I’m glad he’s not looking at me, because I’m sure I must go pale. If only he knew how strange it really is. How much I know about him without actually knowing him either. How many pictures I’ve seen, how many moments of his life, big and happy and painful and scary. Moments that moved me to tears, made me want to know him, justified my finding him.
And then I think of how well I know the heart that beats in his chest right now. How knowing it makes me feel like I know him on another level too. How a tiny little part of me wonders if Trent’s heart in his chest is what makes it so easy to be with Colton. Is what gives us that feeling, like maybe even though we don’t know each other that well, our hearts do.
“Hm” is all I say—is all I can say. I take a small bite of my sandwich so I don’t have to add anything, even though I have no appetite at the moment. Something about his tone makes me scared to go down the path of this conversation with him, but I can’t help it.
“What . . . do you know?” I ask, despite my fear of what his answer will be.
“Well, for starters, I know you’re not the world’s best driver,” he says with a grin.
“Funny.”
“Let’s see,” he says, like he’s thinking. “I know you live in the country with a family you’re close to.”
I nod.
“That you have one dimple when you smile, and that you should smile more because I like it.”
This makes me smile.
“See?” he says. “Like that.”
Heat creeps from my chest up my neck.
“I know you’re brave about doing things that scare you. Like the kayak yesterday, or sitting here right now.” He looks me in the eye. “I like that too.”
His eyes roam over my face for a moment that feels too long, but then they come back to mine, and he speaks softer, gentler. “You trust easy, but questions seem like they scare you, which means . . .” He pauses, seems to be weighing his next words carefully. “You have things you don’t want to talk about.”
I look away, scared that if I let him see my face, he’ll know more than he does already—that he’ll see everything.
“It’s okay,” he says, reading my reaction wrong. “We all have stuff we carry around like that, things we’d rather just forget about.” He pauses and takes in a deep breath that comes out in a heavy sigh. “Problem is, most of the time you can’t. No matter how hard you try.”
I hear two things in his voice right then. Pain and, beneath that, guilt. I know those feelings so well, they’re not hard to recognize, and I think I might understand why he never answered my letter. It must’ve been everything he didn’t want—a connection to his past, and the acknowledgment of a stranger’s death, and the pain of those mourning that death. The guilt must’ve come with that.
Empathy is what I feel in this moment. Because the things we’re carrying around, that we’re not talking about, they are the same.
A wave thunders down on the rocks below, and white water engulfs them, hiding them momentarily beneath swirling white foam. I look at Colton, and he reaches his hand to my face, brushes his thumb slowly across my cheek, which I realize is wet with tears again.
“I’m sorry,” he says. “For whatever it is that you went through.”
“Don’t be,” I say. It comes out with more force and emotion than I mean for it to. I want to take away the weight of his guilt. “Please don’t ever be sorry.” I want to make him understand what I really mean. I look at him then, and I say something Trent’s mom said to me that I didn’t believe. Right now I want, more than anything, for Colton to believe it for himself. “You can’t be sorry for something you had no control over.”
He looks down at his lap, then brings his eyes back to mine, searching like he knows there’s something else there, something between us that runs deeper than this conversation, but he can’t see it, and I don’t show him. We’re sitting on the edge of a cliff with a long fall and no safety net.
“Then let’s not be sorry,” he says, steering us away from it. “Let’s just be here now.”
“Is that, like, your mantra?”
“Sort of.” He shrugs. He’s about to say something else, but his phone rings from his pocket. He reaches in and silences it.
“Do you need to answer that?”
“No, it’s just my sister.”
“Maybe you should get it. She seemed a little worried earlier.”
“She’s always like that with me,” he says. “Protective.”
He waves a hand like it’s no big deal, but his eyes leap out to the water, avoiding mine. “She means well by it, I know, but it can be a little much. Sometimes I think she still sees me as pretty helpless.”
We’re quiet for a moment, and I think of the picture of him from when he first went into the hospital—pale but smiling, flexing his thin arms, Shelby standing at his side doing the same thing. I glance at him out of the corner of my eye, at the same dark hair and green eyes set off against the deep tan of his face.
“That’s not what I see,” I say.
“No?” he asks with a smile.
“No.”
He leans in close. “Then what do you see?”
I’m aware of the shakiness of my breath, and his, as I look at him. All the pictures in my mind—the ones of him before, and the ones of Trent—disappear, and I am here with Colton, now.
“I see . . .” I pause and lean back a little, putting more space between us. “I see someone who’s strong. Who knows a lot about life already. Someone who understands what it means to take a day and make it a good one.” I pause, looking down at the water for a moment, then back at him. “Someone who’s teaching me to do the same.” I smile. “I like that.”
This makes him smile.
“So maybe we could keep doing this,” I say, surprising myself. “Making each day better than the last, and being here now, and all of that.”
“Tomorrow?”
“Or the next day.”
“Both.”
His phone beeps again. “Damn,” he says. “We need to go.”
Another wave crashes on the rocks far below, sending its salty mist swirling up and around us, blurring our pasts and the things we don’t want to think about. We linger there in the present moment and the possibilities it holds for a few more minutes, and then we collect our things and go back to our separate worlds.
CHAPTER EIGHTEEN