Page 34 of Tell Me You Love Me

“You can keep going,” Alana rasps, stepping to the side. “Wherever you were going or whatever you were doing. We don’t have to do this awkward back and forth. I understand.”

“Maybe next time.” Hesitant, he shuffles past her and stops on my right, dropping his hand to my shoulder and meeting my eyes. “Was hoping to have a word with you if you had a sec?” He tries to push me back a step. “About the class schedule.”

About Alana.

But even she knows he’s lying, so she continues past the desk on her own, chewing on her nail and disappearing into the hall without me.

“Tommy…?”

“I’m handling myself.” I shake his hand off. “Leave me alone.”

“You’re handling yourself?” He grabs me again, earning a fiery glare when I swing my eyes around. “Dude, you already died once. Youdon’t get to come back from that twice. Chances are, just as soon as Bitsy no longer needs her, she’ll probably leave again. It’s best if you keep your distance and wait her out. She’s a summer blip at best.”

Funny, seeing as how we fell in love in the first place during the summer between elementary school and middle.

“I’m not gonna do anything stupid.” I push his hand off and jerk my shoulder out of the way when he tries to grab on. “If she’s temporary, then I’m gonna use this time to get closure. Get answers, maybe.”

“Not everyone gets closure,” he growls. “Sometimes, there is none. There’s just a trip down the yellow brick road, and when you get to the end, you fucking die. Again.”

“Leave me alone?—”

“Tommy!”

“I’m not asking.” I turn on my heels and move into the hall, following Alana’s sweet scent and the sound of a dozen children shouting theirkiais. But when I reach the main training room, a feral swish of panic storms through my gut. She’s not here. I don’t see her sitting along the wall with the other parents, nor someplace else, all alone and nervously destroying her nails.

For a single moment, I wonder if this is what may be best? Is this what the rest of them are trying to protect me from?

Blinding pain, just like when I was eighteen and couldn’t find her, comes surging back. A reminder of the terror I felt back then, as fresh now as if this was our senior year all over again.

But then Eliza coughs from the front of the room and tips her chin until I turn and find Alana huddled as deeply into the corner as she can physically get.

Folded arms and frightened eyes. She’s shrunken down as small as humanly possible and tugs at my heart because her vulnerability now is just as palpable as it was when we were kids, when she needed refuge with a personnotintent on making her question every thought that passed through her mind. Every memory. Every belief.

Maybe I care for Bitsy these days, and maybe when the time comes and we have to bury her, I’ll shed a tear for the old duck and send up a prayer that whatever comes next will be kind to her. But she was always, and will forever be, a master manipulator. And Alana was her target. Day in, day out. If Alana questioned anything, Bitsy rode her narrative until she was blue in the face, and her daughter, so sweet and sad, doubted her own sanity.

That’s what drew us together, I think. Her need to escape a mother who twisted words with expert precision, so she came to a guy who never twisted a damn thing. And I needed her, my safe haven from the people who considered kicking the shit out of their sons a sport.

Her touch was healing. Which made us exactly what the other needed.

Until we weren’t, that is.

“You wanna go to my office or something?”Shut the fuck up, Tommy. You’re angry, remember? You’re furious.“No one will stare at you in there.”

Her cheeks warm, and her eyes glitter. I know she tiptoes atop a wireline that, if she falls, will leave her destroyed.

But she clamps her lips shut and shakes her head. Then, she shifts to the right and makes a point of watching her son.

Her son.

She has a son.

DoIwant to go to my office? Tie a rope around my neck and take care of business, maybe. Seek Oliver out and invite him into the cage? If I lay there long enough, he might beat me half to death and give me something different to hurt over.

I do neither. Instead, I back up to the wall and shield her from the curious gazes of the other parents who stick around for class.

“You don’t have to do that.” She speaks barely above a whisper, sniffling and hiding the sound amongst the shouted cries of training children. “Just go about your day, Tommy. This won’t ever feel good, so why force it?”

I tuck my hands behind my back and enjoy the scratch of the brick wall against my bare shoulder blades.

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