Say the Word(80)

She’d winked at me and gone right back to peeling.

I liked to think that Minnie had been right that night — that if someone or something awful entered your life, you could cut it out cleanly and move on, as though that spot had never been there at all.

But what if you didn’t have just one — what if you were full of brown spots?

How many people could you walk away from? And how much of yourself could you cut away before there was nothing left behind?

No matter how much you wish it, you can’t rewrite the past. It’s set in stone — unshakeable and uncompromising. So it made no difference whether Sebastian blamed me or badgered me about our history — I couldn’t make things better for him. The only thing I could do was vanish, cut myself out of his life completely once more, and hope that someday he might forget me all over again.

“Say the word and I’ll go,” I whispered in a broken voice, my watering eyes locked on his furious ones. “Say the word and I’ll fade away, and this, right here, will be the last time you see me.”

His eyes lost a little of their fury, but his jaw remained tightly clenched. I tried to gauge his emotions, but his expression was guarded. My throat constricted, and I thought I might choke on all the words I wanted to say but couldn’t ever voice.

“You brought me here; you can send me away.” I forced myself to go on. “Let me go back to Luster. Back into your past. You and I both know it’s where I belong — and where I’m supposed to stay.”

He stared at me for a minute in silence and for just a moment, I caught a glimpse of the boy I’d loved beneath the surface — he was there in the flash of sadness in Sebastian’s eyes, in the tense fists his fingers curled into when those words left my lips.

I hiccupped for air, the choked sobs rattling my chest and finally breaking free. Tears blurred my vision, appearing faster than I could wipe them away.

“I’m sorry, Bash. You have no idea how sorry I am.” I looked up at him with wet eyes, wishing I could tell him all of it — every secret, every false truth — but knowing I couldn’t.

He opened his mouth to speak, but I took an abrupt step backward and cut off his words with my own.

“Let me go,” I pleaded, feeling an unpleasant sensation of déjà vu as I told the man I loved, the man I’d always loved, to watch me walk away.

I turned and darted for the elevator which, for once, opened almost immediately. I boarded and pushed the button that would carry me down to the lobby, my shoulders heaving with sobs as I wept. I didn’t — couldn’t — look back at Sebastian before the doors closed.

“Goodbye,” I whispered into the empty elevator, pressing my eyes tightly closed against the tears.

Regret was an emotional cancer, destroying you from the inside out. Eating at your most vital parts until there was nothing left but scar tissue and sorrow. It chipped away at you in small increments, shattering your defenses and tiring you out. But, unlike a physical cancer, which might eventually go into remission or be cut out with a few careful strokes of a surgeon’s scalpel, regret would stay with you forever. It was chronic, but not terminal — a constant companion that would haunt you until your deathbed. And there were no cures to diminish its influence. No salves to counteract its effects.

Regret didn’t break your body. It crushed your spirit.

Mine had just been broken beyond repair.





Chapter Twenty-Four





Now


I don’t remember much of my walk home, but I know it wasn’t pretty. More than a few people stopped to stare at the girl with mascara running down her face, mussed up hair, and a trembling lower lip, but no one spoke to her. New Yorkers were rarely phased by something so minor as a girl having a total breakdown while wandering the streets of Midtown. Times like this made me miss Georgia, where I’d have been stopped immediately and tucked under the wing of a concerned neighbor, who’d have insisted on bringing me home with her for a glass of sweet tea and a slice of homemade pie.

I supposed a bottle of Merlot would have to do as a substitute.

When I got home, I didn’t even take my dress off before collapsing onto my bed in a heap of misery. Though the tears had finally stopped, I was exhausted from my crying jag and had no desire to look in my mirror at the puffy-eyed mess I’d become. I slipped my sleep-mask over my eyes to block out the light, burrowed my head beneath a mound of pillows to muffle the sounds of rush hour traffic, and fell into a fitful sleep, in which I dreamed of cemeteries and flashing hazel eyes.





***


“Do you think she’s dead?”

“I don’t know, poke her foot.”

“You poke her foot. I hate dead people.”

“Does anyone like dead people?”

“Necrophiliacs?”

The sound of two people giggling like hyenas pulled me back into consciousness.

“Ungh,” I muttered. I really needed to change my locks.

“Oh good, she’s alive.” A voice I now recognized as Simon’s drifted closer, and the weight of someone’s body landed next to me on the bed. Seconds later, another body settled in on my opposite side. To my dismay, my cocoon of pillows and blankets was ripped from my body and shoved to the floor. With a resigned sigh, I pushed the sleep mask up onto my forehead and cracked my eyes open. Simon and Fae were staring at me with horrified expressions.