Page 252 of Falling Backwards
My own tears finally surge back up.
With a sharp breath, I drop my face into my hands to try to hide—I don’t know why since Luke already knows this hurts for meandfor him on top of all the other emotional things that have been said, and he has cried, too, and—
Quick thuds.A light gust of air.Gentle hands wrapping around my wrists as a solid presence settles right in front of me, brushing my uninjured knee.
He has run over here and knelt before me.
The heavy sob that fact gets out of me cannot be hidden.My crying cannot be held back.
I love his closeness, his touch, his determination to pour his heart out to me.
I despise him being robbed of his self-worth and despise the coloring-in of the bleak betrayal I’ve lived with for so long.
“Maggie,” he murmurs throatily.
My crying shakes me and I shake my head, yet I don’t have it in me to try to pull away or silence him.
“Baby, things went so differently from how I expected them to.I didn’t feel like I was anything special, but you did.And I didn’t believe being around you would lead anywhere, but I was wrong.I expected absolutely nothing and you turned out to be everything.”
It feels like there are fifty things I want to fire back and ask and accuse him of.Feels like there’s no way to decide which to go with, so I might just choke on all of them.
But as he tenderly, stutteringly swipes his thumbs back and forth over the backs of my hands, those things get cleared away until only one remains.One thing he mentioned earlier, sending my stomach into a breathtaking twist.One thing I have been wondering about for a very long time.
I lower my hands to my lap again.His shift to enclose them, warm and secure, and I look at how perfect that sight is even with my quivering vision warping it.
“You really didn’t fake ca-aring about me?”My voice is frail, my breaths catching.“It really was as real as it f-felt?”
“Yes, it was real,” he tells me again, heartfelt.“I just fucked it up.I didn’t fake it, Maggie, I just fucked it up.”
I was right.I wondered about that, and I was right.
That old weight eases.
I try to measure out my breaths, try to calm them.“You sh-should’ve t-told me what was going on.You shouldn’t have let me fi-ind out the way I did.”
“You’re right.But by the time I realized that, I had no idea how to do it.”
He lifts my hands and I follow them with my eyes, breath catching anew as I watch and feel him press them to his chest.Then my tears are blinked away enough that I can properly meet his blue gaze as he keeps talking.
“The plan got derailed not just when you found out about it but also long before then, when I canceled it in my mind because I’d realized you were a beautiful person and I didn’t wanna keep going on a lie.I kept feeling like I needed to tell you I’d lost that bet, kept feeling like I needed to give you the truth and let you decide whether you still wanted me, but I was scared of how you’d react.You were so goddamn golden through all my dullness and my shadows, and the more of that I got, the worse I felt about how I started out with you.Never in a million years would I have thought we’d fall for each other, but we did,and I didn’t wanna lose you.So I kept letting the truth sit.And I was too young and dumb to understand that that kind of decision never works out.Keeping secrets never works out.So things went the way they went and I lost you anyway.”
I sniffle and…
…nod.
Luke’s eyebrows lift lightly.His eyes slip over and over my face.
“I didn’t only hurt you,” he whispers.“I hurt myself too.”
I whisper, too, sadly, “And thenIhurt you.”
His throat moves with his swallow.He gives a nod of his own.
I uncurl my hands within his so I can touch the front of his shirt, flatten my hands against him.His heart thumps under my right palm.“We both did the wrong thing.”
The sigh he lets out is full and heavy.I find myself copying it as he presses my hands more firmly to his chest.“Yeah, we did.”
And I find the chaos in me is quieting.
