Page 136 of Only in Your Dreams

Her face crumbles at my words, eyes fill with tears. “Then why didn’t you reach out? Why didn’t you try? Getting over you was… It was the hardest thing I’ve ever done. I can’t tell you how much I missed you. How long it hurt me to leave things the way we did, even to this day. I was upset, but I’d have heard you out, eventually.”

“I tried, a few years in. I got Summer to get your address out of Parker and I came to find you in the city. You were already with Connor,” I say. “Melody, I am so sorry. I’m sorry for letting you believe for a second that I didn’t love you. I’m sorry that I hurt you bad enough that you pulled away from your life here, and that I wasn’t there for you for ten years, in whichever capacity you needed me to be.”

Mel rubs her lips together, now looking anywhere but at me. I get to my feet. She loves me back—I know her, Iknowshe does—and she won’t even look at me.

It’s utter bullshit.

“Let me off the hook.”

Two swipes of her arm, and she looks at me with hastily dried cheeks. “What?”

“You heard me.” I fiddle with the red shoelace around my wrist, tugging at it compulsively. “I made a mistake, but it was years ago. I’m different now—you know I’d never choose anyone over you. Youknowthat, Mel. Let me off the hook. Get out of your head and let us finally have this. Have us.”

“Are you asking me to get over something I just learned about, after a decade of believing something else entirely—”

“Yes. That’s what I’m asking.”

“And if I need to process it?”

“Then you’ll process it with me. We haven’t come this far just to throw it away over a ten-year-old fuck up. You’re stuck with me, and we’re not doing anything else until we get past this. Staying up all night if we have to.”

I flick on the bedside light just to drive the point home. Stride across the room and turn on the floor lamp, too. She stares down at her hands. I pick at the flimsy shoelace.

At the sound of my sharp breath, Mel twists around to look at me.

My red shoelace sits on the ground, snapped in half, frayed ends curling up. I stare at it, this desperate talisman of everything I longed for since I was fourteen. This thing I held onto, pretending it meant that the woman now standing feet away from me was mine. Even from miles away, without a word spoken between us in years.

The sight of it broken on the floor kills my frustrated momentum.

Is this some kind of sign, then? That I’ll never really have her?

I pick up the string, but I know it’s beyond help. It had already been hanging on by a thread.

“I can’t win, can I?” I sink down at the foot of the bed.

Melody slides off the bed, moves for the hotel room door. I think she’s really about to fucking do it and walk out on me. With my jersey on, just to twist the knife. But she crouches to fiddle with her backpack instead.

Her keys clang together in her hand as she makes her way back, stops just short of where I’m sitting.

“There’s no hook, Zac. Okay? There’s no hook to be let off. But it’s been fourteen years of thinking things happened a certain way, only to find…” She looks at my side, the part of me I branded with her, over and over. Her eyes soften and the second they do, so do my shoulders. “Only to hear I had it all wrong. I’m processing. That’s all.”

I nod, take in a breath. “I love you. I always have,” I say again. Just so I know she heard it.

She’s still a bit guarded when she looks at me, but her mouth pinches into a relenting smile. Cheeks flush in that way I love. Mel pries the broken shoelace from my fingers, tosses it onto the bed. My gaze drops when she starts fiddling with the keys she pulled out of her backpack. My heart is in my throat.

She picks at a knot on her keyring until the matching red shoelace comes free.

I can’t take my eyes off it. I haven’t seen the thing in years, not since I tied it around her wrist. I’d assumed she tossed it the second she realized I wasn’t coming back for her. Never for a second thought she might have kept it. That she’d dig it up again, one day.

“Where’d you find it?” I ask, voice thick.

Melody takes my arm. “Find it? What do you think was important enough to go back for in that storm?”

“This is what got us stranded together at camp?” I am flying. I am weightless, made of air and hope. “You always had it with you?”

“I always had it with me.”

She loops the rope around my arm. Double knotting it. Triple knotting it. Every sure flick of her wrist whispersmine, mine, minein my ear, and it really feels like she’s staking her claim on me with this shoelace.

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