Page 68 of The First Kind of Love
Her eyes are the color of burnished copper in the hallway’s light, and her lips part to permit a hollow sound. “Fulton…”
Not that I had a lot of composure to begin with, but the rest of it shatters, and a jumbled apology is the next thing to come out of my fat mouth—to console her more than to absolve me. I can’t waste another second without her knowing how sorry I am.
“I’m so sorry, Shiloh. I’m sorry if it seemed like I was trying to buy your affection—that wasn’t my intention at all. I should’ve listened to you instead of throwing money at your problem and expecting it to magically go away. I was an insensitive asshole, and it breaks my fucking heart that I hurt you.”
I thought that the truth would lift the crushing weight off my chest, but it doesn’t. No, if anything, it weaponizes my pain against me, and my heart thrashes like a hummingbird in a gilded cage. Her expression is inscrutable. The only piece of evidence that confirms she evenheardmy apology in the first place is the parched plot of lip she chooses to gnaw on.
I don’t think I could live with the possibility of never earning her forgiveness.
Time crawls by slowly while she ponders a response, and the longer she leaves me in dreary silence, the harder my stomach works to eject itself out of my goddamn mouth. The apparent cold is doing nothing for the sheet of sweat sticking my shirt to my body. It’s hard to breathe. It’s hard to focus onanything other than the anxiety swarming me like white blood cells to a newly opened wound.
“You don’t need to apologize, Fulton,” she says, shaking her irresistibly soft hair. “I overreacted. You were just trying to help, and I blew up at you. I put words in your mouth that Iknowyou’d never say—or think.”
“You didn’t overreact. I hurt your feelings. You needed someone to listen, and I justlecturedyou. If I was in your position, I would’ve been upset too. And my offer had absolutelynothingto do with thinking that you’re not capable of solving this problem on your own, because I know you’d do a better job than me, but…”
She stares at me expectantly, the shape of her mouth hard to place—somewhere between a frown and an indifferent line. Her grip on the blanket tightens as she braces herself for the deathblow of my admission.
“But…?”
“But you shouldn’t have to.”
I saw the damage prioritizing work over his family did to my dad, and I’ll be damned if I let Shiloh go down the same path. What Idoknow is what it feels like to be a prisoner in your own body, to constantly be haunted by the belief that you’re not good enough…and Shiloh ismorethan fucking good enough. If I can get her to see that, even for a split second, then I’ve finally done something worthy in my twenty-four years on this big, stupid, floating rock.
As if she’s just uncorked a well of sadness, tears gloss over her eyes, threatening to race toward an invisible finish line in never-ending tributaries. “I can’t justtakeyour money. I can’t stop…I have to keep working…I…”
“Breathe, Sunshine.Please,” I beg.
Screw the distance. I need to hold her right now. I need it so badly that I think I’ll die if I don’t. So I do—I wrap her in my arms to shield her from all the hurt, and my own chest shakeswith each reverberation of her sobs. She’s so small against me, so feeble, a broken girl refusing to let herself heal because all she knows is discipline and sacrifice. The thought of allowing change to happen scares her more than suffering silently for the rest of her life.
The space behind my eyes starts to burn, my diaphragm heaving with a breath not yet ready to egress from my lungs. It feels like there’s a goddamn noose tied around my neck, and each time she furls her fists in my shirt or howls in agony, the rope tightens.
“I can’t a-accept your offer,” she wails, guilt tearing through her last pillar of defense, the break in her voice rising above the whitewater in my ears. “I don’t want to take your money. I did that before with my parents, and it r-ruined them financially. If I take money from you, it could ruin more than just your finances…it could ruin ourrelationship.”
I rub her back with one soothing stroke after another, holding her so closely that I can feel her heart thundering against my ribs, and the way she hangs on me unbalances the apparent unsteadiness of my feet.
“You won’t ruin anything, Sunshine. I’ll help you figure this out. If you need time off, I’ll cover your shift. It doesn’t matter if it’s for a day, a week, a month—I’ll do it. I’ll do whatever it takes to carry some of this pressure,” I promise.
Shiloh reels back so she can look me in the eyes, and I have to work twice as hard to suppress my laughter when an objection flourishes over her lips. “You play hockey for a living, Ful. You can’t work two jobs.”
“I don’t care. You’re more important than hockey. You’realwaysgoing to be the most important thing in my life. You do get that, don’t you?”
I don’t think she could ever comprehend the space she takes up in my heart. She hung my moon and stars, she gave meoxygen on an uninhabitable planet, she inspired vegetative growth after years of adapting to a scorched earth.
Her tone is dipped in uncertainty. “Why would you risk your whole future for someone you’re not even with?”
“I’d never force you to be with me, Shi.Ever.But my heart belongs to you. There’s nothing you can say or do that will change that. You stole it the moment I met you—the moment you blessed me with the biggest smile even though I was a fucking mess when I was trying to order.”
“I just thought it was nerves,” she admits bashfully.
Not even close.
“It wasyou.”
And like a pebble plinking into a stagnant pool of brackish water, a ripple effect occurs, the rest of her emotions seeping out of her through overtaxed tear ducts. “I don’t deserve you,” she cries, keeping me at a distance while her fingers are still pretzeled in my shirt.
I grab her hand as my belly lurches with a newborn warmth that’s never existed before. “Sunshine, you deserve everything in this godforsaken world, and I won’t rest until I’m the only person who can give it to you.”
Despite my seemingly redundant efforts to pacify her, she only sobs harder, squeezing my palm back with a desperate kind of urgency that turns my knuckles the color of snowdrifts. It reminds me of the way she relied on me during our flight here.
