Keeping Secrets in Seattle - By Brooke Moss Page 0,47

leave like that and not tell me? Or my mom?”

I just sat on the counter top, picking at a frayed piece of my jeans. “It was no walk in the park for me, either.”

“Eventually I started talking to Cameron again. It took until Christmas break that year. He came to my house and apologized for…” Gabe looked like the words filled his throat with bile. “What you guys did.”

My eyes widened and I looked up. “What did he tell you?”

Gabe glanced at me. “Nothing. It’s not like I wanted to know the details, anyway. We’d never really declared ourselves exclusive. He told me that you were fair game. And eventually I guess I decided he was right, though I thought differently at the time.”

I cleared my throat furiously. “I considered you my boyfriend.”

He looked at me, only half of his face visible in the darkness. “Then why? Why’d you do it?”

My mouth opened, then shut, then opened again.

His eyes dropped. “By the time you came back from your dad’s I was past the anger. I just missed my best friend. I wanted us to go back to the way things were before.”

I nodded sadly. “I know. So did I.”

“When your mom came over to tell us that you were flying home, I made the decision that those couple of weeks when we were dating was ancient history. I packed them away in the back of my mind and promised myself never to bring it back up again.”

I watched him look out the window, his profile strong against the Seattle skyline.

“You came off that plane so different.” Gabe shook his head. “Your hair was purple and you had your nose pierced. You were a completely new person. There was something darker about you. Evasive and defiant. You snuck out all the time and tried to piss your mom off every day, and you’d changed your looks so drastically. It was weird.” When I didn’t respond, his voice deepened, anger visible on his pinched face. “I asked you, over and over again, what was wrong. I begged you to tell me why you were acting so weird.”

I nodded. “I know.” By the time I’d come home from my father’s, the vault had been locked, and the secret about Cameron was in it. I’d vowed to never bring that subject up again, and no matter how much he pleaded with me to spill it, my secrets remained mine alone.

Gabe’s eyes were so sad that I wanted to reach out and cup his face. Instead, I just sat on my hands. “I couldn’t tell you then. I’d worked too hard to lock it all away.”

“I never stopped, you know.” His voice was quiet.

My pulse stuttered. “Never stopped what?”

He gripped the glass tightly. “Never stopped loving you.”

I held my breath. My bones morphed into butter, and I was going to slide off the countertop and into a pile on the floor.

“What?” I whispered.

Gabe went to set his glass down on the counter, his eyes still locked on mine, but missed it by half an inch. It hit the tile floor with an ear-piercing crash and shattered at his feet.

I jumped off the counter, “Here, let me get it…ow.”

Crumpling forward, I landed in Gabe’s arms, which effortlessly lifted me up and placed me back on the counter. I realized that the bottom of my rainbow-colored sock was saturated with blood.

“Vi, your foot.” Gabe flipped on the light above the sink and peeled the sock off my foot to examine my heel. “Crap, there’s glass stuck in it.”

“Damn.” I grimaced, pain searing through my heel.

He turned on the faucet, pushed the hem of my jeans up, and swung my leg into the sink. While rinsing it under the cool water, Gabe’s fingers stroked my foot, carefully picking tiny pieces of glass out of the skin. “I don’t think you’ll need stitches, but you definitely need a bandage.” He reached into a cupboard and pulled out a small first-aid kit.

“Wow. What a Boy Scout. Always prepared,” I joked.

He glanced up at me. “Shh.”

I watched him in silence. Gabe finished cleaning the cuts, dried my foot off with a kitchen towel, then delicately taped gauze on my heel, stopping momentarily to chuckle at the sight of my freshly painted teal-green toenails. When he was done, he swung my leg back, then stood in front of me. It wasn’t until about twenty seconds later that I realized he was biting his lip. He reached over and flicked the light above

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