Page 117 of When Sky Breaks
“But if you hurt my sister?—”
I shove him in the shoulder. “Don’t even. I fucking love her.”
Trek mumbles, “You better. Just maybe keep the other…finer parts of your relationship between you two. There’s only so much of that stuff I can handle.”
I burst into laughter, finally released from the shackles that held me captive.
CHAPTER FORTY-SEVEN
sky
The sound of the front door opening spurs me into motion. I jerk mine almost off the hinges as I watch Trek hang his keys.
He faces me, cheeks flushed from the cold, and nods.
“Where is he?” I ask, a little breathless, wringing my hands in anticipation.
I have to see him.
I’ve never read the official fire report until now. Foster only said it was an accident. But when Trek and August confessed their secrets, accidental was out of the question.
My biological father was a smoker, a pack-of-day kind of guy. My job on most nights was to pluck the lit bud from his hands when he’d fall asleep on the couch before a cherry fell to the old carpet and sent our house up in flames.
For as long as I could remember, I believed I was the one at fault. For the one night, I didn’t check on my dad as he passed out on the couch from too many drinks. I went to bed upset my mom didn’t pick Chase and me up like she was supposed to. My bag sat ready by our front door. We were going to spend the night at a hotel with a pool. Excitement bubbled in my belly as I tucked my favorite and only swimsuit under a beach towel. The suit had Minnie Mouse on the front and a cute little bow on the back. We got it at a garage sale, and even though the elastic was thin and close to breaking down, I loved it.
However, it wasn’t a match lit by August that burned down the house, nor the bud of a glowing cigarette. It was a faulty power strip. Of all things, it was something innocuous, yet it created years of pain and heartbreak.
It truly was an accident.
August was innocent of this sin he carried around. It didn’t matter how many times I told him I forgave him. He still held onto the belief he was a monster for what he did.
My chest aches thinking about the boy who, in reality, was neither monster nor foe but a shining beacon of everything pure. He just wanted me safe and loved.
I didn’t need to see the report to forgive either him or Trek. I’m living proof that love isn’t simple. That good people can do bad things with good intentions. But I knew they both needed the undeniable proof to set them free.
“He’s outside. I told him I’d send you to his house, but he said no, he had to see you now.” Trek shrugs, but there’s no denying the lightness around him as he smiles.
“Feels good, doesn’t it?”
“What? Finding out I’m not actually complicit in a decade-old crime or the bit about reconciling with an equally innocent childhood friend?”
I sock him in the shoulder once I meet him in the foyer. He acts all wounded before draping his arms around my shoulders and squeezing me in a tight hug.
“Thank you for not giving up on us.”
I speak, my voice muffled by his sweatshirt. “I’m not a martyr, bud, and five years was kind of hardcore in terms of grudges, but I think deep down, I knew this point would come. Believe it or not, I was miserable without you two.”
After I peek in on a sleeping Foster, I run out the front door. August leans against his truck. His head is back, eyes pinned to the night sky, streams of warm air floating from his nose as he breathes.
Once I step in front of him, he brings his head down and roams my face with his mercury-gray eyes and a soft smile.
“Come home with me?”
All I do is nod because if I speak, I’ll cry, and he’s on the verge of crying himself.
He opens my door and closes it once I’m in, just staring at me with this expression I can only describe as a dreamy euphoria. He jogs around to his side and hops in, immediately lacing our fingers together before shifting into drive.
In the fifteen minutes it takes to get to his house, we don’t utter a word. But I watch him. The way he rolls his lip under his teeth and bites it before licking it. The way those lips brush over my knuckles every time we hit a stoplight. The little sighs coming from his chest.