Page 55 of Drum Me Away
I stared at the phone, watched as she swiped at her cheek and sniffled.
“Holy shit.” I practically breathed the words. Was she doing true confessions—live—in front of a bunch of strangers?
“No kidding,” Lacey said. “This is gold.”
“This is not gold,” I said hotly. “This is between her and me. At least, it should be. I can’t fucking believe—”
The video feed went dead. Lacey’s phone screen was suddenly blank.
“You’re right,” came a voice from my left.
I whipped around to watch as Faith stepped into view and began slowly walking across the lawn toward us.
“You’re here,” I said dumbly, my flip-flops slamming onto the wooden planks along with the front legs of the kitchen chair I was sitting in.
And she was wearing her favorite pink sweatpants. No idea why that particular detail popped into my head.
She stopped at the base of the stairs. “I was afraid you wouldn’t talk to me if I showed up unannounced, without at least some sort of priming so you’d understand why I was here.”
I dragged my hand over my face. “That was some announcement. I hope you warned Dahlia you were going to do this.”
Speak of the devil. Dahlia popped out of the shadows, holding a miniature video camera in one hand and her phone in the other. “For the record, this was not my idea,” she said. “This was all Faith.”
Lacey popped to her feet. “Hi, Faith, nice to see you again. Hi, Dahlia, I’m Lacey, Lucas’s sister. Why don’t we go inside and make sure none of my ten thousand roommates comes out and interrupts whatever is about to happen out here?”
“Excellent idea,” Dahlia said, and she and Lacey disappeared into the house.
Faith stayed where she was, standing at the base of the stairs, like she was afraid to move closer. I stared at her. I didn’t know what else to do.
“Will you hear me out?” she finally asked. “Let me explain?”
“What are you explaining?”
“I’m not sure,” she admitted with a shake of her head. “But I just want to talk to you. I want you to be back in my life. I want you to believe in me. I want you to understand me.” She sucked in a deep breath and exhaled through her mouth.
“I want to give you all of me.”
That was exactly what I’d pretended happened in that treehouse in Washington. But at her grandmother’s viewing, I’d realized—or I’d convinced myself—that she wasn’t capable of giving all of herself to me. And if she couldn’t do that, how could we have a relationship?
“What happened?” I asked. “How’d the epiphany come about?”
“Are you kidding? You left me.”
“I left before and this didn’t happen.”
“Because that time, I knew you were coming back. And I didn’t realize I was in love with you back then. This time—”
“Wait. Did you just say you’re in love with me?”
She laughed, although there wasn’t humor in the sound. “Lucas, I’m pretty sure I’ve been in love with you practically since we met. But I was too busy trying to shed the old me, trying to create this new person who I thought maybe I could actually like, too busy trying to break out as a rock ’n roll singer, too busy…”
She flapped her hand. “Too busy denying the truth because I didn’t know how to handle it. You’ve always been so free with your affections, and I had no idea how to even be affectionate. How in the world would we have been able to make it as a couple?”
I stood and leaned over, pressing my hands to the railing in front of me. “By doing exactly what we did in that treehouse.”
“Have sex all the time? Really, you think that’s all it takes?”
I rolled my eyes. “By being real. By beingus. Remember when we left Wednesday morning and we were both afraid the bubble would burst? But it didn’t, because what happened in that treehouse was real. That wasus.”
