And so she took the steps two at a time, almost shoving anyone who got in her way. Popcorn spilled down the stairs to her right, though she had no idea why or how or from where. She didn’t know anything but her goal—getting to him and telling him something, anything, to make him go down. Maybe even grab him, if she could get close enough. Run right out onto the gym floor like a maniac.
So it was lucky, really, that Coach Parker caught her. He put an arm out and stopped her before she could make it; barked at her that she was crazy. And the truth was, she couldn’t argue with him.
She sounded it when she shouted his name.
“Tate, stop!” she yelled out, hardly expecting him to hear over the crowd.
But he did. For one brief second his gaze locked with hers, so full of relief and happiness and surprise she could have cried. In that instant, everything was real again. It was real and it was okay.
It was going to be okay, she thought.
Then he closed his eyes and dropped his arms, just in time for his opponent to smash him into a bloody pulp against the gymnasium floor.
—
It was strange, sitting next to his hospital bed. Like that gravity switch again, only ten times as fast and ten times as hard. Whenever she looked directly at him she got kind of dizzy, and breathing became a problem. But she looked anyway. She looked at all of him, the way he must have looked at her. Not like an enemy or a friend or even someone he ruined and wanted to put back together.
More like a woman he’d loved for years and years.
Far longer than she had loved him.
Longer even than she’d ever loved anyone.
They had both been sixteen when he first asked her, and she had laughed in response. They would be twenty-one soon, with almost five years of this bloody battle behind them. Five years of fucking up and fixing things and fucking up again. It seemed impossible and tiring and amazing and beautiful. It made her exhausted thinking about it and it made her happy, but most of all it made her desperately needing him to wake up.
What if he never woke up? It did seem like the right ending for reality, after all. In real life, you didn’t get a neat resolution. Explanations never happened, and if they did they were usually half formed. The brittle ice of his apologies to her, while underneath an ocean of what he really wanted to say surged and flowed. Never breathing a word about it, because what would a word have done?
It would have made her sorry.
And he wanted it to be him, only him.
Or at least, she thought so. But what if she never got to ask? What if she— “Are you upset because you think I’m taking the combination to the safe to my grave?”
She had her head in her hands when he suddenly spoke, which of course only made it ten times more shocking. The sound almost made her jump out of her chair, and she came extremely close to giving him a good whack. In fact, she probably would have if his face wasn’t a bleak mosaic of blacks and purples.
Instead she had to settle for shouting.
“Oh my god, you asshole. You total, total asshole. I swear to god if you ever let anyone smash your face into the ground like that again you better stay dead. Otherwise I’ll just fucking murder you.”
“It’s super nice to see you, too, Letty. I’m glad you…want to…murder me?”
“I do want to murder you. I want to murder you to fucking death.”
“Well, that’s typically the state murder leaves you in.”
“Do you not think I know that do you think—”
The tears just came, right in the middle of her rant.
One second she was furious, the next she was blubbering like a fool into her hands.
Though she suspected the word death had something to do with it.
“Hey, come on. You can’t cry. You’re supposed to hate me, remember?”
“I don’t hate you. How can I hate you when you wrote those emails?”
There was a long pause then. Long enough that she knew he knew what she meant.
It was even more obvious when he answered, in a tone that was trying hard to be casual.
“What emails?”
“The ones you sent me.”
“You mean…the one where I was a huge dick after your accident?”
“No, I mean the ones where you seemed to realize you had been a huge dick and then agonized over it and beat yourself up until I lost my fucking mind.”
Again, there followed a huge silence. And when he eventually spoke, his voice was even more unconvincing than it had been when he first asked which emails she meant.
“I don’t know what you might be referring to.”
“That’s okay. Because every word is burned into my brain, so it should be pretty easy to jog your memory. Let’s start with you being the person who called 911.”
“That…anyone would have done that. I would have had to be a sociopath not to.”
“Probably true, probably true. But less of one to get my blood all over you trying to save my life.”
“You think that makes me less of a sociopath? Come on, Letty. I had to do something. You were bleeding everywhere and it looked like there was a rock in your head and I just—”
“You just didn’t tell me anything about any of this.”
She looked up at him then, but it didn’t make anything any easier.
Now she could see those pained eyes among the forest of bruises.
“If I had told you, how would it have looked?”