.” I try to put strength in those words, because they’re true, but I’m still shocked by what she’s just shown me.

She lowers her arms with another snicker. “Well, take it from someone who did. It’s not worth it. It’sreallynot worth it if you’re brought back, and that can happen,” she adds through her smirk. And I’m not sure if it should, but even through hints of her trauma, her seeminglyit’s funny nowway of looking at her past lifts some of the weight of my present and has me smiling again with her.

“Life’s always gonna beat you down,” she continues. “What helped me beat it back was finding someone who fights for me. So that’s what I’m telling you. Find someone who fights. Really fights. Loves every scar. Everything you are. Who you do the same for and who gets you. Picks you up when you can’t get off the ground yourself. You do that for each other because we can’t do this shit alone.”

I swallow hard against the sting in my eyes, knowing someone else who should hear from this woman.

If he’d take the time to listen.

The same someone who isn’t the one Greta just described.

Adam and I aren’t those people for each other, and we won’t be those people for each other again.

That sting becomes a blur, my head and my heart trying to focus on anything but the pain of being completely laid open with that admittance.

And I find it, after a few blinks, on Greta’s left hand, holding the empty cup, and wearing an amethyst diamond and wedding band on her ring finger.

“You married that person,” I state low, swiping the falling tears from my face.

She makes anehface as she looks somewhere past my shoulder. “I can’t blame me.”

My laugh is full this time as I follow her stare now, and she points out the group of three watching the show from a bit higher up, her husband being the one with the dark man bun, standing next to another man, who is the husband to thevery pregnant—Greta’s words—dark-haired woman tucked into his side.

“We know the band.”

I whip her a wide-eyed gasp. “Personally?”

I’ve met someone who knows Kai Colemanpersonally?

Which obviously means I know him now too.

I share a person with Ten Decembers!

“Yeah, and no, I can’t introduce you.”

My chest deflates as I sigh away that next question right there on my tongue. “I wasn’t gonna ask.”

Her smile sayssure you weren’tand she raises her empty cup at me with a step back as if to remind me I’m the reason she has to go grab a new one.

Which she does.

My eyes stay on her back until she passes Levi, his own steps slowing when his gaze connects with mine. He’s holding two cups, one in each hand, and when he stops in front of me, the burn that simmered down roils through my body like a tight and aching heat, and suddenly, I can’t be here anymore.

I can’thang outwith Levi and just be friends.

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