Curvy Girls Can't Date Bad Boys - Kelsie Stelting Page 0,58

but the cost of being together was anything but.

A tightness gripped my chest. I wasn’t ready to read someone else’s love story when mine had gone so wrong.

I turned my eyes back toward the bag and saw the worn book of poems Ronan had given me. I picked it up and held it to my chest. It was the closest thing to Ronan I would ever hold again.

My eyes flooded with tears, and they quickly spilled over. I let them pour, knowing it would be useless to try and stem the flow. Instead, I leaned into my pain and opened the book to the pressed flower. I imagined how Ronan must have seen it and plucked it. I wondered if he’d been thinking of me as he did it—what he might have thought.

He’d said he loved me.

The ache in my chest grew, making it hard to breathe.

I read the page the flower was on. Something by Percy Bysshe Shelley about love and passion and fearlessness.

Ronan had been fearless, and I’d been a coward. He’d loved so bravely, telling me about his past and inviting me into his present. I’d hardly let him in at all, except as an escape.

I’ve always had a hard time finding the words for my feelings, preferring to put them into action, and that had been my downfall. Bravery would have told him about Ryde, about my father, about my dreams. Cowardice had kept my secrets in the dark, where they festered until the light had revealed how terrible hiding them had really been.

I found my phone on the nightstand, and even though there were thousands of notifications, none of them were from Ronan.

I desperately wanted to hear from him, but all I had were these pages, this book. He’d given it to me for a reason.

I flipped through the pages, reading it late into the night, until morning rays came through the pale aqua curtains.

Disappointment flooded me as I came to the last page, until I saw the writing inside the back cover. The last poem had come from this century—an original by Ronan.

Zara

Fleeting beauty

Lasting charge

Fading lines

Beating heart

Worth the pleasure

and the pain

Full of doubts,

As well as gain.

Fearful longing

Brave belonging.

Bare, real, here.

Ronan

My lips parted as I read over his words, understood the meaning behind them. He’d wanted me to know that he was here for me through it all. That he understood the risk we were taking in divulging ourselves to each other.

I pictured his hand holding a pen just as surely as he’d held me the night before, the way his lips might have pressed together as he carefully crafted each word. What he must have been thinking as he handed me the book, knowing the immense gift that lay inside.

My fingers feathered over the page, feeling the indentations of his words into the page just as clearly as I felt them on my heart.

Thirty-Six

Maybe it was the ache in my heart making me a glutton for punishment, but I got out my phone and looked at every message I’d gotten. Hateful ones, congratulatory ones, apologetic ones, rambling ones that didn’t quite make sense, a few even tagged me in pictures of them wearing their Ryder hate shirts.

Everyone saw me a different way—a “b*tch”, a cheater, a rebel, a hero.

That last one threw me off guard. I was the furthest thing from a hero. I was a coward who’d given the boy I came to love everything but the truth, and the truth was that I cared what my father thought, even with all of this going on.

I hated him, but I loved him too. He was the man who loved my mother with all his heart, the one who gave me everything the world had to offer, and the one who'd been around after my mom passed away.

But none of the messages were from him. It worried me. Now that I had nothing to offer, did that mean he had stopped loving me? And if my father could stop loving me, what did that say about the potential for anyone else to truly love me?

The door to my room cracked open, and Jordan popped her head in. Her eyes went from me to the phone screen, and her mouth fell open. “What are you doing?”

My voice fell flat. “My dad hasn't texted me. Ronan hasn't texted me.”

She came closer and took the phone from my hands and set it on the nightstand, where her eyes stalled on the book. “And what is this? You’re