Page 204 of Composed
He glances at me over his shoulder. “Ten years lost, Rixie. And for what?”
That’s the million-pound question, isn’t it?
“I waited, you know,” I tell him, my face crumpling when he turns his head from me. “I kept waiting for the day you’d show up, curse me out and tell me I was wrong. When you didn’t, I convinced myself it was because I’d done the right thing.”
He takes another step away and the words fall out of me, desperate and pleading.
“Because you never came back. And if you weren’t happy without me, you’d have come back, right? You’d have told me you hated me, that I’d made the biggest mistake of my life, that you couldn’t bear to look at me because youresentedme.”
His shoulders tense as he keeps walking.
I cling to the metal railing on the quarter-pipe. “You never came back!”
He freezes.
Rain crashes around him, bouncing off the metal ramps. I expect him to turn. To look at me and hear what I never dared tell him all those years ago. But he doesn’t.
For a long moment, only the roar of the wind fills the silence between us.
Then, I hear it.
His voice, so soft, sosplintered, slices through the air, and tears down the final wall I was clinging to.
“You never asked me to.”
Chapter sixty-five
Cole • Then
If It Means A Lot To You – A Day To Remember
Twenty-One Years Old
Lightningripsthroughthedark clouds.
Hands shoved deep in my pockets, I follow the clink of wheels through the tree-lined path.
Floodlights bounce off the wet ramps, sliding across Hendrix like a spotlight.
Her hair is pulled into a tight ponytail, and she’s wearing a tight-fitting black hoodie—a hoodie that’s not mine for the first time in five years—that’s doing nothing to shield her from the trickling rain.
My chest knots, ice settling deep into my bones.
I climb onto the half-pipe as she drops her knees and glides across the rain-slicked metal. If she notices my arrival, she doesn’t show it. Not like she’s not expecting me, I guess. She’s the one who asked to meet here in the middle of the night.
Air lodges in my lungs as the board rocks beneath her.
She teeters on the edge of the deck, her eyes slamming closed before she loses the battle.
The board crashes, Hendrix drops, and my stomach sinks as she exhales a slow, ragged breath into the sky.
Then she shifts and her blank stare locks with mine.
Everything heightens.
The lighting spears brighter, the rain lashes harder, the wind whips sharper.
I knew this day was coming.
