Page 61 of Leave Before I Love You
I sink onto the couch, pulling my phone from my pocket. It lights up with a flood of notifications. Texts, emails, missed calls. I swipe through them mechanically, my thumb scrolling past dozens of messages from journalists, clients, and employees. Everyone wants a piece of the story.
Unknown: Henry, can you comment on your survival experience?
Cara: Hey boss, hope you’re feeling better now that you’re home. New phone is being couriered to Avery Banks’s condo as we speak. Call me when you’re ready to debrief. By the way, Larry Meadows from NewsSource (among several other journalists) is requesting an in-person interview. Are you interested in that?
Larry Meadows is one of the most popular journalists on national television. Clearly, he wants the inside scoop on the “the island survivors,” but I can’t deal with any of it right now.
Don’t want to deal with any of it right now.
How can I give some kind of interview about what happened between Avery and me on the island? That feels wrong in every kind of way. It feels like…I’m letting someone else in on our secret. Like I’m being disloyal to Avery.
I turn off the phone and toss it onto the coffee table. My head falls back against the couch, and I close my eyes. For the first time in twenty-four hours, there’s no one around to ask how I’m feeling, no doctors poking and prodding, no friends cracking jokes to distract me. It’s just me.
I don’t need the crowd—can’t fucking stand it right now, to be honest. But I am undeniably missing one person.
She’s still in the hospital, I think. Or maybe she’s beendischarged. I don’t know. I should have made Ronnie and Mav take me by her room when they let me out, but the iron-fist nurse kept insisting that I take the wheelchair all the way to the door in accordance with hospital policy and left no room for argument on it.
I reach for my phone again, hesitating for a moment before powering it back on. The screen fills with more notifications as the device reconnects, but I ignore them, going straight to my text inbox to find my message thread with Avery. The last messages we sent each other were from months ago, when she was asking me about the New Year’s Day trip and trying to talk me out of the skydiving portion.
My snort is audible as I consider how fucking right she was about it being a stupid idea.
I laugh to myself at her horrified reaction to my telling her she had to leave her suitcase behind that morning in the hangar as my fingers hover over the keyboard, unsure of what to say.
According to Cara, there’s a chance she doesn’t even have the fucking thing yet, and still, I know I would have to be fucking dead to wait another minute to try.
Eventually, I type out something simple.
Me: Hey. Just checking in. How are you feeling?
I hit send and stare at the screen, waiting for the little bubble to pop up, signaling she’s typing back. But nothing happens.
Minutes pass, and still nothing. Even though I know that she might not even have the phone yet, the possibility that she does and just doesn’t want to talk to me is too ubiquitous to ignore.
I…I don’t know what I’ll do if that’s the case. On the island, it felt like we were in this bubble. Nothing else mattered but surviving and each other. But here, in the real world, everything is different. She has her family, her life.
And me? I have…this. An empty apartment and a phone full of demands.
I set the phone down again, running a hand through my hair.Was what we had on the island real? Or was it just the circumstances? Two people clinging to each other because there was no one else?
I don’t want to believe that. Every moment with her felt real. The way she laughed, even when everything felt impossible. The way she looked at me, like I was more than the reckless guy everyone else sees. And the night she gave herself to me… I’llneverforget it. I don’t want to.
I wish I knew where we go from here.
It’s ironic, I guess.
There, we had no option but to sit and wait, and while I thought that ended yesterday, it didn’t. It shape-shifted and morphed into something a lot lonelier, but the feeling of waiting is the same.
Waiting to know. Waiting with hope.
My own metaphorical fucking stranded island.
I get up and wander to the kitchen, opening the fridge out of habit. It’s empty except for a few takeout containers that have to be weeks, if not months, old. I grab a beer, ignoring the taunt of the morning clock on the stove, crack it open, and lean against the counter.
My mind fixates on the way Avery’s hair looked under the sunlight, messy and tangled but perfect, and the way she challenged me and called me out on my bullshit. I see her smile and her frown, and I feel the tears she cried in my arms.
She is unlike anyone I’ve ever known and has always been that way, even when she was a knobby-kneed thirteen-year-old.
Because of Beau, she’s indirectly been in my life for as long as I can remember. And because of the island, she’s burrowed into my life in ways I never ever imagined.
