Page 55 of Our Secrets and Scars

“Little one, you’re not making any sense.”

His apparent confusion does nothing but enrage me. I’m out of bed and pacing the room before I’ve even taken a breath, clawing at my hair as the anger rages inside me, all the hurt that’s built up from his callous silence erupting, wild and irrepressible.

“Not making any sense?” I yell, spittle flying, but I’m too mad to care. “What doesn’t make sense is how I wrote to you for four years, telling you things I’d never even told my twin sister, my secrets, my darkest fucking confessions, for you to drop me like I mean less than nothing just because you got a little scared. After all that time, you couldn’t find it in yourself to send me a letter goodbye? Even a few scribbled lines to let me know that I wouldn’t hear from you again? Did I really mean so little to you that I didn’t even deserve that much?”

Holden stands, looming over me, his jaw set tight and eyes wide. “What the fuck are you talking about?”

“You!” I scream. “I told you something really big and you didn’t write back. I sent two more letters after that only for you to return them right back to me.”

“Kinsley,” he growls, seizing my arms in his strong grip so, I’m forced to look up at him. The intensity of his glare is so strong that it doesn’t even register that this is the first time I’ve heard him say my name. Myrealname. “Listen to me. I don’t understand what the hell you’re saying right now, but I didn’t get any fucking letters.”

He releases me, going to his closet and taking out the bundle of letters I’d found the last time I was here. He shakes them out onto the bed and looks at me pointedly. “These are all the letters I ever got from you.”

I rifle through them, looking for one in particular. The one I sent him months ago telling him my biggest secret of all, that I was in love with him.

It’s not there.

“Can’t find it, can you?”

I shake my head silently.

He gently takes my chin between two fingers and his thumb, holding it as he speaks. “I don’t know what you wrote in that letter, but trust me when I tell you that there is nothing you could have said that would have scared me away. Nothing. Do you understand?”

My bottom lip trembles as I step out of his hold, turning away and digging the heels of my hands into my eyes. I can’t handle this. It’s too much right now. My head is screaming in pain, and I don’t know if it’s because of the drugs in my system or the heaviness of this situation. Or a potent combination of both.

All I know is that I’m suddenly so tired. And I can’t deal with this right now.

“Can you take me home?” I ask.

“Really?” I flinch when he laughs darkly to himself. “Running again?”

“I’m not running.” I sigh, holding the side of my head to try to alleviate the ache. “But I can’t do this right now. I’m so tired, I just want to go to bed and deal with this all later. It’s too much. It’s too damn much.” I suck in a long shaky breath and admit, “I don’t even know what to call you anymore.”

“Holden,” he answers immediately. “Fletcher was what they called me in jail. I’m not that man anymore.”

“Right.” I nod, but I’m so overwhelmed, I’ll probably have forgotten by tomorrow. “Please, can you just take me home?”

Finally, he nods.

When I’m back in my dorm room and alone with my screaming thoughts, despite my utter exhaustion, I can’t find it in myself to fall asleep. Because all I can think about is how much my world has shifted in the past twelve hours. How everything I thought I knew until this point hadn’t been fact at all but a result of misunderstanding and lost letters.

All I’ve learned this morning rests on the surface of my soul, too thick to sink in. So, it just lingers there, waiting to be processed. Because nothing makes sense. None of it aligns with the narrative I’ve spun myself for so long. That he left because he deserves better.

That I’m not and never will be enough.

Cruel words have a habit of sticking to the soul more than the kind ones.He’d said that once, in one of his letters. And I’d rolled my eyes at the time, but the truth of that statement is as stark as silver moonlight cutting through an all-black sky. But what he didn’t say was that the cruelty that sticks the strongest doesn’t come from other people.

It comes from ourselves.

Fourteen

Holden

FallfellquicklyinSalt Lake City this year. One moment, the sun was high and overbearing, the next, the wind carried the sort of chill that bites when it blows too hard.

But I welcome it, that sting of the breeze on my cheeks. I stare straight into it, relishing in the freshness of the air as I breathe it in because it’s been a long time since I was able to experience this. It’s been over four years since I last saw an autumn in Utah.

In prison, I was lucky enough that my cell looked out east across the ball field. Behind it was three witch hazel trees. No one was allowed back there apart from the groundskeeper and a couple of trusted inmates who had taken an interest in gardening. And for a brief moment, I’d considered becoming green-fingered myself simply to get closer, but it was enough just to be able to look at them. To watch as they bloomed and sprouted leaves, only to lose it all so the cycle could begin again for the coming year.

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