Page 42 of Choosing Forever
She hums and drops back down to her haunches to pick up a cracked four-by-four. Flipping it over, she taps a fingernail to a missing chunk of it.
“Are you upset that it’s gone?”
“The drive-in?”
Delaney nods and tosses the wood.
“Seeing it up in flames hurt more than I expected it to,” I reveal.
“I always expected it to be here, guarding the town. I guess I waited too long to come back.”
“It won’t be gone forever.”
She turns away from me and stares out at the now empty field. The hunch of her shoulders is a dagger to the chest. “It won’t ever be the same as it was.”
“Is that such a bad thing? Maybe this is what we all needed,” I offer, dragging my foot through the dead grass.
“We needed to lose a key structure from our past? For what? To be punished?”
My other foot moves through the grass. “It’s hard to move on when our ankles are tied to something anchoring us in place.”
“Don’t make this about us.”
“Isn’t it, though? Nobody gives a shit about this place but us, Elle. We’re the only ones standing here with an ache in ourchests because the one place still calling to us is gone. Nothing but fucking ashes in the scorched grass.”
Eyes burning with the hottest flames I’ve ever seen, she whips around, her head shaking. “It’s.Delaney.”
“You’re angry with me. Good, you should be. I want you to be pissed off and honest about it. We can’t continue to ignore each other and pretend that it’s fine,” I say, knowing damn well that I’m right back to being too much, too soon.
She could turn and run any second, and fuck, that’s scary. But if I’m not honest, we won’t get anywhere. We’ll be stuck in this cycle that’s tearing me up inside for the rest of our lives.
“You want me to be angry so that you can justify the hatred you hold for yourself and the choices you made! This isn’t about me or us, Darren,” she snaps.
“We can’t go back in time. I can’t change the things I did, but I also can’t keep pretending that I don’t hate what we’ve been doing since. You were more than my girlfriend. You were my best friend, and I miss you. Have been missing you for years.”
She sucks in a sharp breath, eyes wide and full of disbelief. My hope rises, then quickly falls at the sight of her obvious step backward. “It’s going to take a lot more than that to change anything. You don’t get to just say those types of things and expect change.”
“But there’s a chance.”
“For friendship?”
For now. “Yes.”
“You deserve an outright denial.”
My heart leaps. “So give me one.”
“I can’t do this right now.”
She’s going to leave. I can see it flashing in her eyes and in the firm twist at the corner of her pursed lips. There’s fear tangled in the panic, painting a portrait that singes my gut.
“Then when?” I ask, more breathless than if I’d just run laps around this charred field.
“I don’t have that answer.”
“Think about it, then. Please.”
“I need space.” She lifts her hands and waves them between us. “Put things back to how they were.”
