You Have a Match(72)

My voice breaks on the last word. Something in his face splinters, and I know I’ve finally gotten through to him. I don’t live in the comfortable in-between now, of pretending Leo knows and doesn’t know the way I feel. It’s all laid out bare, and me right along with it.

“You think I didn’t tell you because you’re not important to me?”

I can only stare at him. I don’t know how else to answer without giving too much more of myself away.

“Don’t you get it?” Leo’s eyes well up, and I’m the one who’s stunned into silence. “I almost didn’t leave at all. Because I—of course I like you, Abby. I’ve wanted to tell you, but I—I knew I couldn’t do it if I was ever gonna leave.”

The breath I was going to let out catches in my throat, my anger dissolving so fast that my bones have almost forgotten how to hold me up without it.

“What?”

He doesn’t say anything, but he doesn’t have to. I see my own confusion and hurt reflected back at me. I see the gears turning in his brain the way they’re turning in mine, the enormity of what he just said, of what it means and what it doesn’t.

“Leo, I…” I want to be happy. I’ve waited for months, hoped against hope, to hear him say this to me. But I never thought he’d follow it up with something so bleak. “You think I’d stand in the way of you going? After everything we’ve been through, is that really what you think of me?”

Leo closes his eyes, breathing something out that’s heavier than air.

“No, Abby, that’s just it. I was afraid I’d stand in my own way. Because I knew if you felt the same way, I’d never be able to go.”

We’re both holding our breath, knowing the next few moments are going to define a lifetime’s worth of what we are to each other. We took reckless steps to get here, but we’ll have to take careful ones to get back.

I shake my head. “I’d have made you go. You know that, right?” I’m not even thinking when I take a step back toward him and lift my hand up. “That’s what—”

“Oh my god. Abby.”

His eyes are locked on my wrist. The pain has seared through my arm, an inconvenient and ill-timed reminder that I am broken in the figurative sense and in a very literal one. I try to shove my sleeve over it, but Leo’s too fast, his touch feather-light but firm enough that I know better than to jerk it back.

“What the hell … Finn,” he says, answering his own question. There’s less anger in it, more worry. He’s gone into full Benvolio mode, and there’s no getting him back. “This looks really bad. We’ve got to—”

Leo looks up at the sound of footsteps. I already know who it is from the look on his face, but that doesn’t make me any more prepared to hear the quake in my mom’s voice when she says, “We’re going home. Now.”





twenty-nine




The dumbest thing I can do is try to hide my wrist, both because it’s clear that my mom has already seen it, and also because it hurts like a bitch. But that is exactly what I do, and the pained squeak that comes out of my mouth only makes it worse.

“What happened?” ask my mom and Leo in unison.

I look over at my mom and see that she has my duffel bag in her hands. Somehow, in the last ten minutes, she has taken the liberty of inviting herself into my cabin, shoving all my stuff into it, and carting it out. She means business.

“I fell.”

She opens her mouth, clearly not accepting that as an adequate answer, but she’s entered fight-or-flight mode and she is decidedly in flight.

“We’ll stop and get it looked at on the way,” she says. “Let’s go, your dad’s waiting in the car.”

“Wait—I can’t—I have to say—”

“Please don’t make this difficult.”

There is this resignation in her voice I’m not used to hearing. Something about it blisters in my ears, reminding me of the truth I’ve been trying to come to terms with not only in the last few months, but all my life—I’m a problem.

Well, serves them right. They had me to solve one. Figures I’d create a dozen more.

My voice is hard, matching hers. “Let me say goodbye to Savvy. You at least owe me that.”

She falters for a split second, and I seize on it, backing away from her. “I’ll be right back,” I tell her. I turn to acknowledge Leo, but he’s gone. I quickly scour the area for him, but he must have gone back into the kitchen.

“Crap.”

I take off, but before I find Savvy I nearly run headfirst into Mickey, who’s coming back from a run with Rufus. She pulls her headphones out of her ears, squinting at the hobble I’ve adopted in an attempt not to mess up my wrist.

“Have you seen Savvy?”

She glances at my arm, drops her mouth in horror, and looks back at my face. “Uh—”

“Seriously, my parents are here, I’ve gotta find her.”

The horror slides off Mickey’s face into a deeper, disquieting kind of fear. “She’s not with you?”

“No. Why?”

“Because she didn’t come back to the cabin after she talked to Jo last night,” says Mickey, the words coming out too fast. She was breathing hard before, but now she’s on the verge of hyperventilating. “I just figured with everything going on that she was with you. She’s not with you anymore?”