Page 21 of So Long, Honey
“That’s why you took off? Cadence, Georgia, and Paisley? Those girls are nothing but rude, cruel chickens, pecking and clucking, and if that’s not where you were going with that sentence, I don’t wanna hear it, Rae. They hold no weight in this conversation.It’s you and me.”
The tone of his voice was more serious than I had ever heard him be.
“I love you, Lorraine Field. I knew it the second you turned those angry, terrified, blue eyes on me that day. I believe it, and every day you don’t breaks my heart a little more! I am going to run out of glue trying to put it back together.” His hands grabbed my face, his jaw ticking in pain from the movement. "Why do you listen to everyone else's noise but you never wanna listen to me?”
“I’m scared,” I said to him, and his features softened with a shaky exhale. “You scare me.”
CODY
“That’s life, Rae!” I said to her when she said that she was scared if that was her only reason for running away. “Being scared is a part of life,” I lowered my voice.
My head was pounding, and the cut on my cheek stung so badly it kept making my eyes water. Dad had never gottenthatmad. It wasn’t exactly unwarranted. I had shown up back home in a huff, pissed off at myself, pissed off at Lorraine. I was confused, sad, heartbroken.
In a matter of a week, a girl upended my entire world, and while I saw an opportunity to feel something off the field, Dad wasn’t as enthusiastic about my newfixation.
That’s what he had called her, a fucking fixation. Like she wasn’t the brightest star in the entire sky, as if I wasn’t meant to spin around in her gravity for the rest of my life. In that moment, all the frustration with Lorraine melted away, and it bubbled up in anger toward my Dad for talking about her like that.
Next thing I knew, we were throwing punches, Riona was screaming for Dad to stop and my oldest brother, Robert, was trying to rip us apart. Dad told me to get gone, go I did.
All the way here.
“I don’t want to be scared!” She argued, pulling me from my own head back into her room. I shouldn’t even be here. In her room like this.Idiot.
“Too bad!” I said, throwing my arms up. “Too fucking bad!” I repeated, watching her flinch as I swore. “I love you, and I know you think that’s stupid, but I’ve been telling you since the day we met, and I’ll be telling you that until the day we die.”
“You’ve known me—”
I cut her off, “a week, yeah, I know. You keep using that as an excuse. You aren’t a game to me. This isn’t a bet I made with Landry,” I said and her eyebrows raised. “Yeah, I hear them whisper too, but you know what? I don’t listen to them. Everything they say is to make themselves feel better and it has nothing to do with what happens with us.”
The devastatingly sad look in her glassy blue eyes burrowed down into my chest.
“They called meLoner Lorraine,” she said quietly, and I knew where this was going. “Just like you call Carlos, kooky.”
“I never called you that, not once,” I argued.
“But you’re friends with the people that do, who see me in that light. You want this epic love story so badly you aren’t stopping to look at the facts!” Lorraine shook her head, “people like us aren’t meant to be together.”
“That’s bullshit,” I said with a shrug, “I told you on the ride how I felt about being popular, that it’s just a show for everyone else. But with you, I’m just me. I don’t have to be funny or loud. You just… it sounds stupid when I say it out loud but you make me wanna sit in the quiet with you.”
She huffed, but I watched the corners of her mouth upturn into a small smile. “I know you’re scared,” I said to her. “I’m scared too, but you were scared of the Ferris wheel, and you still got on it for me?”
Lorraine peered up at me through thick lashes and inhaled slowly. I watched her chest rise and fall softly as she reasoned with her inner thoughts. I held mine, terrified that she would still send me away even after all this. I’d have to go sleep on one of Landry’s pool chairs in the backyard because going home wasn’t an option at the moment.
“Because you asked me to, because you—” she stopped, clearly frustrated with me.
“I held your hand, I asked?” I laughed. “I’m asking you right now to do the same thing,” I said. “Hold my hand, don’t shut me out.”
The storm in her eyes raged as she tried to work through everything. Still very conflicted about everything that I had said to her, I just had to wait and hope that she believed me—or at least that I could get to a place where she couldstartto believe me.
“Are you hungry?” She asked me suddenly, after all that silence, that’s what she asked me, and I started to laugh.
“I'm starving,” I admitted, my breath hitching when she extended her hand to me, fingers softly wiggling. I took it without question, my knuckles sore from the fight, but I didn’t care because the moment our palms connected, her warm touch soothed every ache.
Their house was twice the size of mine, and it was a wonder she didn’t get lost as we wandered down the hall and toward the stairs.
“Your parents won’t be mad,” I asked her as we headed toward the main floor.
She shook her head, “they’re gone for the week.”