Page 80 of Our Hearts Knew Better

The guy who’s continuously breaking my heart. . .

I don’t tell him Summer’s words.

My grip on my best friend is slippery with her in his clutches, but I’m still bound.

I’m a good friend. I’m a good son. I’mgood. Good guy Levi.

I’m a rhyme.

Adam’s features smooth out, then so do mine, both of us looking out at the water.

His next words are low and rough, dragging my eyes to the dark cloud casting into the corner of his. “Nobody can really get what it’s like in my head.”

“Try me,” I prod straight away, leaning toward his tense gloom, knowing the last time he was spun into a storm was when we were seventeen. And I got him through that then.

His laugh is huffed behind a tip of the bottle. “Just thoughts,” he mutters, another lead in his tone, and I can hear how loud they are as I wait and listen. “Just, you know, how I hate my mom more than my dad, because she’s the one who forced me into life. To suffer. Look at you too,” he says, with a point of hisbottle before bringing it back to his mouth. “But then, if I could be like you…”

I lean back into my seat with my own huff.

“You do it right,” he argues, a defense in his tone for my slight roasting of myself, pulling out my half smile. “You know how to be happy.” My smile scrunches up, a pang in my chest at the wayward and longful way he’s studying me. “You’re more cut out for the pain. I’m not saying you deserve it, but you can deal with it. A hell of a lot better than most of us.”

This is said to his bottle, and I swallow down another snag in my throat, a surge of my own pain, that I deal with so well.

My own sad story is he’s not exactly wrong.

I do know how to be happy. I know how to hold everything and everyone together. Because of my dad. Without him, it takes double the mooring to not go adrift.

“And I look at and think about other baseball players, guys who’ve achieved their dream, that should’ve also been mine, and pray for them to lose their spots too.” His voice is so low, his hand white around his bottle, his eyes glazed onto some point of the deck, and I’m leaning toward him again, a jolt to pull him back from a destruction I know he’s leaning toward.

“If I ever see him—”

“You’re going to walk away,” I cut into the picture he has of the drunk asshole who hit him. “You have too much more to lose, Adam.”

He stays stiff and staring, and I pat his arm. “Hey,” I prod, the touch turning into a clench around his arm. “I will call someone—”

He shakes me off, shaking himself off, and huffs another laugh. “You don’t have to call someone.”

I drop back into my seat with a half relieved sigh, and he says, softer but only marginally lighter, “Thanks for being here. I’m sorry I wasn’t.”

I shake my head, tapping my bottle against his. “You did what you could.”

What I don’t tell him is Summer deserves more than that.

We bob through beats of silence, watching the sea, until he says, “Your mom still thinks he’s alive…”

The rest of the air in my lungs releases slowly before I take in more. “Yep.”

We didn’t talk about my dad’s death too much, but we talk now. We talk about him, and my mom. Our memories. While the built-in stereo continues to play an oldie but a goldie station, music from our teen years, like we’re back there again, but not touching on how if wewereseventeen again, we both would do things differently.

If it was just last year again, we wouldn’t be on this boat together, at this moment.

He’d have a career in baseball, and I’d have my dad.

And I’d havemygirl.

Get the Squash

Summer

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