“My dad thinks we should take a break. That seeing each other is a reminder of that night.”
A tear trickled down my cheek, but I pushed back the flood that desperately wanted to release because a small part of me agreed. “What do you think?”
He swiveled around, grasping my head in the middle of his hands. His thumb wiped the few tears away. “When we’re together, all that fills my head is the sight of blood and the sounds of squealing tires and their screams.”
My heart shattered into fragments from his words because I still saw the boy I loved.
At that moment, it was confirmed. We couldn’t continue on this path. Something needed to change if we were ever going to heal.
I drew back, but his hands held my head harder. “Why did this happen?”
His eyes morphed into a deeper dimension of sadness. “Because I’m completely fucked up.”
I shook my head. “That’s not true.”
My blood boiled as I fought our options. We might never be fixed, but we needed to carry on with our lives as normally as we could.
“El”—his hands fell from my skin, taking the little warmth I’d felt tonight—“I have to remind you of that night.”
I cast my eyes toward the uneven ground, picking at a patch of longer grass. “You know what I remember?”
Chirping crickets hidden under the luminous sky were the only sounds cutting the silence.
“Your eyes when you slammed on the brakes. Your white knuckles on the steering wheel. That’s it. Everything else is black.”
A low growl rumbled out of his throat.
“Because you were unconscious. I thought you were…” He closed his eyes and took a deep breath. “I’ll never again be the guy you fell in love with.”
“What haunts you?” I inched forward, begging him to let me in, to trust me.
He shook his head. “I’ll never share that with you.”
“Crosby, how will we overcome this if you don’t tell me what you saw?”
“We won’t. I brought you here tonight because this is where I promised you a future.”
A threat of doom quickly sank into me, and all of his words tonight started making sense.
“And this is where you’re going to break that promise?”
He placed his hand on my shaking knee.
“You know as well as I do that it’s for the best. The only hope we have is to move forward.” His voice was so even…so unaffected. “Hopefully, years down the road…”
A glint of hope washed over me. A future? Our future?
He shook his head again. “No, I’m not making promises I can’t keep. This is for the best.”
I stared down at my pile of grass pickings in front of me. What he was saying made sense. When I looked at him, I saw the boy I loved, but Kedsey’s screams rang in my ears, too. If I was keeping him from being the guy he was meant to be, then I had to let him go.
“I can’t live with knowing you aren’t one hundred percent happy.”
“I don’t know how to live without you,” I whispered.
His hand moved up to the back of my neck, urging me to look toward him. “Me neither.”
Deep down, the choice seemed like our only option. We would have to heal apart. My parents had signed me up for therapy at a clinic near Ridgemont, and I knew our parents had been talking to one another about the closeness between Crosby and me. But it seemed crazy to separate from each other.
“Take out your phone,” he said.
I nodded, dug it out of my back pocket and held it out in front of me.
“This will only work if we delete each other’s phone numbers.” He poised his phone in the palm of his hand, my contact information already lighting up his screen.
“But I know your phone number by heart.”
“We have to do this. You’ll eventually forget.”
Never.
My thumb scrolled through, and soon, his name was on my screen.
“On the count of three, we’re going to delete.” I heard a crack in his voice and wondered if he was having second thoughts.
“One…two…” He paused a few seconds, and I watched his chest rise and fall. “Three.”
My thumb pressed the Delete button, and in a millisecond, his name was no longer there, like the love of my life had vanished.
His phone vibrated. “Listen, I have to go.” He stood and held his hand out to me.
He walked me to my car with his hand still in mine.