Boys Like You(47)

“Gram is…I don’t know what Gram is gonna say, but I need to get to the house now. Maybe she won’t know I left. Maybe she’s still in bed.”

I nodded.

“Okay. Let’s go.”

It was Monday and I was due to be here in an hour or so anyway. I figured it was around six in the morning. I would have enough time to go home, eat breakfast, shower, and then start my day. But before I could do that, I had to make sure things were going to be cool between Monroe and her grandmother.

The meteor shower had been my idea, and though I hadn’t meant for us to fall asleep, I liked waking up with Monroe in my arms. Any blowback would be worth it.

I packed up my bag. Tossed in the uneaten chips and Cokes I’d brought and then rolled up my blanket. When I glanced up, Monroe was staring down at me. I couldn’t quite read her expression, and my gut twisted.

“What? Are you okay?” I asked, trying not to show panic, but man, she ripped me apart without even trying.

She nodded, a small, tremulous smile on her face. “I think so,” she said almost carefully, as if she wasn’t sure she should say anything at all. “I mean, I feel…lighter.” She moistened her lips.

Slowly, I got to my feet. “Last night…” Shit, I needed to get 192

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this right. “I just want to make you better, Monroe. I don’t want you to hurt anymore.”

She stepped forward, slipped her arms around my waist, and rested her head on my chest. As soon as she touched me, my heart sped up and I buried my nose in her hair, loving the way she smelled. The way she felt.

“I haven’t talked to anyone about Malcolm. Not even my therapist.” Her breath hitched and my arms tightened.

“After it happened, I just wanted to forget everything about him. I wanted to forget how the sun made his hair look like liquid gold, or how, when he smiled, his dimples appeared like tiny little craters that I wanted to kiss. I wanted to forget how he’d made me so angry, and I wanted to forget how sorry I was.

How guilty I was.”

“It’s okay.”

She shook her head. “You don’t understand, Nate. I couldn’t even tell my parents the things they wanted to hear. The little details that told them he would be fine. After he died, they kept waiting for me to start talking…to start moving. I can see now how they existed in a state of nothing. They weren’t moving forward. They weren’t going back. They were just stuck in this horrible place, and they needed me to lead them out, but I couldn’t. I wasn’t strong enough. Instead I cut my wrist, which wasn’t so much an attempt to kill myself as it was a way to make myself feel.”

“Shit, Monroe.” I lifted her chin. “I’m glad that you didn’t…”

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Juliana Ston e

She sniffled. “It proved that I didn’t feel anything. My parents sent me to therapy and they tried to get out of that place they were in. My dad started acting like everything was normal when it was so screwed up, and that made me angry. My mother…she just didn’t know what to say or how to act, so she started avoiding me.”

She squeezed her eyes shut.

“I get now that they were waiting for me. Waiting for me to come back to them. That they needed me before they could start to heal.” Her eyes were shiny again, and she reached for me.

She kissed me then, her mouth soft and tentative. I tasted the salt from her tears and the pain from her heart.

It was a slow, lingering kind of kiss that I wanted to keep going, because I could kiss this girl all day, but she pulled away and slipped her hand into mine. “We’d better go.”

The birds sang as we trudged through the damp grass. We’d just rounded the corner of her grandmother’s house and I was picking a twig out of Monroe’s hair when the front door banged open and we both froze.

“A little early in the morning for a stroll, isn’t it?”

Mrs. Blackwell leaned against the railing in a blue and white housecoat that fell almost to her feet. Matching slippers tapped along the floorboards, and she stared down at us with an expression that wasn’t exactly pissed off, but it was something. What that something was I couldn’t say at the moment.

She arched an eyebrow and pinched her lips when neither one of us answered right away.

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Yeah. Okay, maybe she was pissed off.

“Mrs. Blackwell, I can explain. There was a meteor shower last night and I wanted Monroe to see it.”

Her eyebrow arched a little higher.

“I called late and she, uh, I guess you were in bed and…”

Damn, that eyebrow was even higher now.

“Well, we kinda fell asleep in the maze,” I finished, a smile pasted to my face. Usually a smile was enough to get any sort of female to melt a little bit. But she wasn’t budging.

Though her eyebrow relaxed a bit, which made me feel a whole lot better.

“It’s not Monroe’s fault, so I hope if you’re upset with anyone, it’s me.”

“I see,” she said, eyeing my backpack and the state of our rumpled clothes. “Well, come on in then. I’ll make you breakfast.”