Page 126 of Maybe You

“It doesn’t fucking matter!” he roars. “It doesn’t fucking matter if I do or I don’t. I. Can’t. Love you. I can’t.”

There’ll be no clean cut after that. Whatever wound he leaves behind will have ragged edges, with dirt and poison in it.

But even so, hope is tugging in my chest, propelling me forward.

“You can,” I say.

“You don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Then explain it to me.”

He heaves in breath after breath, a step away from hyperventilating.

“I will hurt you,” he finally spits out.

I take a deep, calming breath.

“I mean, yeah, there are no guarantees. Yeah, it might not work out between us, but that doesn’t mean we should just give up before we’ve even properly begun.”

He stares at me like I’ve said something absolutely insane and unthinkable.

“I am not going to risk you,” he rasps.

“So you’re going to hurt me now for sure instead of maybe hurting me in the future?”

“I’m not going to risk you,” he repeats.

“There are some things in life worth taking a chance on.”

His gaze gets stuck to a spot on the wall, somewhere above my shoulder. He swallows hard. I watch his Adam’s apple bob.

“There are also some things that aren’t worth taking a chance on,” he says quietly.

After everything that’s been said, this is the one that cuts deepest.

I can’t be here right now.

I’ll bleed all over the floor.

All the anger and confusion and hurt and… everything. It’ll bleed out of me right here and now if I stay here.

For a horrible moment, I feel like I might cry.

I turn on my heel and march out the door.

And nothing is calm anymore.

It’s just storm.

Violent, raging, destructive, devastating storm.

TWENTY-SEVEN

I slam the front door shut so hard the photos on the wall sway in the resulting current of air. I’m too pissed off to care that it’s one a.m. and everybody else is probably sleeping already.

Over the course of the past few days, I’ve been getting steadily more and more angry. Or maybe I’ve been the same level of pissed off since the moment I walked out of Sutton’s place. It’s hard to say.

All I know is that I’m angry all the time.