Page 53 of Price of Victory
I swallowed the knot in my throat and turned away from the building, walking back toward campus with my hands shoved deep in my jacket pockets. The night air was sharp and clean, cutting through the confusion that had been clouding my thoughts for days.
By the time I reached my dorm, I’d come to a conclusion that felt both inevitable and terrifying. I’d made a mistake. Not in ending things, necessarily, but in the way I’d ended them. In the assumptions I’d made about his motives and the accusations I’d thrown at him when he’d been at his most vulnerable.
Maybe we couldn’t have a future together. Maybe the complications of our families’ history really were too much to overcome. But he deserved an apology for the way I’d handled things, and I deserved the chance to explain what I’d really been afraid of.
The question was whether he’d be willing to listen and whether I’d be brave enough to try.
But that was a problem for tomorrow. Tonight, I was just going to lie in my empty dorm room and try not to think about how much I missed the sound of his laugh, the way he looked when he first woke up, the feeling of falling asleep next to someone who made everything else fade away.
Tomorrow, I’d figure out how to be brave.
NINETEEN
AIDEN
I openedmy eyes to the familiar sight of glow-in-the-dark stars scattered across my childhood bedroom ceiling. They were faded now, their green luminescence barely visible in the morning light, but they were still there exactly where I’d stuck them fifteen, sixteen years ago. Every constellation I’d created in my twelve-year-old imagination, every carefully placed star that had helped me fall asleep during the worst years of boarding school homesickness.
The comforter slid off my torso as I sat up, the Egyptian cotton sheets that cost more than most people’s monthly rent feeling strange against skin that had grown accustomed to Rhett’s threadbare dorm linens. My feet hit the hardwood floor with a dull thud, and I slipped them into the leather slippers that had been waiting beside my bed like faithful dogs.
Everything in this room was exactly as I’d left it when I’d gone to college. Comic books lined the shelves in alphabetical order, action figures still posed in whatever dramatic scenes I’d arranged before abandoning them for more adult pursuits. Hockey trophies gleamed from their designated spots, a timeline of achievements that had once felt so important but now seemed like artifacts from someone else’s life.
It was a museum of my childhood, perfectly preserved and completely untouched, as if my parents had been waiting for me to return and resume being the person I’d been before I’d learned to think for myself.
I padded to the bathroom in my baggy pajama shorts, catching a glimpse of myself in the mirror. Ten days of highway motels and gas station coffee had left their mark. My hair was longer than I usually kept it, curling slightly at the ends in a way that would have made Rhett run his fingers through it and tease me about looking like a romance novel hero.
The thought of him hit me like it always did, sharp and unexpected, even though I should have been used to it by now. Ten days of driving, and I hadn’t managed to outrun the memory of his hands, his laugh, the way he looked at me like I was something worth keeping.
I brushed my teeth mechanically, tasting mint and regret in equal measure, then stepped into the shower that was larger than Rhett’s entire dorm room. The water pressure was perfect, the temperature exactly what I wanted, but none of it felt as good as those cramped shower stalls where we’d pressed together under barely adequate spray and pretended the rest of the world didn’t exist.
Ten days. That was how long I’d been running from the wreckage of my own making.
I’d driven straight from my apartment to the highway, with nothing but my phone and wallet, no change of clothes or backup plan or destination in mind. Just the need to move, to put distance between myself and the look on Rhett’s face when I’d pretty much accused him of being a corporate spy.
The first night I’d ended up at a highway motel somewhere in Indiana, exhausted and empty and wondering what the hell I was doing. I’d bought a change of clothes at a truck stop,eaten questionable diner food, and fallen asleep to the sound of eighteen-wheelers rumbling past on the interstate.
But sleep hadn’t brought peace. I’d dreamed of Rhett’s voice, the way he’d said my name when I was touching him, the soft sounds he made when he was half-asleep and thought I couldn’t hear him. I’d woken up reaching for him, my hand finding nothing but cheap motel sheets and the growing certainty that I’d destroyed the best thing in my life.
The days that followed blurred together into a haze of highway miles and anonymous towns. I’d driven through Ohio, Pennsylvania, parts of West Virginia I’d never seen before. I’d stopped at scenic overlooks and roadside diners, bought clothes I wore once and threw away, stayed in motels that all looked exactly the same.
No matter how fast I drove or how far I went, Rhett was always there in my peripheral vision. In the passenger seat of my car, in the booth behind me at every diner, in the mirror when I checked myself into another faceless motel room. I could smell his cologne in the wind when I rolled down the windows, could hear his laugh echoing in empty truck stop parking lots.
I’d turned my phone off after the first day, unable to face whatever messages or missed calls might be waiting for me. The world could burn down around me, and I wouldn’t have known, wouldn’t have cared. All I wanted was to disappear, to find some place where I’d never heard the Morrison name and could pretend I’d never learned what it felt like to fall in love with someone I was supposed to hate.
By day eight, I’d stopped moving entirely. I’d found a motel in some forgettable Pennsylvania town and stayed there for two nights straight, ordering pizza and watching terrible cable television and trying to convince myself that I could just keep running forever.
That was when they found me.
I was having breakfast at the attached diner when the waitress brought over the phone. My mother’s voice was crisp and controlled, but I could hear the steel underneath.
“Enough is enough, Aiden. It’s time to come home.”
“What if I don’t want to?”
“Then perhaps you’ll find your credit card no longer functions when you try to pay your bill.”
The threat was delivered so matter-of-factly that it took me a moment to process it. They’d been tracking my transactions, following my paper trail across three states like I was some kind of fugitive. And now they were calling in their markers, reminding me who really held the power in this relationship.
For a moment, I was tempted to call their bluff. To let them cancel the card, abandon the car, walk away from everything they’d ever given me, and find out what it felt like to exist without the safety net of Whitmore money. I could disappear into the mountains, learn to build fires and hunt for food, meditate in silence until I turned to stone like the monk in that old story.
