grip.
This had to happen sometime. You knew that. Just get it over and done with, and you can put it behind you.
I knew what I had to say, but my tongue felt swollen, too heavy to form the words I needed.
Something flashed through Julian’s eyes. No, not something. Pain. I’d memorized his face years ago, and I still knew what pain looked like on his features. It made what I was about to do even worse.
“Um. Hi.” Julian’s voice was the breeze on a June evening. As soft and warm as the night sky itself. Not the voice he’d used in the meeting. This was Julian unfiltered.
I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t. My mouth had forgotten how to move and my throat was bone dry.
Julian’s eyes watched me. Waited for a response. Flickered with resignation when he got none. I wanted to sink into the ground.
“I didn’t realize you were back,” he said after a moment. “You didn’t—I mean, Eleanor didn’t—” he paused again. “Do Deacon and Emory know?”
It was such an innocuous question and it filled me with rage. Not at Julian. At myself.
Because I could see what he was doing, as clearly as if he’d written it out with sidewalk chalk. He was trying to be kind. To make small talk. To show that there weren’t any hard feelings.
He was trying to forgive me.
Julian always wanted to forgive.
I made myself raise an eyebrow. “Considering that I’m staying with them, and Em’s currently walking my dog, yeah, I’d say they do.”
He flinched. Forget sinking into the ground, I wanted to peel my skin off. I hated this.
“You have a dog?” Julian shook his head. “Nevermind, that’s not—I didn’t—I’m just surprised, is what I’m trying to say. I hadn’t heard that you were coming back.”
“Should you have?” I kept my voice cold. “I didn’t realize you were in regular contact with my family.”
“I’m not, I just—” He bit his lip. “You always said you would never move back.”
“Nothing’s changed.”
“But you’re here.”
I shrugged. “Temporarily. As a favor to my boss back home. As soon as the council votes, I’m going back to Tennessee.”
“Oh.”
He didn’t flinch that time, but I still felt like I’d hit him. I had to end this. For both of us.
“Look, did you need something? Because I kind of need to get going.”
I made my eyes hard. Kept my lips pressed shut, callous. I’d never been good at looking disinterested, so angry would have to do.
Julian swallowed. “No, I guess not. If you have to go, it’s fine.”
I nodded, started to turn. The sooner I could put some distance between the two of us, the better.
“Wait.”
And just like that, I was frozen again. I waited until I was sure my face was hard, then looked back.
“I didn’t want it to go this way,” Julian whispered. His eyebrows flew up, like he was surprised at what he’d just said.
“Didn’t want what to go this way?” I kept my voice just this side of derision.
“This. Talking to you. For the first time in a decade. I just wanted to talk. To find out how you are, to know what’s going on in your life.” He sighed. “Maybe it’s stupid and I shouldn’t, but I miss you, and I just want to feel like I didn’t make you up and hallucinate everything that happened between us.”
“Nothing happened between us. Nothing important anyway.”
“You can’t mean that.”
And fine, maybe I didn’t, exactly. But there was a difference between honesty and handing someone a butcher knife while you unbuttoned your shirt. I made myself shrug again.
“I don’t know what you want me to say.”
“I want you to say that I’m not crazy. Even when you visit, I never see you. It’s like I imagined you. Like you were never real in the first place.”
His words were so close to the way I felt about myself sometimes that I shuddered.
“I’ve never stopped thinking about how it ended,” Julian finished.
“Well you’re wasting your time. We were kids. Whatever happened, it’s not that deep.”
“Whatever happened?” Julian repeated. His voice crept up a few notes. “We might have been young, but that doesn’t mean it didn’t matter.”
“Maybe it did, back then. But we were eighteen. If I were still hung up on something that happened that long ago, there’d be something wrong with me.”
Not technically a lie. Because there was something wrong with the fact that I’d never been able to move on. But Julian didn’t need to know that. It wouldn’t help either one of us. It