Page 61 of I Would Stay Forever
The thought of him hit me square in the chest. How could I even think of leaving him behind? I needed him.
Somehow, in the crazy world my life had turned into in the last couple of months, Dean had become my anchor, stopping me from getting blown away in the waves. I needed him here to tell me if I was making a mistake, to come along with me so I didn’t have to go at it alone.
Because that was what I’d been the past two months. Alone.
Dad was gone and Mum was busy trying to hold all of us together. My friends didn’t know what was happening, my sisters were dealing with their own issues, and my brother barely talked to me. But Dean—he was there. He had always been there, even when I didn’t want him to be.
I needed him.
I needed him right now more than I needed anything else.
With trembling fingers, I fumbled for my phone in the center console. Notifications filled the lock screen, probably my friends trying to check in, but I ignored them all as I moved with a single-minded focus. I scrolled until I saw his name and pressed the call button because I had no idea how I could even begin to explain this all over a text.
My heart pounded with every ring.
Once.
Twice.
“Hello?” his voice was breathless, and if I wasn’t imagining it, a little concerned. And that broke me.
“I need you.” The words came out in a sob and were probably almost impossible to make sense of. It was raw. Ugly. A side of me only he got to see. “Please.”
I looked around wildly, blinking at the shadowed stretch of road beyond my windshield. “I—I’m on the highway,” I said. “Outside of town. I don’t even know which direction. I just… I drove.”
“Okay,” he said, instantly calm. Grounded. “Pull over. Are you pulled over?”
“Yeah.” My voice cracked. “I couldn’t—I didn’t know where I was going. I just knew I couldn’t stay. Dean, please. I don’t want to go home. I don’t want to go back.”
“I’m coming.”
“I don’t even know?—”
“I’ll find you.”
I believed him.
I stayed there, breathing through the panic, letting the tears fall as I stared at the occasional passing cars and the stretch of road that had almost taken me away from everything I’d ever known. Finally, I dropped my forehead onto the steering wheel and let the sobs overtake my body once again.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried this hard. I wasn’t sure I’d even hurt this much when Dad left in the first place and I felt ridiculous for breaking down just from seeing him, but I couldn’t stop it. Maybe if it was only that, I could have handled it. But it wasn’t just him—it was him and Sebastian and Imogen and this school and this stupid town full of memories of a time when my life was better. Why did everything always have to lead back to that?
And then, some unknowable amount of time later, headlights pulled in behind me. A car door slammed. Footsteps. And then?—
A flash of cold air, like the passenger door being opened, and a soft voice. “Breathe, Lavender.” I might have thought Iimagined the words, except that it was accompanied by a hand on my back a moment later, comforting circles that sent shivers down my spine. Only one person ever did that.
“I want to go,” I said through wracking sobs. “I want to leave and never come back.”
He didn’t respond, or if he did, I didn’t hear it. But I did feel him—the way he leaned across the center console to hug me, how he pressed soft kisses along my shoulders, how he grabbed my hand in his and let me squeeze it so tight that it must have cut off his circulation.
He came. I called, and he came.
That realization undid me all over again.
I turned my head just enough to see him. His warm brown eyes. The flush still lingering in his cheeks. The way he looked at me like I wasn’t falling apart, like I wasn’t too much.
“I meant it,” I said. “When I said I wanted to go, I didn’t mean temporarily.”
Dean kept holding my hand in one of his like he wasn’t planning to ever let go, but he used his other to brush his thumb along my cheek, gently wiping away a tear.
