Page 89 of Our Hearts Knew Better

Clarissa crunches on one of the candy mints she keeps by her bed. That’s what I heard, her digging through the drawer. “Want one?” A tapping sound fills my ear as she attempts to send me one through the phone, and my laugh is another sob, but softer.

“Okay,” she starts after swallowing her mint, and I suck in and hold my breath. “You have to break up with Adam.”

My breath releases as a gust and I immediately say, “No.” I know what I need. “I have to be fought for, Clarissa.” I give another shrug to the universe, this time with a middle finger attached. “I’m sick of feeling like I’m fighting on my own.”

“And you need the security.”

“Security,” I repeat low through my teeth, rubbing at my forehead. “I need someone who loves me.” Tears build again from the back of my throat and I swallow them down, hurrying to add, “And despite everything, Adam does love me.” He just doesn’t love himself right now.

He doesn’t loveliferight now, and I’m often sitting in that boat. Though I’d rather be in another one.

“Even if you don’t love him?”

“Stop saying that,” I scold at those words, but it’s weak, repeating, “I do love him.”

“You love him, but you’re never gonna get over the possibility of that twelfth letter because you love him too.”

My laugh this time is a groan, my feet slipping to the lower step.

“You have to talk to him,” Clarissa advises through crinkling wrapper paper, and my spine straightens with an ache for how I’ve been slouching out here.

“He has to talk to me,” I say with a finality that won’t accept an argument. I’m not giving myself to Levi like that again. Putting what’s left of my stupid heart on the line. I can’t. I have to protect myself.

It’s his turn to move.

“He has to prove himself.”

Prove it.

My saying those words to Levi, giving us both the chance to be the friends we were, fills me with more anticipation than I’ll admit.

Clarissa yawns, then makes a noise to shake it off. She hates yawning and sneezing. “Then what happens? If he proves himself? What if he proves what you want him to?” She calls me out so easily, and with a loud crunch too. “Then you’ll be together?”

I snicker, tucking my legs back up. “You’re almost worse than I am with the questions.”

“Well, that’s how you get answers.”

“I have the answers,” I sigh out. “I have…” I swallow down more building tears, always fighting the breakdowns. “If I get pushed down any more than I already am…”

“I know,” Clarissa says, the murmur like her hand reaching for mine. “I do know, okay? You just have to be happy. You deserve that.”

They say your comfort zone will kill you, and when I was growing up, I wholeheartedly agreed. I still agree to an extent, but I’m not a kid anymore. I’m not as hopeful and impressionable. I’ve been in the real world. I’ve seen things I needed to see. Now this is my life. And I have a responsibility.

“Thanks,” I murmur back, not knowing what I really deserve right now.

“And if you want to givebothyour boys the chance to learn from their mistakes…” Clarissa clatters a mint between her teeth in her pause. “I suppose I have to let you.”

My sigh is silent but loosening. Until a thought tightens me again.

“I actually have a thirdboy,” I start, then tell her all about the revelations with my father.

I already told her about Levi helping him, to which she responded with a,that boy loves you, that fed my madness.

So it’s no surprise when Clarissa encourages me, as Levi did, to let my father in.

I always wanted that perfect father-daughter relationship. Us closer, our love stronger. Us against the world.

That might be a bit farther fromhogwashnow, but the world has also been doing too much, and nothing he does now can undo what he did then. He’s myfather. The man who raised me. The pain he gave me will always be part of me, just as he is, as thick and dark as our blood.

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