“Do you like it there?”
He sighed, but it was the short kind I was beginning to understand meant he was about to let me into his world a tiny bit. “I love it. My father builds sailboats, the racing kind, and he’s pretty certain I’ll come back to stay, but I just… Sometimes I need the space.”
“I’ve always wanted to go there. My mom spent a summer there in college and loved it. I was born right before she graduated UNC that spring after.” My stomach turned sour again thinking about her. “I still haven’t told her about Troy.”
“Scared she’ll lose it?” His arm flexed around me, pulling me closer.
“No.” I shook my head slightly, unintentionally burrowing into his shoulder. “I wanted to prove to her that I could do this on my own. That I didn’t need her approval, or disapproval, rather. That’s why I’m staying here. All she sees is this giant screw-up, and I love her, but she wants to fix me. This Troy thing proves that I’m a step beyond fixing.”
His chest rose and fell a few times in the silence. “There are broken people in the world, Samantha. But you’re not one of them. Dinged-up maybe, but not broken, and definitely not beyond repair.”
A small, empty laugh burst free. “If you only knew, you wouldn’t say that. You would shove me outside and let the tornado spin me away.”
He pulled back enough to look down at me. The turbulence in his eyes was enough to suck my breath away. “I don’t abandon people.”
It was there in my throat, the secret I’d been holding in for too long, suffocating me in its need to be heard, to quit festering inside my body. But what would he think if he knew? Guys like Grayson didn’t sleep with the wrong people, let alone have their lives ruined by them. Grayson’s choices were so calculated, so deliberate, I doubted he’d ever so much as been late for a class.
“Samantha?” His eyes softened, revealing the give in him, and it cracked my own defenses.
“Have you ever made a mistake, Grayson? And I don’t mean the kind that costs you an apology. I mean one that destroys you? Where you lie awake at night, unable to sleep, because you’re terrified of what’s going to happen the next day, and the one after that? Where you’d give anything, and I do mean anything to go back and make a different choice? Where you’re sick all the time at the thought of what you’ve done? Because I have. I’ve crumbled my entire future, shredded any hope of finishing college, and killed off who I used to be. And I don’t…I don’t know how to come back from something like that.”
“You don’t.”
I jerked back, but he held me immobile against him.
“Stop, and listen to me. I’m not going to belittle you by saying nothing is that bad, because some things are. Things happen that change who we are, and what we’re capable of. So you’re not going to ‘come back’ from that any more than you’re going to erase whatever you did. You have to decide if you’re going to try to keep patching yourself up or if you’re going to tear down and rebuild.”
“I don’t know how to do that.”
“You wade through the pain, and the guilt, and the excuses you make to yourself. Stop drowning in alcohol to numb the fear, and suck up the bitter taste of accountability. You move on with who you are now. It’s not easy. If you think you screwed up that badly, then maybe you did, but you also have to leave room for the chance that you didn’t. Have you talked about it?”
I shook my head. There were two of us who knew the whole truth, and that circle was big enough. “I’m not sure I’m ready to let go of everyone’s vision of who I am. It’s so much prettier than the truth.”
“Not even Ember?”