“Preppy...”
“No, I don’t need or want your fucking pity.” He quieted sinking to his knees on the carpet and I slid down from the bed onto mine, craning my neck so I could look into his eyes. “I have nightmares all the time. You know what’s the only thing that makes them go away?” He placed his hand over mine. “You. You silence the world when it’s too fucking loud. You make me feel less broken.”
“You’re not broken!” I said, grabbing his hands in mine and away from his face. He opened his eyes. “You’re not broken.”
“I’ll always be a bit broken,” he said, staring at me with glassy eyes.
“That’s bullshit,” I said. I released his hands and stood up abruptly. I pulled open my desk drawer and retrieved the proof I needed. I unfolded the wrinkled piece of paper and stalked back over to him shoving it into his hands. “A broken man didn’t write these words.”
“You got my letter,” Preppy said, turning the page in his hands, the ink smudged with the millions of tears I’d cried reading his words a thousand times over and over again. A small smile appeared on his face. “You lied to me, Doc,” he said, sounding both amused and pissed off.
“I did. I didn’t tell you because I didn’t know if you still felt the same and I didn’t want to make assumptions when you were in a shitty place.”
His voice softened to a whisper. “Do you want to hear about how the only fucking reason I survived that place was by thinking of you every single fucking day and night. I even meditated like Mirna showed me and tried to go somewhere in my mind, anywhere that wasn’t there. I spent hours in my head having fake conversations with my friends. With you. I don’t remember much, just wanting to get away. I’m alive because of you.”
“No, you’re alive because you’re YOU. Because you battled with the reaper and you won. Because you’re Samuel fucking Clearwater and you make your own rules.” I laughed and choked on a sob. Preppy smiled. “That place you went to in your mind? It was home. It was to your family. To me. I heard you. We all did. Me. King. Bear. Ray. Even Thia.”
“You really believe that?” Preppy asked, raising a brow and brushing a hair from my face.
“Yeah. As crazy as it sounds, yeah, I think I do.”
Preppy leaned in close, pulling my lips within an inch of his. “You always were a little fucking crazy,” he breathed. He leaned down to kiss me and I pulled away. I stood up and walked to the other side of the room.
“You made me think you were dead again. I can’t live in a constant state of fear that you’re going to be hurt or worse. I just can’t. You broke me and I can’t.”
“You’re the one who taught me that. If you’re hurting, you don’t have to stay hurting. I’ll take your hurt for you. I’ll take it all for you. I’d go back down in that fucking hole all over again if it meant getting to see you just one last fucking time. I’m a selfish fucking man and when it comes to you I’m the most selfish man of them all, because I want you regardless of the fact that I’m no good for you.”
“I don’t...” I started, but stopped when I realized I had no clue what I was going to say.
His eyes spoke volumes of how he was feeling. Sad, but determined, rimmed in red, but wide open and clear. “And if this is all coming to an end before it even has a chance of beginning again then there’s no fucking risk in telling you what I have to tell you now. What I have to say to you before it swallows me fucking whole.”
I shook my head, both fearing and anticipating what was coming next. But nothing could’ve prepared me for those three little words that trampled over me like a herd of fucking cattle.
“I love you.”
I shook my head again, not to disagree, but to shake the words from my brain. Words he couldn’t have really said. It was either my imagination or lies. They had to be. Either way, my heart couldn’t take much more. The barely held together seams of the last mending had started unraveling the second I saw him in that bed. ALIVE. And with those three little words that held so much power I felt them reach down my throat into my chest and start snipping away at the fraying threads stitch by stitch. “No. No, you can’t just love me.” I heard myself choke out. “You just think you do because now I belong to someone else,” I rationalized. “And you want what you can’t have.”
“Fuck that," he said, anger lacing his words. His eyebrows pointed inward causing lines on his forehead to appear. "You think I just decided NOW that I loved you?”
“Well, maybe I don’t love you.”
“Doc, this wasn’t a revelation 'cause you showed up with Justin Bieber's stunt double and I thought you were engaged. I love you because I fucking love you. I’ve loved you since way back before I fucked it all up, you know, the first time. I thought if I pretended to be happy that I’d be happy but it took months of sitting in the dirt being tortured every single fucking day to realize that the real torture was not telling you how I fucking felt from that very first day.”
“You...”
“I loved you when I carried your broken body to Mirna’s that first time. I think I even loved you from the second I saw you up on that water tower. You were so broken...and so fucking beautiful.”
“When you saved me,” I said, unable to yet find my voice it came out as a whisper.
Preppy shook his head. “No, when you saved ME.” I gasped and placed my hand over my chest where I was sure I was about to pass out from the pain. Tears welled up in my eyes and rolled in warm drips down my cheeks to my chin. Preppy reached out and wiped the tear from my chin with his thumb. He then placed his own hand over his chest like he was feeling the same kind of unraveling I was. “And before you say anything else. Before you tell me that I can’t really love you, or to fuck off, or that you don’t feel the same way, I have to tell you first, that I don’t like being lied to.”
“Who lied to you?” I asked, trying to look anywhere but into his eyes, but it was impossible. I was locked into his determined gaze.
“You did, Doc. You fucking lied to me,” he growled.
“When?”
“Twice actually. First, when you told me you didn’t love me.” Preppy took a step forward, and I instinctively took a step back. He chuckled low and deep. “Because you and I both know it’s bullshit.”
“And the second time?” I tried to swallow down the lump forming in my throat that was threatening my airway, causing me to breathe erratically. My chest heaved up and and down with the need to catch my breath.
He smiled wickedly. “Then when you said I couldn’t have you.”
“Why...why all this? Why now?” I asked.