Page 48 of Our Hearts Knew Better

“You know what you’re doing and you’re still doing it,” I said, with another wipe at my face, my fork clanging to my plate. I pushed myself up and swiped up both plates, my voice almost gone. “Just admit you never wanted me to have a life.” I extended those six words to the ten, because that was easier than saying he never wanted me, period.

“Fine.”

The plates slipped from my hands at the counter and I caught them as I froze, because my dad really just saidfine.

He sighed. “You can handle everything you want to now, so you can handle the truth.” A pause, another sigh, his tone tired. “I never wanted kids. All right? Your mom did, and when she got pregnant with you, I tried to adjust to the idea. Then you were born, and I just couldn’t do it. But you had your mom.”

Until I didn’t.

My knuckles ached around the plates, my chest tight, my entire world water.

“When she died, she left me with you all alone.” He said this like I should have felt sorry for him. “I did everything I could, anything I was equipped to do. You were all I had left—”

A noise sputtered out of me. “Someone you didn’t want.”

“You were all I had left and I did what I thought I had to to protect you—”

“Keeping me to your chest,” I started on a spin, cutting through the conviction of his defense. “Smothering me, just…giving me no room to doanythingwith anyone, neglecting me, ignoring me, not wanting toknowme isn’t protecting me, so don’t say that to me.”

“You were all I had left of your mother,” he said now, but from an actual place of truth or from spite, I didn’t know but could guess, “and I needed some control. Losing my wife was out of my control.” He stressed that loss while losing the slightest control of his voice. “And I wasn’t losing you.”

I laughed, dry and aching. “Then life played a joke on you, Dad, because you lost me too.”

We weren’t hollering at each other. This was worse. We were released. Resigned. Accepting.

He slumped some in his seat with a nod at his laptop screen. “You can stay here.” He sounded tired again. I was just so exhausting for him. “You’ll still have food, clothes, whatever you need, but…”

“Fuck you,” I spat, but it was a blubber, a wet mess. I knew what I said, though, even if he didn’t. And it fueled my next move.

He had a prized wine he kept in the cabinet, and having one more thing to prove, I swiped it, right in front of him, and left him with the sight of whathehad done to me.

Legendary

Levi found me sprawled out on the sole of his dad’s boat, grinning up at the stars, when I was several swallows into the bottle. My limbs, muscles, organs, tissues, veins were all loose as my brain was loopy and lively, my skin clammy and flushed.

“Summer.” He said my name like relief, like he had been searching, and I closed my eyes with my grin as I swayed to the sound.

Then he cursed. Not the one that put a spicy image of us in my head, but it scorched its way in and I laughed, sighing at my hotter flush.

“How deep are you?” he asked, the tips of his shoes pressed into the bare part of my thigh, and I felt him bend down to inspect the bottle in my grip.

I tilted my head toward him, my eyes still closed, my grin stuck. “Not deep right now.”

Then suddenly so deep, emotions, my feelings for this boy, crashing around my heart, magnified, as my breathing picked up between us and I blinked him back into my sight.

Hewasbent down, close, his gaze so intent on my face.

“You knew,” I breathed.

“Good timing,” he said low, and my stomach turned.

“No—it’s not good timing. We know each other. I found you, remember? I find you. And you find me.”

He only looked at me, but there was the flutter in his lids. Then he tapped at the bottle through my finger, the touch springing back my grin. “Just a little more.”

I groaned at the cut off warning, but I’d never had alcohol before, and I didn’t know when to stop. I also felt like I didn’t want to. “Have you been drunk before?”

He nodded with a half smile. “I think it’s every teenager’s rite of passage.”

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