Page 135 of Only in Your Dreams

I stiffen. Jerk back but the second her eyes find mine, I know it’s too late.

“Zac, what is that?” she asks again. “Show it to me.”

Heart sinking into the depths of my stomach, I move my arm out, away from my body, watching her duck to have a look at the side of my ribcage. With a finger, she traces the skin there, over the cluster of black four-leaf clovers tattooed along my side, down to my hip.

I can’t get a read on her face. Can’t figure out what that wrinkle in her eyebrows means.

“When did you do this?”

I think maybe she’s hoping I’ll confess I popped out to get it done an hour ago, though there’s no way she’d actually believe the lie. I go with the truth.

“I started ten years ago. I have one for every year I lost you.”

She eyes my side, and I can tell she’s counting. Double checking. Her gaze flicks to mine. “Why?”

“Melody.” Her name is a plea out of my mouth. “You know why.”

I know she does. It was in the way she looked at me, just this morning. The way she was adding up my mom’s words, the way she stared at the house.

It’s in the way she stares at me now, rubbing her lips together. I think she’s trying hard not to cry. “You—you left. You didn’t want me.”

“I’ve loved you since we were kids. I’ve wanted you since I figured out what it meant to want someone. I loved you so fucking bad, and then you said what you said that night and I… You were my best friend’s twin sister.”

Her brows pull together. “What does Parker have to do with it?”

I feel the sting of it all over again. The fucking torture it inflicted on my immature teenaged brain. “He had this stupid rule—the one fucking rule he made sure to drill into every guy who ever came within spitting distance of you. He’d bring it up all the time, out of nowhere, like… like he had some kind of internal clock telling him,oh, it’s that time of day again. Better drill it into this sad fucker’s head that he can’t have the one girl he’s ever loved—”

Mel disentangles herself from my lap, shuffles back onto the bed, and my entire body aches from the void she leaves behind. She finds the jersey she threw off only a handful of minutes ago and pulls it on.

“That’s why you left—the Hands-Off Melody Woods Rule? You actually listened to that?”

“I left to tell Parker how I felt about you, and that I was going to do something about it. It was so fucking senseless that I left without explaining that, Mel. But I had it stuck in my head that I was going to do it the right way. I was going to clear the air with my best friend, my brother. I wasn’t going to turn you into this dirty little secret. He blew up on me. It was—it was bad.”

“This—” She rubs her face in both hands. “You let me sit there, waiting for you all night. Ignored me when I reached out the next day. I cried myself to sleep for months—you left me hanging for years—all because you couldn’t get my brother’s blessing?”

“You know how he can be. You haven’t wanted to tell him about us.”

“But I never let it stop me. I’ve come to you every single day for months. I’ve been pretending to date your friend to get more time with you. Maybe I’ve been slow and closed off, and a bit confused about my feelings for you. Maybe I didn’t want to rock the boat with my brother, but I never stayed away. I’ve been choosing you. Over and over again.”

She’s so fucking right, it kills me.

“I told you I had no good excuse. I chose my friendship with Parker over my love for you, and it was the biggest mistake I’ve ever made. He and I have never been the same since, anyway, and… I lost you both that night.”

There’s no humor in her chuckle. It’s pure incredulity. “Leaving me like that wasn’t love. If you loved me—”

“I do—”

“You didn’t—”

“Do, Melody. Are you hearing me?” I get to my feet, agitated. Shove the hair off my face. “Don’t do that. You don’t get to tell me I didn’t love you then and haven’t loved you since. You don’t get to tell me that I haven’t beenachingfor you—down to my fucking bones—since the minute you left town. That I haven’t spent half my life starving for any bit of you I could get, since the second I met you.”

She clamps her jaw and I pull on a shirt, unable to believe how fucking sideways this night has gone.

“I endured ten years without you, Mel. Ten fucking agonizing years. And while you were out there getting over me, building a life with someone else, I was here. Waiting. Hoping. Praying to gods I don’t believe in for another shot with you.”

I think she’s getting it. Finally getting it, because the fight in her body seems to go out then, replaced by something that seems almost stunned—overwhelmed. But I’m not stopping now. I’ve held all this in for as long as I’m capable. I crouch at her feet, take her hands from where she’s tucked them underneath her on the bed.

“I am in love with you, Melody. I havebeenin love with you. And frankly, given the way the past fourteen years of my life have gone, I don’t see a way out of it. This it for me. You, with all your—your inability to start a conversation with a simplehello. The way you don’t give me an inch, make me work my ass off for the ghost of a smile. I will never stop working for it, working to earn you, because that’s what you deserve. And I’m so utterly and completely gone for you, anyway, that I wouldn’t know what to do with myself if I weren’t.”

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