Page 39 of Sunshine

I suck in a breath, closing my eyes against a wave of nausea.

“There’s more, Layla,” he says evenly, looking like the weight of the world is on his shoulders. Like of all the personal hells he could be in, this is the worst one.

“What?” I croak out. “What do you mean there’s more?”

He sighs. “His mom told me that she talked to Coach Jones. Apparently, the day before the accident, Coach told Jason that he was going to start Stevens in the next game. Jason had a few missteps in some of our recent games, and he was starting to slip at practice too.”

“Oh my god,” I whisper. Football waseverythingto Jason, more than school or his family or even Wells and me, and we all knew it. Learning that his coach intended to pull him from the starting lineup would have been . . .devastating. “Do you think . . . ?” I start, but promptly stop. I can’t force the words out.

“What?” he asks.

I close my eyes and say the words as I hug my knees close to my chest. “Do you think he was distracted by Emma? Was that why he was messing up?”

Wells’s eyes soften. “I don’t know, Layla.” He finally pulls his second boot off, giving himself time to think through an answer. “It’s possible he was feeling the mounting pressure of not being the golden boy on campus like he was at home, which could have driven him to be impulsive. I’m not sure which one led to the other. Either way, he was struggling more than any of us realized.”

My skin burns hot and I almost can’t stand it anymore—combing through the web of Jason’s lies is ruining me.

“But he was also really fucking careless,” he adds, and it’s tinged with his own hurt. His own frustration.

I nod through the burn of tears, knowing if I try to speak this dam will break. My mind spins with a flurry of thoughts. One of the things I keep replaying in my head is one of my last phone conversations with Jason. It was after Thanksgiving, when Ithoughthe’d just returned to campus from his trip home with Wells. He’d been noticeably vague as we recounted our holiday weekends, but was still curious how I spent mine with Chantal. It would have been a perfect chance for him to let me in on his side of things, to share anything that might have been bothering him.

I’d handed over six years of my life to him like a sacrificial lamb. And in return he fed me lies and ultimately turned to someone else for comfort during a real time of need. I’d bet money that Emma knew he was being pulled to the bench—it’s not something he would’ve been able to hold in and process on his own. And while I always knew the pressure was often unbearable for him, I thought I was giving him the support and encouragement he craved to round it all out. I thoughtIwas on the front lines of his needs.

It’s a whole new feeling of betrayal to think eventhatmighthave been for show. An orchestrated slow dance in a room that was crumbling all around us.

I try to fight against it, but the tears break through like the crash of a wave against the shore. It’s only moments before I’m sobbing into my palms, fighting for air.

Wells is there in an instant, lowering himself to the floor next to me and pulling me into a warm and sturdy embrace. He doesn’t say a word, but he doesn’t need to.

He knows.

You’re the love of my life, sweetheart, Jason had murmured the last time I saw him, the end-of-summer bonfire in front of us growing high enough to lick the ink-black sky.

I can’t wait to call you Layla Moore.

The phantoms of our younger selves haunt me, and I can do nothing but succumb to this grief that’s become so wide I’m not sure how to fill it with anything but pain and anger. Pain for the girl I once was: resilient and unwounded. Anger for Jason who set fire to it all, and then went and fuckingdiedso I’d have no one to anchor any of it to.

I’ll never leave you.

My skin turns to ice, and I’m not sure if the heat of fury dissipates or if the room is just cold, but I shiver against Wells’s chest. He runs his wide hands up and down my arms, creating a friction that feels like a relief. “I hate seeing you cry, sunshine,” he says low, the vibration of his voice against my cheek. “I don’t have the stomach for it.”

I huff out a small laugh as I pull back and wipe my eyes. “I’m sorry . . . There’s just still so much love in my heart for Jay, for who he wanted to be, and it hurts. I believed in him, you know? I don’t know the right words for how I feel. Shame, maybe? Regret?”

He tucks an errant strand of hair behind my ear. “It’s okay to be mad at him, just like it’s okay to still love him. He was yourfirstlove . . . there will always be something special that exists between you and his memory. But he wasn’t perfect. Not even close. And you deserved a hell of a lot more from him.”

I suck in a deep breath, keeping my eyes trained on the cotton of his T-shirt, now spotted with my tears.

“Look at me,” he says softly, lifting my chin with his fingers until our eyes catch and his dark gaze burns into my skin. “This isn’t the end of your story, Layla. You’ll fall in love again, and it’ll be with someone who can love you back and give you everything you need. You won’t have to earn it.”

The words crack me right down the middle. Can it really be so simple? “Thanks, Wells,” I say. A long sigh spills out of me. “Look at us . . . on the ground again.”

The corner of his mouth quirks. “You have a thing for crying on the floor,” he says plainly.

“Name a better place,” I quip.

He shakes his head. “Can’t.” And then his smile flattens, and his gaze tracks across my face. “Come on, let’s get you to bed.”

Later as I fall asleep, the room is dark and cold, but the warmth of Wells’s body next to mine cocoons me. And just as I tip into the edge of empty black nothingness, I hear him say it in the midst of his own dreams.

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