Page 229 of Story of My Life
I gestured toward the window impatiently.
“What in the fucking fuck are you doing lurking in my yard, squishing your face against my window?” she demanded as she forced the window up.
“I didn’t squish my face against the glass,” I argued. “Back up.”
“No! Why?”
I heaved myself up onto the windowsill.
“Oh my God. Why are you wet?” She wrinkled her nose. “You smell like a fish.”
“Gage hit me with one in the face,” I explained, climbing the rest of the way through the window. My soggy boots hit the hardwood with a squish.
Hazel looked as if she were searching the room for a weapon.
“I come in peace,” I promised her.
“I don’t care. If everyone else got their shot at you, I want one too.”
“Well, unless you’re willing to hit me with a closed fist or you’ve got a live trout handy, you’re shit out of luck.”
She nodded. “Okay then.” She balled up her fist and drew her arm back. “You have ten seconds to tell me why the hell you dumped me, publicly humiliated me, and then broke into my house smelling like some lake monster, or else I’ll be forced to use my YouTube-researched self-defense moves on you.”
I held up my palms in surrender.
“I broke up with you because I was scared. This whole love thing is new to me. I was starting to get comfortable with it until Laura ended up back in the hospital. It reminded me of her accident. How we lost Miller, how we’d almost lost her. How she barely survived us telling her Miller was gone. I think I had a panic attack and I decided to solve everything by not being in love with you.”
She lowered her fist an inch or two.
“That’s horrible,” she admitted.
“I never got over it. She’s one of the best people I know, and I love her to death, but that didn’t protect her. I didn’t protect her. Love didn’t save her from a life without her other half, a lifewithout any of the things she used to do. I looked at her in that bed, and I saw you.”
“And you’d rather not be by someone’s bedside. Got it. Thanks for letting me know after I fell in love with you,” Hazel snapped. She had both fists up now in a completely wrong stance.
“Laura already kicked my ass. Mom and Dad too. Everybody dies. Everybody loses the people they love. There’s no escaping that fact. No shortcut to avoid the loss. So I wanna suffer with you, Hazel. I want to grieve and be angry and be at every bedside.”
“This is the most depressing grand gesture.”
“I thought I could protect myself from the bad if I didn’t have enough of the good.”
Her expression softened incrementally. “That’s really stupid.”
“Agreed. But you showed me too much good, and now I want more. Because we’re going to have the bad. It’s guaranteed. And the only way to survive it is to hold on to as much of the good as possible.”
“Okay, slightly less depressing.”
I reached for her and captured her wrists, tugging her closer to me. “Life is messy, but I’d rather be part of your mess than watching you make one with someone else.”
“I wasn’t actually making messes with other people. I was set up.Wewere set up. Zoey called itWeekend at Bernie-ing because it was like forcing a corpse to go through the motions.”
“The whole town knows we belong together. I know it now too. And I’m not letting you go,” I said, pulling her closer.
“I’m not going to just suddenly trust you and take my pants off?—”
“You’re already not wearing pants,” I pointed out.
She looked down. “Damn it.”
