Page 59 of Our Hearts Knew Better

It’s always one more time.

“Stop hovering,” he says, a grate in his voice that skims at my skin, pausing my opened mouth before I can start trying. He’s on his stomach, staring out toward the balcony. “I’m awake.”

I swallow, prepare my own voice. “Are you getting out of bed too?”It’s just a question.

“I get out of bed.”Defensive, anyway.

“Then get up.” My defense counters his.

“And do what?” he mutters out as he turns the other way, his shift running the sheet down. I’m more familiar with the lines of his back now than I am his face. His longer hair. His shrinking muscle mass. He needs to eat. I need to get the squash.

I inhale a cushioning breath. “Be with me?”

I catch the slightest shift in his shoulders, but he keeps his back to me and his eyes away in silence as he hugs to his pillow. Not to me.

How can I love someone and hate how they are? I’m doing that again now.

“You used to love looking out this glass with me.” I was pulling, always pulling, for him to turn back around, to see me and this life we’ve built, just to be snagged.

“It’s just a view.” Another mutter.

My silent laugh squeezes and burns as I give a glance to the glass, because I get it. He’s right. But this is wrong. I don’t want togetit.

“Adam, you need totalkto—”

“What’s anyone gonna do for me?” He’s whipped his stare to mine, tired but flared. “Unless this miracle worker can give me back my future…”

“You still have a future with me.” No warning, no threat that he could lose that too reaches my voice, but he almost gives me an argument before he thinks better of what I’m guessing he’s thinking—that’s not enough—and clenches his jaw shut.

Then he releases a breath like he’s been holding it, reminding me to release mine. “I can’t go in these circles.” His eyes flare again. “There’s no point.” He shakes his head at me, seeking his pillow again. “You weren’t there.”

“What about how I’d been there after? Andnow.” The understanding. The patience. Through his distance and his pain. The physical therapy. . .

He smacks at the bed as he pushes up, both of us coming alive at the burst, a second of revival. Yes.Care.“This same fucking—”

I cut in my agreement, wanting to smack my hands at something, but all I have is glass. “Yeah, the same—”

“—nagging.” He drops back against the wall, adjusting the sheet over his hips.

I actually haven’tnaggedin a while. That takes energy I don’t always have.

“Look at me,” he says, and I do. I see a lost and grieving man, who still has so much going for him if he’d give himself another chance, get up and take areallook around. “Look at you,” he says next, a tone of being blinded to anyone but himself, a scale of who has it worse.

The only thing worse is his eyes. Those once bright hazels hold something darker, hazier. He’s less here than I am, but I’m the one whohasto have a grip. I have tohaveandkeepa job while he just lies here, because this apartment is expensive. And in Adam’s dad’s way of showing he cares for our troubles, he’s been helping me pay the other half of the rent. Which has honestly been an added anxiety waiting for that to go south. It’s more than my own father would do, but things with both our parents have a price.

I press my spine into the jamb of the door to feel some other pain that isn’t from him, from this. “If it weren’t for me, you really would loseeverything. The world doesn’t stop just because you’ve stopped living in it.” I move closer to the bed as he stays still, a throb in my back and in my heart. “You expect me to just always be here for you when you’re not here for me. I can’t do this anymore.” His eyes sharpen on mine now, wide andvulnerable, as I stare back the same. “I can’t carry…ourlifeon my own anymore.”

He drops his head back with a thud that echoes through me, his hold on the sheet, on himself, as tight as the one I have on myself too. “You act like you don’t have anything or anybody—”

“So do you,” I argue back at the same time he says, “You have Clarissa.”

“It’sourlife,” I stress more, differently, as he slides back down to his pillow, burying himself in what might as well be his tomb. “Me and you.” My voice shakes with the words. “But thank God for our best friends, something you also still have.” My legs have hit the side of the bed, my hold slipping. “And you have me.” I give the assurance, the reminder, knowing it’s a fifty-fifty shot I get one back. “I’m supposed to have you too. You’re my boyfriend.” Another reminder, his still frame blurring around the edges. “You’re my future. This can’t be…I can’t beignored, Adam.”

My eyes squeeze shut against seventeen-year-old Summer, squeezing at the sting, until another smack to the bed has my eyes jolting back open.

“Talk to me when your dream dies,” Adam says, sitting up again, his hold gone with mine, leaning toward me with anger and desperation and pleas. “Talk to me when a shit-faced idiot plows into you and destroys everything you’ve worked for. Talk to me when a job you loathe is what you have to look forward to now. Talk to me when yourfatheris your future.”

He takes a big breath to my gasped one, then he falls back to the bed, his lungs heaving, as tears threaten to fall down my heated face.

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