between the two of them now. Your father already
knows.
Clayton brings families together.
Miles rips them apart.
I tried to stay. I tried to love you. Every time I look
at you, I see him. Everything is him. If I stay,
everything will always be him. You know that. I know
you understand that. I shouldn’t blame you.
But you do.
I’m so sorry.
You stopped loving me with a letter, Rachel?
Love,
I feel it. All the ugly parts of it. It’s in my pores. My veins.
My memories. My future.
Rachel.
The difference between the ugly side of love and the
beautiful side of love is that the beautiful side is much
lighter. It makes you feel like you’re floating. It lifts you up.
Carries you.
The beautiful parts of love hold
you above the rest of the
world. They hold you so high above all the bad stuff, and
you just look down on everything else and think,
Wow. I’m
so glad I’m up here
.
Sometimes the beautiful parts of love move back to
Phoenix.
The ugly parts of love are too heavy to move back to
Phoenix. The ugly parts of love can’t lift you up.
They bring you
D
O
W
N.
They hold you under.
Drown
you.
You look up and think,
I wish I was up there
.
But you’re not.
Ugly love
becomes
you.
Consumes
you.
Makes you
hate it all.
Makes you realize that all the beautiful parts aren’t even
worth it.
Without the beautiful, you’ll never risk feeling
this.
You’ll never risk feeling the
ugly.
So you give it up. You give it all up. You never want love
again, no matter what kind it is, because no type of love will
ever be worth living through the ugly love again.
I’ll never let myself love anyone again, Rachel.
Ever.
chapter thirty-five
TATE
“Last load,”
Corbin says, picking up the remaining two
boxes.
I hand Corbin the key to my new place. “I’ll make one
more walk-through and meet you over there.” I open the
door for Corbin, and he exits the apartment. I’m left staring
at the door across the hall.
I haven’t seen or spoken to him since last week. I’ve been
selfishly hoping he would show up and apologize, but then
again, what would he even be apologizing for?
He never lied
to me. He never verbalized promises that he broke.
The only times he wasn’t brutally honest with me were the
times he didn’t speak. The times he looked at me and I
assumed the feelings I saw in his eyes were more than what
he was able to verbalize.
It’s apparent now that I more than likely invented those
feelings from him in order to match them to my own. The
occasional emotion behind his eyes when we were together
was obviously a figment of my own imagination. A figment
of my hope.
I scan the apartment one last time to make sure I packed
everything. When I step outside and lock Corbin’s door
behind me, my movements are taken over by something I’m
unfamiliar with.
I can’t tell if it’s
braveness or desperation, but my hand is
balled into a fist, and that fist is knocking on his door.
I tell myself that I’m free to escape to the elevator if ten
seconds pass and the door doesn’t open.
Unfortunately, it opens after seven.
My thoughts begin to riot with rationalization as the door
opens wider. Before rationalization wins and I dart away, Ian
appears in the doorway. His eyes change from complacent
to sympathetic when he sees me standing here.
“Tate,” he says, capping my name off with a smile. I notice
the shift of his gaze toward Miles’s
bedroom before his eyes
fall back on mine. “Let me get him,” he says.
I feel the ascent in the nod of my head, but my heart is
making a descent, scaling down my chest, through my
stomach, and straight to the floor.
“Tate’s
at the door,” I hear Ian say. I inspect every word,
every syllable, searching for a clue wherever I can find one. I
want to know if he rolled his eyes when he said that or if he
said it hopefully. If anyone knows how Miles would feel
about me standing in his doorway, it would be Ian.
Unfortunately, Ian’s voice gives no indication of what Miles
may feel about my presence.
I hear footsteps. I dissect the
sound of the footsteps as
they close in on the living room. Are they hurried footsteps?
Are they hesitant? Are they angry?
When he reaches the door, my eyes fall to his feet first.
I get nothing from them. No clues that will help me find
the confidence I so desperately need in this moment.
I can already tell my words will come out raspy and weak,
but I force them up anyway. “I’m leaving,” I say, still staring
down at his feet. “I just wanted to say good-bye.”
There’s no immediate reaction from him, physically
or
verbally. My eyes finally make the brave journey up to his.
When I see the stoic look on his face,
I want to step back,
but I’m afraid I’ll trip over my heart.
I don’t want him to watch me fall.
My regret over making the choice to knock consumes me
with the brevity in his response.
“Good-bye, Tate.”
