All This Time(59)

“I’m not,” I say, cutting her off.

She stops and looks at me.

“When I thought you were dead, all I had left were the last words you said to me. I replayed those words over and over.”

“Kyle, listen. I—”

“Let me finish. I need to say this, okay?”

She nods and reaches behind her to find the chair, slowly sitting down.

“That night, I wasn’t ready to hear you because… I was afraid you were right.” I glance up to see her eyes are wide with surprise. She was definitely not expecting this. But I’m not the same Kyle I was. “To turn around and not see you there… I thought that was the worst nightmare imaginable. But… to turn around and know that there was no you anymore, anywhere?” I let out a ragged breath, remembering that pain. That year I spent thinking she was dead. “Fuck, Kim. That blew up my whole world.”

She doesn’t say anything, her hands tightly gripping the wooden arms of the chair.

“But I still had your words. I finally listened to them. And I learned to stand on my own. I learned who I was and who I wanted to be,” I say, thinking of Marley. The internship. Journalism classes. “I learned who I am. Without you.”

She’s stunned into silence. That never happens. I keep going, finally saying the words I needed to say but was never able to find.

“We settled, Kim. You and me. And we weren’t happy.”

She opens her mouth. Once. Twice. Struggling to find words. Finally they come. “Who are you, and what have you done with Kyle Lafferty?”

“Oh, that guy?” I give her a small smile. “He was a selfish kid, so I left his ass in the dust. Then I grew up. Or—I’m growing up,” I say as she wipes tears from her cheeks. “Well, I’m trying to,” I admit.

She stands and gives me a long, uncertain look, unsure of where we go from here.

I reach out. “Come here.” She hurries into my arms, and I hold her close, her tears falling onto my shirt. “You’re my best friend, Kim. I want you to be so happy,” I tell her. “At Berkeley. Go find what you love. Find someone you love. Find that person you can’t live without. He’s out there.”

The person I can’t live without. I think of Marley. How it felt to hold my entire world in my arms. How it feels to have it ripped away from me.

“Yeah, right,” Kim says with a tearful laugh as she pulls away. She quickly grabs a tissue and blows her nose.

“Hell, go on a date with Sam—”

The words are barely out of my mouth before she slugs me with her sling-free arm.

“You’re stupid,” she says, acting like I’ve just said the craziest thing.

I grab on to the bed rail, smiling at her as I catch myself. I see it, though. In her eyes. That thought. That glimmer of a possibility.

“Don’t settle again, okay?” I say after I right myself. “Ever. And I won’t either.”

She nods, agreeing, and we shake on it. “Deal.”

I take a deep, determined breath as her hand slides out of mine.

For the first time since I woke up, I feel a little closer to peace. Because I will not settle.

I won’t give up until I have Marley in my arms again.





32


I’m back in my house.

My house, but not. The world I live in now is leaking in more and more every time I close my eyes. It’s weird, even scary how much my dreams are changing.

“Kyle.”

I follow the sound of the voice down a hallway, the walls crumbling around me as I fight to get to her, peeling paint giving way to the pale walls of the hospital, the standard-issue TV, the big window in the corner.

I finally find her at the kitchen table. I can see her, but… barely.

I squint, straining, the colors so dull.

“Everything’s going to change now, isn’t it?” she asks, her voice the same as I remember it. Sadder now.

I try with everything in me to get closer to her, to hold her again, but my feet won’t move. My legs strain, fighting to take even a single step in her direction. I look down to see my feet are enclosed in grass and mud, the cherry blossoms from the pond sprinkled around my ankles.

The second I look back up at her, I jolt back into my hospital room, my sheets twisted tightly around my body, sweat beaded across my forehead, and the loss consumes me again.



* * *




Her voice still echoes around in my head as I grip the support bars in the physical therapy room a few hours later. I put a guarded amount of weight onto my leg, carefully taking one step and then another. My only break from my tireless googling the past two days has been going down to see Henry every afternoon, the grueling leg exercises he puts me through an attempt at distracting myself from everything.

But no matter how hard I try today to focus on my legs, on getting them stronger, I can’t escape the dream I had last night.

Every day the world around me gets less hazy, but that means every day she feels farther and farther away, that dream I lived in for a year crumbling, cracking, showing its holes every time I go to sleep.

“I wish I could do that for you,” a voice says.

I come to a shaky stop and look up to see Sam. Even my good leg feels about as strong as a toothpick, yet somehow Sam looks worse.