Page 82 of The Worst Kind of Promise
“Faye!” I scream, rushing over to her, ignoring the collision of my hip into the front row of seats.
Her head perks up as she rises to her feet, and my arms immediately bar her in an embrace. I don’t know why I thought she would smell or look different, but she smells and looks likemyFaye. She’s shivering in her tiny pajama set, burying herself into the heat of my body, and now I wish I’d brought a jacket with me. I don’t pull away. I’m not ready yet.
“Are you hurt?” I whisper against the crown of her head, inhaling her peach scent—how it still lingers even after a grueling day. The smell of her, the feel of her, just looking at her is like a muscle relaxant. My own slice of heaven that I don’t deserve. The one place I’ll always come back to no matter how far away I am or how much time passes.
“I’m okay,” she says quietly, cheek pressed against my chest.
I can’t tell you how many times we’ve been in this position before. I don’t want to repeat it, no matter how familiar it may be. There shouldn’thaveto be a reunion with us. We shouldn’t have to be separated in the first place. And I know each of these instances have happened because of something idiotic I said.
I pull away from her—even though my body protests—and I drink in those perfect features of hers, catalogue the smile adorning her heart-shaped lips, the brown of her eyes that remind me of autumn, the freckles that dot her alabaster skin in vast constellations.
“You scared the shit out of me, Faye,” I tell her, running my hands over the gooseflesh on her arms.
She doesn’t seem to respond to my touch like she usually does, and her lifelessness nudges my anxiety into action.
“I’m sorry,” she says. “I shouldn’t have said those things to you. I shouldn’t have run. I just felt so cornered, and I didn’t know what to do.”
“No. You don’t need to apologize.I’msorry. I shouldn’t have raised my voice at you, and I shouldn’t have tried to villainize you when everything was my fault. I was ashamed and angry and didn’t want to hear the truth. I thought I knew what was best for you, but I was wrong.”
I’m never going to go behind Faye’s back again. Because nothing in this world—and I meannothing—is worth losing her. I’ve never been so wrecked in my life. I was fully ready to accept that she was gone. Not, like,deadgone. But just gone. Somewhere better, without me. And if she was, I wouldn’t have held it against her. I’ll always put her happiness first, even if that means sacrificing my own happiness.
My life doesn’t fucking exist if Faye’s not in it. Whenever she decides to leave this planet, I’m going to follow her, because there’s no way in hell I’m going to survive if I never see her face again, never hear her voice, never hold her.
There are inky streaks of mascara on her cheeks from crying, and the sight sits on my chest like an imposing anvil, too heavy to move. She’s been sitting in this empty rink for an hour, all by herself, in nothing but a tank top and shorts. I know her thoughts can be a dark limbo, a cesspool of negativity and self-deprecation, and I let her run out of the house after saddling her with too much emotion for one person to handle.
She shrugs. “It’s okay—”
“It’s not okay,” I assert, trying to soldier through the thick layer of bile in my mouth that has yet to recede. “None of this is okay. How Saxon treated you, how I treated you. I was supposed to protect you, and all I did was let you down.”
There’s not a lot of space on the ground for both of us, but I lower anyways, folding my legs in uncomfortably so Faye has enough room. She follows suit and sits down next to me, all of her limbs fitting proportionately between the front row of seats and the partition of plexiglass.
I don’t have a speech prepared, but I am ready to grovel—which, knowing me, is kind of guaranteed at this point.
I’ve never liked talking about my past. It doesn’t matter who it’s with. And no, I didn’t have the most gut-wrenching and heartbreaking childhood. I didn’t witness a major death in the family. I didn’t suffer from abuse. I wasn’t forced to take care of myself from a young age. I always had a roof over my head and food on the table. My childhood was…fine. It was just lacking.
I hazard a glance at her, feel the backs of my eyes itch with tears. “I never had a good model of what a healthy relationship is supposed to look like. My parents fought a lot when I was younger. I thought it was something that every married couple went through, until they eventually grew further apart. I don’t really believe they wereeverin love. They were cruel to each other, blaming the other when they had the chance, lying and manipulating when things didn’t go the way they wanted. They created this toxic environment that, as a child, I was completely oblivious to. I’d fall asleep to the sounds of them yelling, the crash of dishes or furniture or whatever was throwable in the space they were in. If a day passed where they weren’t screaming their lungs out at one another, I thought something was wrong.
“After they split, home life got a lot easier for me. But my relationships with other people…suffered. I was terrible to my girlfriends—unempathetic, uncaring. I didn’t know how to show compassion or how to think about anyone besides myself. I mean, you said yourself that I’m not necessarily the nicest person.”
“I didn’t saythatexactly.”
I laugh for the first time in days—something I definitely didn’t think I’d be doing for a while. “It’s true. I don’t make an effort to understand people. I don’t care about anything unless it affects me. It’s what I grew up with, what I thought was the norm. I’d been content living a loveless life because I never really knew what love was. It wasn’t until you that I realized I’d been doing everything wrong.”
“I love you, Faye,” I profess, robbing the breath from her lungs.
Should I have said it sooner? Maybe. Do I wish I had done some big reveal, like flying her out to Ireland on a private jet to show her the flower field I bought that spells out her name? Yes. But all that matters is she knows it now.
Faye stares at me, eyes wide, mouth agape. I don’t want to put pressure on her to say it back, so I continue.
“When you told me not to reach out to Saxon, I didn’t listen to you. I was convinced that I was in the right, and I wasn’t willing to change my mind to understand where you were coming from. But in doing so, I fucked up what we had. I broke your trust…again. I believed that love was all about sacrifices instead of compromises.”
She pushes out a quiet breath, but it’s the only noise to be heard in the whole arena. A heavy exhale echoing off a surface of ice and skyscraping walls. I can see the gears turning in her head as she contemplates what she’s going to say.
“Yeah, you’ve been kind of a dick lately,” she mutters.
The corners of my lips buoy into a smile. There’s my Faye. Tells it like it is. Always holding me accountable. Never sugarcoating anything. “I have. I’m sorry. You’re the last person who deserves it.”
“I’m tired of being mad, Kit. I’m just tired of it all.”
