Page 13 of Heart of Gold
Something about that comment guts me. I can’t exactly pinpoint it at first, but it’s enough to pull me into a sitting position.
“What’s wrong?” She asks, “I didn’t mean to strike a nerve.”
I think about blowing her off but for the first time maybe ever, I want to open up to someone.
“I wouldn’t refer to myself as the golden child.”
She sits back on her knees, her eyes turning to a more troubled look.
“Levi?” She questions.
“It’s complicated,” I sigh.
She waves me off, “It’s okay. You don’t have to talk about it. There’s tons of things I don’t like talking about, so if anyone gets it, I do.”
Shit. Now I’m curious.
“What do you not like talking about?”
She raises her brow, crossing her arms all sassy like. “Why should I tell you when you won’t tell me?”
I lay back on the bed with a thud, “Touche´.”
She jumps on top of me, placing her hands on the pillow and caging my head in. “You could just tell me, you know. It’s not like we will see each other again.”
I stare into her brown eyes. I don’t like thinking about the very likely truth of not seeing her again, because something inside of me wants to see her every single day.
She rolls her eyes, her small frame falling to the pillow next to me, “Stop lookin’ at me like that.”
“Stop acting like you aren’t going to be so obsessed with me that you won’t stalk me after this cruise.”
She pulls her phone up in front of her face, pretending to search, “Phoenix….”
“Richardson.” I smile. “It’s Richardson.”
She looks back to her screen typing away, before shoving it in front of me. “It says Pheonix Richardson doesn’t exist.”
I thought about taking her phone from her hand and typing my Instagram handle into the search bar so that my profile fills the screen, but I decided to at least let her ask me for my real name first.
She drops her phone to the bed, “You probably already have thousands of fans on there.You don’t need me. Plus, I bet the entire female population is following you.”
For some reason, I feel like maybe she’s insecure. Probably something to do with that Grayson guy eating away at her self confidence.
“They aren’t you.”
She blushes a bit, pulling her nails to her lips, biting them subconsciously. The way her eyes dart from me to the bed, and back to me, is adorable.
“Ok,” I huff, here goes nothing.
“Levi was better than me. He always was, at everything. So when he got sick, it was hard. Suddenly, I wasn’t just Levi’s brother anymore. It was the first time that I was the only kid on the field with Richardson on their jersey. Things changed.”
“For you?”
“For everyone. My brother almost died, right in front of the entire town. It was the longest twenty-two minutes of my life. I just remember staring at him, laying there on the turf, watching as they gave him CPR. I was so scared, and there wasn’t anything I could do. I remember the coaches holding me back, and I was crying in front of everyone. I remember screaming, begging them to help him. I remember the exact sequence of the lights on the ambulance as it drove away.”
“Phoenix…”
“He finally woke up a couple days later, and they took him off the vent. The first thing he said to me was, “Your heartbeat saved my life.” I had no idea what that even meant and he was on so many medications he was basically high, but he swears to this day that he felt my heartbeat while he was unconscious, like he was living inside my body.”
