Page 92 of The Last Kind of Kiss
My father holds out his hand. “Give me your car keys, Bristol.”
I swallow down a mouthful of hot vomit. “I…can’t.”
“Son,please.”
The metal edges of my keys dig craters into my palms, and the tears slip silently down my cheeks as my shoulders begin to shake. I feel my fingers slacken before I even register what I’m doing, guilt sitting in the bottom of my stomach like quick-drying concrete.
LILA
I don’t knowhow much time has passed, but the adrenaline has started to fade. I’m bound to freeze even in my puffer jacket, and I’ll be lucky if the engine or the headlights haven’t already attracted whatever is out there lurking in the darkness.
Bristol’s playlist has kept me sane for the most part. I’ll keep listening to it until my phone runs out of battery—which is probably going to be soon. So I stay curled up in my malformed half-circle, parts of the passenger seat notching uncomfortably against my spine, and I fold all of my limbs underneath my shivering body.
If I die out here, Bristol, I’m sorry. I’m sorry I ran. I’m sorry I didn’t try and fix things like I should’ve. I constantly judged you for the way you handled things, and now I’m no better. Running is easier—painless, almost. And after you’ve dealt with a lifetime of pain, I don’t blame you for wanting to escape.
I’m losing cognizance faster than California loses daybreak in December. I’m so tired. I just want to go to sleep. I want mybrain to be quiet. Maybe I’ll wake up in a better place, or maybe I’ll wake up in Bristol’s arms. That would be nice, wouldn’t it? To be back at his cabin, huddled around the fireplace, hearing his laughter echo into the night.
My eyelids slowly droop closed, and I let all of the anger and the fear and the sadness go.
And then, in the fogginess of my imagination, I hear a knock. I don’t know what I’m dreaming about, but Bristol must be at the door. Maybe I’m remembering all the times he showed up to my apartment for fancy date nights or casual movie marathons—all the times my heart waited nervously for him to come back and see me.
Rap, rap, rap.
He’d always knock three times. I don’t know why. Maybe it was the way he was raised—to be assertive but not insistent. Bristol was always too polite for his own good, but I loved that about him. It’s hard to find someone like that in this day and age.
Rap, rap, rap.
Okay, Dream Bristol. I get it. It’s a dream. You can just come on in.
RAP. RAP. RAP.
There’s muffled shouting, the car’s shaking, and that’s when I realize I’m not imagining things. With a racing pulse, I scramble away from the door, panickily searching for anything I can use as a makeshift weapon…until I realize through a bleary haze that my intruder isn’t an intruder at all.
Bristol’s banging on the car’s carapace with red, puffy eyes, and I work hastily to pop the back seat door open. His mountainous body enters the vehicle without hesitation, and his arms are the first thing I feel when he embraces me, accompanied by a sizeable dusting of snowflakes.
“I found you. Thank God I found you.”
How did he—? Am I sure I’m not imagining this?
He squeezes me tighter than ever before, as if letting go isn’t a fate he’s willing to face. “I thought I’d lost you. I thought you were—I thought you were gone for good.” His throat protests a wounded sound, and it stings as badly as lemon juice trickling into a fresh cut.
I immediately withdraw from him and click on the overhead light, which highlights the aftermath of tears on his face in a rinse of gold. I lose myself in his gaze like I always do—eyes the color of melted Ghirardelli squares and pupils blown wide, leaving behind the rings of his irises. He’s so beautiful that I don’t know how God could’ve created something so pure.
“Bristol…”
“Lila, I…” There’s an underpinning of shame in his voice, and he struggles to get the words out like there’s a hand curled around his windpipe. “I fucked up. I fucked up, and I’m so fucking sorry.”
I torture my bottom lip with my teeth, already feeling the tears circle back and start to tease my waterlines. “No, Bristol. I’m the one who should be apologizing,” I say quietly, blinking quickly to stall the flood. “I shouldn’t have run, and I-I can’t believe I was so awful to you. I should’ve been more understanding about where you were coming from. But instead, I took an already shitty situation and made it even shittier. I wasn’t even thinking about how you felt.”
His voice rolls over me like a babbling creek, smooth and soft and so unapologetically him. “You have nothing to apologize for. I should’ve been honest with you the moment I told you about Summit. I didn’t want you to find the ring like this. I was so ashamed that I wasn’t strong enough to get rid of it that I just…I just dragged everything out. And just because I was still grieving doesn’t give me an excuse to talk to you the way I did.”
“But I understand why you did. It wasn’t from a place of malintent. If I hadn’t given you the impression that I wouldn’t understand your dilemma, you wouldn’t have withheld the truth from me. And then for me to accuse you of comparing us? That was wrong. God, it wassowrong.”
“I wasn’t trying to compare you. I wasn’t trying to make you feel like my second choice. I said a lot of things I didn’t mean.”
I can feel my face draw tight, a predecessor to the tears that spill down my cheeks like ichor from a cut vein. I’m doing everything in my power to stop them before they escalate into river rapids, and I hold back the hiccups that jostle my rib cage. “I-I know that. I said…I said things I didn’t mean too. I’m sorry, Bristol. I’m s-so sorry.”
He wastes no time in bridging the distance between us, enveloping me in another hug nourished by love. “Shh, angel. Shh. Just breathe with me. You don’t need to talk, okay? I know.”
