Beautiful Graves(70)

“But it happened to me.” I smile sadly. I can barely see him behind the curtain of tears. It’s happened to me twice, in fact. Dom was the second death I was responsible for. “I remember, as the policemen talked to me, as Dad and Renn frantically tried to understand what had happened, you kept on sending me message after message. The screen kept flashing with a green light. Until one of the police officers asked me to put it aside. I was still holding it in my hand. I didn’t let it go, even when I fell to the tracks and hit my head.”

There are tears in his eyes. I don’t remember Joe ever crying. Not even when Dom passed away. But he is crying now, and when I reach over to hold his hand, he clasps my fingers like I’m made out of sugar. Carefully. As if I could melt away.

“So you blamed yourself for your mother’s death, and me for causing you to act that way.” Joe stubs out his cigarette in an ashtray with his free hand.

I run my thumb over his knuckles. “I let the phone run out of battery and threw it in the ocean a few days later. I wanted to throw myself inside, too, but didn’t have the guts. I thought we shouldn’t be together after what happened. I felt so guilty. Our relationship was the reason she died. It sickened me to think I’d just continue as usual after she was gone. Go on dates, have sex, laugh, live . . . all those things. They seemed too trivial after what happened. And, yeah, school was a part of it. Going to college was a way to better my future. I didn’t deserve that. I deserved to be stuck in place, just like Mom was going to forever be stuck at age forty-three. So I dropped out. Cut all ties with Pippa and all my other friends.”

“Punishing yourself,” Joe comments.

I down another shot of tequila. The edges of my vision begin to blur.

“I decided to move to Boston. In retrospect, it’s easy to see why. I wanted to run into you, even if subconsciously. I fed myself some crappy story. That Boston was a great market for jobs. That if I ever decided to go back to school, there were lots of colleges in the area. It was also far enough from home that Dad and Renn couldn’t bulldoze their way into an intervention. I was free to destroy myself without interruption.”

Joe doesn’t say anything. He just listens. And God, it is so good to talk to him again. His gaze is like the sun. It gives me warmth and strength.

“But quickly, I realized that the city was too big, too gray, too rough. More than anything, it reminded me of you. And the pain of losing you, on top of losing my mom, was just too much. I couldn’t take it. I moved to Salem. It seemed like a good place to get my artistic mojo back. Spoiler alert: even Salem didn’t help. My art died with my mom.”

“I don’t think your art died,” Joe says cautiously. “I think it’s still inside of you, pounding on the door, waiting to get out. You’re locking it in, because your art is a way to get ahead. To achieve things.”

We hold each other’s gaze before I pour him another shot. “Your turn to tell me what went on with you these last six years.”

A ghost of a smile touches his lips. “Well, as you probably pieced together, I went to Europe because Dom had just received his all-clear after another cancer scare.”

I give him a thumbs-up. After what happened with Sarah, it is hard to tell which of the things Dom told me were lies and which were truths. In the past month, I have questioned every single aspect in my relationship with Dominic Graves. Ultimately, even the anger and the pain can’t make up for the fact that I genuinely loved him. And that with his death, he took any sense of closure I may have had to his grave.

“I wanted to get away from the Dom-fest. Not because I didn’t care—because I cared too much and didn’t know when the next opportunity to live for myself was going to present itself. I wanted to live for me. Write, drink, fuck. Live a detached, lonely life. Get lost inside myself, find out who I was.” Joe strokes his chin, deep in thought. “Then I met you, and you went and crapped all over my plans. I couldn’t escape you, no matter how hard I tried. You were the only thing I thought about. I wrote Dom and my parents letters about you. I told them I met the one. I wasn’t happy about it. It was more like: ‘Can you believe I met her before I slept with fifteen girls? Before I signed a book deal? Before I rented my own place?’ That was to Dom, obviously. Not Mom and Dad.”

His confession is ripping me apart. I feel like he is prying all my wounds open. I had no idea he was in just as deep.

“I bought a ticket back before I even talked to you,” Joe admits, looking away so I won’t see the color rising in his cheeks. “The plan was to go home, pack my shit, move to California, and hope to hell you wouldn’t get your head out of your ass quickly enough to realize you were dating a loser. I was hoping being next to you would help me put a dent in my manuscript.”

I clutch his hand in mine, closing my eyes. The past is so painful, because we were a breath away from a happily ever after. From my mom being alive and well. From Joe coming for me.

“But then I stopped answering you,” I finish for him softly.

“That didn’t mean I stopped trying, though.” He rubs the back of his neck, frowning. “I kept sending you messages. Then emails to variations of your name. I couldn’t believe I was dumb enough not to ask for your last name. Everlynne is such a unique name. I’d have found you in a heartbeat.”

I sigh, because I felt the same way.