CHAPTER 55
Emilia
My parents leave the next morning for the news conference, and Asher goes to school, even though they told him he could skip today.
I walk Drew to his car and I think I could hug him forever.
“I’ll miss my Nastypants,” he tells me.
“There will never come a day when I won’t be your Nastypants.” I smile and let go. “Tell Tierney to give you another chance. If you screw up this time, I’ll take you down myself.”
And then he’s gone; and it’s just me and Josh Bennett and all of the unasked questions.
I hand him one of the notebooks because it’s the only way he’ll know, and he looks at it like it’s a viper.
“I don’t ever want to know what’s in those books,” he says, and he won’t take it out of my hands.
I tell him that I don’t want to know what’s in them either. But I do know and I need him to know too. So he reads it and his face tenses along with every other muscle in his body and I can tell he’s trying not to cry. And when I show him the pictures, he shoves his fist against his mouth and I think he wants to hit something, but there’s nothing here to hit.
When he gets to the one of my hand, the one with the bones coming through the skin in so many places it’s hard to believe they ever put it back together again, he throws up. And I don’t blame him.
I show him videos of me playing the piano and photo albums full of pictures and introduce him to the me he never met; but we don’t say very much.
“You were really good,” he says, his voice faint as it breaks the silence.
“I was f*cking amazing,” I try to joke, but it just comes out sad.
“You still are,” he responds with quiet conviction, piercing me with his eyes the way he does when he wants to make sure I’m listening. “Every way that matters.”
The silence returns and we sit on the couch, photo albums on our laps, staring at the wasted piano in the corner.
“I wish I could have saved you,” he says, finally. And this is what it always comes back to. Salvation. Him saving me.
Me saving him. Impossibilities, because there is no such thing, and it’s not what we ever needed from each other anyway.
“That’s stupid,” I echo his words from my birthday. “Because it’s an impossible wish.” I pick up his hand and he laces his fingers through mine, holding on tighter than he needs to. “You couldn’t have saved me,” I tell him. “You didn’t even know me.”
“I would have liked to.”
“Mrs. Leighton told me you needed to be saved, too. But I can’t do that either,” I confess, and he looks at me skeptically because I never did tell him about that conversation. “I don’t want you to save me and I can’t save you,” I say, because I need him to hear me say it, but also because I need to hear me say it.
He closes the photo album and lays it down on the coffee table and cringes, because I’ve found that’s what he does every time he looks at that coffee table.
And then he turns and puts his hands on either side of my face and kisses me with a reverence I may never understand. And maybe I’m a liar and I do need it, because being kissed by Josh Bennett is kind of like being saved. It’s a promise and a memory of the future and a book of better stories.
When he stops, I’m still here, and he’s still looking at me like he can’t believe I am, and I want to keep that look forever.
“Emilia,” he says, and when he does, it warms me to my soul. “Every day you save me.”