Page 78 of The Truth About Love

It was the first day of Spring break of my freshman year. I’d come home from college and found my mother dead in a puddle of vomit, piss and faeces, her blue hand still clutching the neck of a five-dollar bottle of merlot. It hadn’t been until days later that I’d found the note she left me, slipped between the folds of my pillow case. I hadn’t turned it over to the police. They didn’t need to see it.

I’m sorry, I love you, it’s better this way,she’d written.I can’t do this to you anymore.

That’s basically the gist of the whole letter. I’m the reason she killed herself, all because I’d made her feel like a burden.

I must have said that out loud because one second, Summer-Raine’s sitting on the couch with her legs crossed beneath her and the next, she’s crouching down in front of me with one tiny hand cupping my face. “Oh, Auden. No, that’s not true,” she says, tears brimming in her eyes.

“You are not the reason she did that, understand? It doesn’t matter what she wrote in that note to you, she made that decision for herself. She did it because it’s what she wanted to do. Do not blame yourself for this,please.” Her voice breaks on a sob.

My eyes shutter and I lean into her touch.Home.That’s what she feels like.

I nod because I can’t find it in me to speak right now. But I don’t believe her. Mama wouldn’t have felt like a burden if I hadn’t had made her feel like one.

I blink my eyes open and look at Summer-Raine. We’re so close, our mouths only inches apart and my lips tingle with the memory of what it felt like to kiss her. When she moves her hair over her shoulder, I’m hit with the scent of her.She still smells like peaches.It’s a fact that hits me like a cupid’s arrow to the heart.

I reach for her, twirling a golden lock of hair around my finger the way I used to do when we were eighteen and in love. So much between us has changed. Our minds don’t know each other anymore, yet our bodies still gravitate towards the other as if we’ve never been apart.

We’re a study in paradoxes, Summer-Raine and I. We’re strangers and soulmates and ghosts from our pasts. I’ve moved on from her, yet I’ve loved her every single day since she left.

“It would have been an insult to call you babe,” I whisper, moving my fingers from her hair to trace a delicate path down the side of her face.

“What?” Her voice is as gentle as mine.

“Babe is a word men use when they forget the name of the girl they’re fucking. It’s easy. It’s impersonal. It lacks intimacy. Babe isn’t the name you use to refer to the love of your life.”

She inhales sharply and her eyes close as if she’s in pain. I brush my thumb along her cheekbone, but her hand snaps up to stall my movements.

“Please don’t,” she rasps, eyes still closed.

I bring my hand down as she stands and walks away from me, her footsteps disappearing down the hall until I hear her slam her bedroom door.

I get it. The intensity of the moment grew too much. The air was so thick with memories of us and words left unspoken that I feel like I need to open a window to let some of it out, so if she needs space to work through whatever just happened between us then I’m not going to hold it against her.

I spend some time clearing up, putting our leftovers in the fridge and taking out the pizza boxes. If I’m going to be living here, I’ll treat the place with the same respect I do my own apartment and maybe in doing so, it will lessen the blow for Summer-Raine.

As I load our dirty plates into the dishwasher, it occurs to me that as furious as she was that I’d be staying with her, not once has she asked me to leave.

Chapter Twenty

Summer-Raine

It’s been two weeks since the first night Auden stayed and my skin is still tingling from the touch of his fingers on my face.

I’d been so mad at him for crashing back into my life at a time that I have never felt so vulnerable, but any anger I’d felt in that moment had dissipated when he told me about what happened with his Mama. My heart had screamed in pain for him.

I’ve always known that he’d had it rough at home, given the severity of his mother’s condition, but he loved her as fiercely as any son loves their Mama. Perhaps even more so. Because out of the two of them, he was the parent.

I didn’t know what I was doing when I knelt in front of him and cupped his face in my hand. Instinct had taken over. In that moment, I’d forgotten that he isn’t mine to comfort anymore?not that I ever did a good enough job of it when we were together. All I knew was that I couldn’t sit there on the couch across from him as he told me how he blamed himself for his mother’s suicide, without doing something to get through to him that it wasn’t his fault.

But then he’d called me the love of his life andGod, how much it had hurt to hear that.

There was once a time that hearing those words would have set me alight like fireworks on the fourth of July, yet now they only bring me pain. I don’t deserve to be the love of his life, not after how I treated him and the shit I put him through. But that doesn’t stop me wishing that I could be worthy of the title, that I could be the love of his life now and forever, not just once upon a time five years ago.

I’ve spent the last fourteen days doing my damndest to avoid him. But it’s pretty hard to hide from the guy who’s been tasked with watching over me twenty-four-seven. He wakes in the mornings when I do and refuses to go to bed until he’s confident I’m asleep. When I try and camp out in my bedroom, he makes me keep the door ajar. When I use the bathroom, I’m thankfully allowed to close the door but he makes me keep it unlocked, and he won’t go to work on weekdays until a nurse or my sister arrives to take over. He even follows my GPS on the days I volunteer at the animal shelter Winter set me up with.

It’s stifling.

Not simply because I feel like a bird in a cage, but because it’s so damn hard to be around him without crumbling. Oh, how desperate I am to fold myself into his lap the way I used to do on my balcony in Islamorada and bury my face in his neck. It’s been torture to be constantly surrounded by the scent of him without being able to smell it directly from his skin. To have to hold myself back from touching him. So many times, I’ve almost slipped up and called him quarterback, only to face the crushing disappointment when I remember it’s not okay for me to call him that anymore.

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