Page 34 of State of Mind

‘Thank you.’ Luca climbed in the car and let the familiar scent of Wilder wrap around him. It was sweet, like his bakery, but it was also a little woodsy from his soap, and it was the oddest blend and yet so perfectly him, Luca couldn’t get enough of it.

He breathed in deep as he put his seatbelt on, but when he looked up, he saw Wilder staring at him with a frown. “What?”

“Were you crying?”

“Shit,” he breathed out, then shrugged. “Yes? It was a weird day.”

“We don’t have to do this if you—”

“No,” Luca said in a rush, then stopped and bit his lip. “I mean, I need this. Unless you wanted a reason to cancel, and then we can…”

“Luca,” Wilder said very softly, and it may have been one of the very first times Luca had heard Wilder use his name. He said it almost unsure—like he hadn’t used the name a lot, like he wasn’t confident in his consonants and vowels. And it was the best thing Luca had heard in a long time. “I want to go out to dinner with you.”

“Okay.” He breathed out a sigh. “I promise it’s nothing bad. I’m trying to figure shit out, and it’s not easy.”

“I get that.” Wilder put the car in reverse, and soon had them on the road—the street sign indicating the freeway just a few miles off. “I’ve been there.”

Luca hummed and glanced at the trees whipping by as Wilder picked up speed. “It’s just weird, you know? I have a break for the first time in my life—no obligations, no people, no nothing. And somehow, I feel worse.”

“Right after my ex went to jail,” Wilder said after a pause, “I went home. I had to do some physical therapy for some of my injuries, and I had mental therapy because all of that fucked me up pretty badly.”

Luca let out a small growl. “I’d like to put his face through a glass window for that. Which is probably wrong of me to say, but…”

“It’s not necessary, but thank you,” Wilder told him softly, smiling. “The truth is, I thought the years right after the incident were going to be the worst—and they were hard. But it didn’t get bad until I moved here.”

Luca frowned. “Seriously?”

“It took me a while to realize that going from living with Scott to living with my parents meant I was still in survival mode. My mom was even worse when I came back, and my dad was more checked out than he’d ever been. My sister was never home, and I was stuck in the same loop I’d been in as a child. The same loop that sent me into Scott’s arms in the first place.”

Luca swallowed thickly. “I’m sorry.”

Wilder waved him off. “It’s okay. I just didn’t realize it until I got to Savannah, and I was suddenly safe. I was on my own, and there was no one left to fight—no one left I had to prove myself to. I wasn’t some useless disappointment. I wasn’t anyone’s punching bag. The quiet safety gave room for all the things that had been silenced by chaos to rise to the surface, and I had never been so overwhelmed before.”

“How did you get through it?” Luca asked. His pain wasn’t anywhere near what Wilder had been through, but the ideas all made sense. Luca had been lazy, but he had never been still before now—he had never been in a position where he didn’t have to use himself in order to feel worth.

“I just let it hit me. I let myself rely on my new friends for the first time ever.” He smiled, and it reached his eyes, the brown color almost gold in the fading dusk. “I let myself be weak—and I let myself fall apart. It was easier to put myself back together after that.”

Luca felt a breath leave him like it had been punched out. “I don’t know how to.”

“It takes time,” Wilder said. “Jayden was kind of my touchstone for a while. He came around even when I didn’t want him to, but I always felt better when he left. He used that analogy, you know, about those Japanese vases with the gold?”

Luca shook his head. “I don’t know that one.” Wilder raised his eyebrows. “I’ll show you sometime. But there’s this practice in Japan where they repair shattered pottery with liquid gold—and somehow it makes all the fractured pieces even more beautiful. He said putting yourself back together after shattering apart was like that. You’ll always have the scars, but they don’t have to make you feel ugly.”

“Oh.” The word left him in a breathy rush, because he could see that in Wilder—even if he didn’t think any amount of precious metal could ever make what he had inside worth looking at.

“He reminded me a lot of what my therapist had been saying to me this entire time. It’s okay to feel shattered—it doesn’t mean you are. You’re just put back together in a different way—but it’s not worse.”

“Is it better?” Luca asked.

Wilder grinned. “I don’t know, but I like to think so.”

* * *

An hour into the drive, Luca realized they were heading into South Carolina. He’d only been to Charleston once—as a patron for a showing at the art gallery, but he hadn’t done much more than smile pretty then get bombed later at some restaurant he couldn’t remember the name of.

He and his friends had boarded a plane first thing in the morning, and the most he remembered about the trip was blueberry mojitos and throwing up purple in the airplane bathroom nearly the entire flight.

He was nervous now, not sure how to react, but the mood in the car was calm. There were no obligations, he reminded himself. Wilder didn’t expect anything from him except that he was there—that he existed in this moment, and he tried to enjoy himself.

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