Page 125 of Our Hearts Knew Better

His own eyes gloss over, another reflection of us. “It wouldn’t have mattered if I’d bounced back, would it?” he asks, but already resigned to the answer. “You would’ve still left me for him.” There’s a trailingeventuallyin his words. “There was always gonna be something there.” He shakes his head, a purse in his lips that splits apart with his sharp inhale of, “It’s always Levi.”

A familiar ache finds my chest for what I now know, my ownit’s always everyone but me.

“For a long time, Adam, it was you.”

“It wasn’t supposed to be,” he acknowledges, then tries for some lightness, his old way of protection, a smile that appears more like a sneer. “So how pissed are you at me? Really. You know everything, right?”

I nod through another big breath. “Probably as pissed as you also have a right to be at me.”

He holds my stare a moment, then grabs for his bags, and my pulse does a little jump of worry. “While you were gone…I knew what was happening. And I shouldn’t be mad. But I am. I’m mad at every fucking thing.”

“I’m mad too,” I say, both countering him and giving him company with the feeling. “At everything.”

His bags are held at his sides, one foot toward the door, as he tries again for that sneered smile. “We’re all mad here?” He doesn’t wait for me to respond before he starts for the hall.

I start too. “Where are you gonna go?”

Adam stops, stopping me, my body already in this muscle memory to keep some space between us. “Where I should’ve gone,” he says, low, to the hall. “I was going about this wrong.”

My eyes narrow on his back, my pulse doing another little jump. “Adam, what—”

“Don’t worry about it,” he cuts in, on the move.

The part of me that isn’t so tired, so numb does worry about him.

But the part of me that already let him go, I truly acknowledge, my heart having released him the moment I lost him, lets him go now.

“You’ll find your someone,” I whisper, for him, to an empty room.

Levi

I leap up from the steps, where I’m waiting, at the banging of the front door opening, floundering over my feet as I pivot around to Adam.

Just Adam. No Summer.

It’s our minute.

He gives me one look as he keeps his hustle, making off with his things, a snub I half deserve, but I’m on his ass for the half that doesn’t. A half-assed pleaded defense for myself, because this time around, I’m righting a wrong on my heart, the bind he put me in the reason I developed this weak point in my moral compass, that summer the turning point for us.

“Adam,” I say, forgetting my defense as I do, my voice tensed from that bind, still a way of holding everything together, when I already let this one go, this one, where it wasn’t just me gripping the rope.

My best friend has already slipped from me. I finally have my girl. I’m not bound to seventeen anymore.

And I just want him tostop. Stop running. Stop beating himself up before he gets himself beat up. He might not know that’s where he’s heading, but I do. He’s going to end up in harm’s way, because he’sneverbeen above that, somewhere I won’t be able to land both hands on his chest.

“You both got everything you wanted, didn’t you,” he says, like it’s a fact, his own binds in his voice, when we’re stopped at the car, but not stopped enough.

“Not at all,” I say as he opens the back door, his bags a solidthunkby the tire. He sighs as he tosses them on the seat, knowing he’s way off, trying to bluff in narrow-sightedness.

He rests one arm on the top of the door and the other along the roof as he glances at me, his features smoothing out to show the actual fact. There are no winners here. We’ve all lost something we’ll have to carry in our chests for the rest of our lives.

Which leads me back to his with my own sigh.

“I can’t be sorry for being with Summer, but I am sorry you—”

“Then you can stop there,” he cuts in with a step back and a slam of the door. “You’re not sorry for being with Summer. You don’t have to add salt from a different apology.”

We hold stares as I let him remind himself that he made the first cut.

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