Page 72 of Brushed and Buried
“Adrian…” Vince’s voice is thick with emotion.
“My first thought wasn’t about me, to be honest. I could try to make do with my art, attend free classes or something, and still improve my craft. But I was thinking of you, of how much you love football. Did I just need to let you go so you could have the life you wanted? I knew the answer to that.” The memory sits heavy in my ribs, years of buried grief finally finding its way to the surface. “I walked back to my car knowing I was walking away from everything I wanted. I sat in the parking lot across from the school and watched other couples arrive for prom, wondering what would have happened if I’d been reckless enough to fight for us despite the cost.”
The silence that follows is deafening. I can hear Vince’s breathing beside me, slightly ragged, and I wonder if I’ve finally said too much, if the damage of what his father did, what we both lost, is too much to carry forward.
“I’m going to kill him.” The words come out low and dangerous, and when I look at him, his jaw is clenched so tight I can see the muscle jumping, his hand grasping his hair and wiping his tears away. “I’m going to fucking kill him for what he did to you. To us.”
“Vince,” I reach out instinctively, my hand covering his other hand on the bench. The contact sends electricity throughmy entire system, and I have to force myself to focus on the conversation. “He’s not worth destroying your life over.”
“He already destroyed it once.”
The anguish in his voice makes my heart ache. For the first time, I’m seeing the full scope of what Victor’s manipulation cost both of us. It’s not just the missed opportunities or the years of separation, but the fundamental damage to Vince’s ability to trust his own feelings, and to believe he deserved happiness.
“We can’t change what happened,” I say, gently squeezing his hand before I lose my nerve and pull away. “But we can decide what happens next.”
Vince looks at me with something like hope flickering in his eyes. “What do you want to happen next?”
The question hangs between us, loaded with years of longing and hurt and possibility. I think about the sketch I created of him last night, how right it felt to capture him on paper again. I think about the way he looked at me on the beach today, like I was worth risking everything for.
“I don’t actually know,” I say finally, the honesty cutting through my defenses. “I don’t know how to want things anymore without wondering when they’ll be taken away.”
He goes quiet, and I know he’s trying to understand the depth of what I’ve just said. It’s the truest thing I’ve said in years, the core fear that’s shaped every decision I’ve made.
“You stayed in my head, Adrian,” he says finally, his voice rough and pained. “In the quiet parts, in the pauses between everything I did. It’s not because I was stuck, but because I never stopped carrying you.”
The words hit me hard, beautiful and devastating in equal measure. I have to close my eyes against the intensity of what they mean and offer.
“That’s the problem,” I whisper. “You carried me, and I carried you, and neither of us learned how to put the other down. Do you have any idea what that does to a person? Living with that kind of weight?”
“Tell me.”
I open my eyes and find him watching me with an expression so vulnerable it makes my ribs ache. “It makes you afraid of everything, to get close to anyone because they’re not you. Terrified to create anything real because it feels like betrayal. Hesitant to hope for anything because hope is what breaks you.”
Vince shifts closer, and I can feel the warmth radiating from his body, the familiar pull that’s always existed between us. “I know what it’s like to live half a life,” he says quietly. “To go through the motions of being someone else while the person you actually are just watches from the sidelines.”
“Then you know why I can’t just say yes to this, why I can’t pretend it’s simple.”
“I’m not asking you to pretend anything.” His voice carries a conviction that makes me want to believe him. “I’m asking youto consider the possibility that some things are worth the risk of being broken again.”
“And what if we’re not strong enough?”
The question comes from the deepest, most terrified part of me, the part that’s convinced I’m fundamentally altered by what we went through. But instead of reassurance or platitudes, Vince gives me something more valuable, and that is honesty.
“Then we figure it out together,” he says, his voice steadier now. “Damage doesn’t disqualify us from love, Adrian. Sometimes it just means we love more carefully.”
Love. He mentions the word without even realizing it, and the easy way it falls from his lips makes my breath catch.
It takes a while before I can form a coherent thought after that. I want to argue with him, to point out all the ways this could go wrong, all the reasons we’re not the same people we were at eighteen. But sitting here beside him, feeling the solid reality of his presence, I can’t deny that something in me responds to his certainty like a flower turning toward sunlight.
“I have been sketching and painting you, not always from memory, but often from yearning,” I say, my voice low, carrying the history and longing of every piece I made of him. “Fragments of what I remembered, pieces of what I imagined you’d become. I’d start these portraits and never finish them because they never looked right. They neverfelt whole.”
“How so?”
“They looked lonely,” I say without hesitation. “Impossibly so, even when I tried to paint you smiling. It was like you were searching for something you couldn’t find.”
Vince’s entire body locks up. “Maybe I was.”
The simple acknowledgment breaks something open in my chest, and I have to look away before the emotion overwhelms me completely. I realize that we’ve both been searching for something. We’ve been carrying these ghost versions of each other, these incomplete portraits of what we lost.
