Page 99 of Making the Save
Syd is the last woman on the planet I would ever marry.
There was only one thing to do. Keep the hurt to myself and get off this mountain.
Away from him.
He would never know he’d broken my heart.
The Next Morning
I wokeup before everyone else. Sliding out of bed carefully so as not to jostle Wyatt, I quietly packed the tiny amount of stuff I had with me. I’d been living in t-shirts, swim suits and underwear. I had my guitar, my notebooks and my broken heart.
And after going to the bathroom…my period.
I looked down at the smear of rusty red blood and felt like crying.
This really was the end. I mean, I’d been pretty sure there was no chance his precum was that dangerous, but there’d been this tiny spark in my chest. This wee littlewhat if?
Thank God, I told myself, trying to make myself be relieved instead of sad and weird about it. I grabbed one of the tampons I kept in my bag, gathered all my stuff and put it on the porch and waited for everyone else to wake up.
This view from his porch was burned into my brain. The tall cedars, the small lilac bushes at the edge of the clearing. The mountains in the distance. The great gorgeous sweep of bright blue sky.
Before, when people said, go to your happy place, it was easy. I thought of my beach house. The porch and the sunlight and the waves. But it was always lonely.
This had been happy in a different way. In a way I never thought I could be happy.
Wyatt stepped out of the cabin in a pair of sweatpants and nothing else. He handed me a cup of coffee, his own mug in his other hand.
“Sydney,” he said, his voice full of an apology I didn’t want.
“I got my period,” I said, happy I had my big sunglasses on.
“When?”
“This morning.”
“I thought it wasn’t supposed to come for a week?”
“All that sex, I suppose,” I said with a shrug. “You must have jostled something loose.”
He snorted. “That’s not how that works. You really need to brush up on your biology. Are you…okay?”
“Fine,” I said, but I could hear the tightness in my voice. “I’ve got a meeting set up with Marc back in LA and a phone call with the label. I’m sorry, but I really need to head home today. Not tomorrow.”
“Tink, about what you might have heard me say last night-”
“Don’t worry about it,” I said. I had spent the last seven years of my life acting. Pretending to feel things I didn’t feel. Pretendingnotto feel was infinitely harder.
“Don’t worry about it?”
I smiled at him. “You weren’t wrong. Everything you said was true. I don’t belong in your world and you don’t belong in mine.” I said, and turned to stare out at the clearing instead of into his brown eyes. “It’s time for us to get back to reality.”
“I never wanted to hurt you,” he said softly.
“You didn’t,” I lied. And then, because he didn’t believe me, I put my hand over his. “We said friends. Friends until the end.”
That seemed to placate him. He took a sip of coffee and squeezed my hand.
“Friends until the end.”