Because all I knew, all I wanted, all I could bear was redemption from everything I’d done wrong.
And for the first time in my life, I wished she’d never been in my backpack, after all.
CHAPTER TWO
DELLA
2018
LET ME ASK you a question.
Why exactly are you still here?
Didn’t I vow never to write in you again? Didn’t I close your document, bury the file, and shove aside all memory of Ren Wild and the secrets I was stupidly sharing with you?
Yet…here you are, still lurking on my desktop, a judging little icon begging me for an ending.
But I manage to ignore your taunting. I keep my mouse pointer well away from your pain and open a new file labelled Assignment Version 2.0.
Or that’s what I did for the past little while, at least.
I earned an extension when I had nothing to hand in to Professor Baxter. I blamed the flu—which normally wouldn’t be a homework-delayable excuse—but I have a bit of a reputation at college, you see.
The reputation of being a quiet, diligent student who enrolled the very afternoon she finished her high school exams. The moment I was free, I walked out of those halls and marched to the university a few blocks away. They weren’t open for new admissions yet, and I didn’t have my results from English, math, and science—not to mention any legal identification.
But that didn’t stop me.
I practically got on my hands and knees for a chance to attend. To know I had a place to go, an institution to hide in because I no longer had anyone to call my own.
They were strict on no special treatment, but something in my desperation must’ve swayed them because my pleas were answered nine days later, and I was accepted into the creative writing course that I’d coveted for a while.
And, thanks to skills used to fibbing about our truth, I was able to extend the deadline for providing personal documentation, enrolling without proving who I was.
All I cared about was a new adventure that would keep my thoughts far from Ren—for however long it lasted.
Not that anything had that power…but I had to try.
The second I entered campus, I gathered a reputation that stuck.
I was known as the earliest arrival and last to depart. I studied with sheer-minded focus. I never answered back. I was hardworking and didn’t make trouble.
Along with an academic reputation, people made assumptions about me as a person. They knew me as slow to smile and last to laugh. A reputation for being a loner who would rather celebrate her upcoming eighteenth birthday on her own, rather than risk her heart by asking friends to fill up the hole inside her.
They say I’m lonely. They call me sad. They murmur sympathies when they find out I’m almost eighteen, live alone, and have no family— Anyway…why did I even open your file?
I have no ending to give you.
He hasn’t come back.
It’s been two whole months since he left.
One graduation in the past.
One birthday in the future.
And no one to love or kiss or—
You know what? That’s not important.
What is important is I didn’t die when he walked out the door.
Bet you thought I slept through him leaving. Did you picture me waking up after a good night’s rest thinking everything would go back to normal after I’d stripped naked and kissed him?
Are you insane?
Of course, I didn’t sleep that night.
I know Ren. Or at least, I knew Ren.
I knew I’d pushed him to his limit and there were only two places he could go.
One, he would stew all night. He’d weigh the pros and cons. He’d blame himself, his parenting skills, his lack of discipline, and beat himself up for doing something wrong. And if, by the dawn, he hadn’t figured out there was something between us that wasn’t mere unconditional love, then he wouldn’t have been able to look at me again—for fear of what he’d become—and he’d leave.
Or two, he’d watch my naked body stroll bravely away after kissing him, and think for a moment. Just a moment. A delicious awareness-crackling moment when he realised he loved me too. And not in just a brother-sister kind of way, but an earth-moving, I-have-to-have-her-right-now kind of way. He’d run after me, shove me against the wall, and his lips would taste so sweet because it would be the first kiss he bestowed instead of the other way around.
Two options.
But I knew in my heart which one he’d choose.
And I’d known the instant the door clicked, and I padded in my cupid pyjamas to stare at the money left on the coffee table, the unfinished note explaining nothing, and the woodsy, broody smell of Ren fading in the air, that I was right.
He’d chosen option one.
My heart didn’t know how to beat anymore. My lungs didn’t understand what air was.
But tears?
They’d vanished.
Not one droplet escaped as I stared at the door, wishing, begging for him to return, and gather me in his arms.
I waited all night until the sun slipped through the curtains, gently kissing everything awake. Its kiss wasn’t kind to me though, because it gave me the first day of many without him.
If someone had touched me that first dawn, I wouldn’t have been able to keep it together. I would’ve broken on the outside as spectacularly as I broke on the inside.
But there was no one to touch me.
No one to tell me it would be okay.
I couldn’t be a child and scream until my heart stopped suffocating. I couldn’t destroy everything so I could purge the destruction inside me.
All I could do was cling to routine and head to the bathroom for a shower. I dressed in my school uniform. I ate some peanut butter toast with the crusts cut off. I gathered my school bag and walked the three blocks to school. I paid attention in class. I smiled at fellow students. I escaped the moment the bell rang. I slung my backpack up my shoulders and strolled to the supermarket close to our—my—apartment. After I chose a two-day-old lasagne that was discounted in the deli, one packet of Oreos, and an iced coffee, I walked back home. I ate, I watched TV, I did some homework, and I went to bed.
I did all that.
I, I, I.
Me, me, me.
And not once did anyone suspect that my world had just fallen apart.
Not once did I cry.
Not once did I scream.
I bottled it all up—the heartache, the agony, the bone-deep cracking—and I swallowed it down like a pill I didn’t want to take.
And there it sat—a breathing, seething thing dark in my belly, blocking my usual appetite for adventure, food, and love.
Blocking me from feeling.
Blocking me from screwing up again.
The next day, I repeated the day before.
And the tomorrow after that.
And the tomorrow after that.
Until a week had passed and I hadn’t died.
My worst nightmare of Ren leaving me had come true, and I was still alive.
And I hadn’t cried.
Not once.
Not even a little bit.
CHAPTER THREE
DELLA
2018
I CAN’T SEEM to go on my computer without somehow clicking on your icon and exposing a nightmare.
I should’ve deleted every word I ever typed, but last week, when I wrote to you against my wishes, I slept a little better.
I didn’t wake drenched in sweat, fearing someone had stolen into the apartment while I rested. I didn’t lie in bed in the morning, frozen solid with the thought of yet more faking, more living, more existing without him.
It was as if I had a friend again.
Two months and one week is a long time to be on your own with no one to talk to. I’d started this assignment with a new lease of hope. I’d stupidly believed by writing about him, I could make him come back. Every day I gave you my secrets, I clung to a fantasy that he’d somehow feel me spilling our life story and come back to reprimand me.
But when the due date with Professor Baxter came and went, and I claimed the flu to write a hasty tale of a girl with two parents who weren’t monsters, I shut up all that pain again.
And I suppose you caught my lie, right?
I said I never cried.
And I didn’t.
Unless you count the times I cried while writing this stupid assignment.