Page 44 of Lovefool

I had no idea that Lake lost her sister, but her reality is my greatest fear. If I had to endure something as horrific as losing a loved one, I don’t think I’d ever be whole again. My mom walked out on her own accord. She wasn’t taken from me.

“You give me a lot more credit than I’m worth, Whittaker.”

I don’t think Lake will ever understand how much she means to me. Seeing her so defeated is a death sentence that I wouldn’t wish upon my worst enemy. I have to take care of her. Not out of obligation, but out of the crushing desperation to be one of the few people she welcomes readily into her life.

I think before I speak—a common theme, I’ve come to notice.

“Do you want to talk about it?” I ask, uncertain if she maintains our close proximity because she needs a shoulder to lean on, or if she’s more afraid of bearing the weight alone.

I fight against the impulse to wrap her in my arms and never let go. She consumes me—every waking thought, every breath I take. There’s no corner of the earth that I could run to where her memory wouldn’t follow me like an unbreakable curse, the feel of her touch still imprinted across my hindbrain.

She pauses before setting her ice cream down. “It’s a lot to digest.”

“You don’t have to⁠—”

“No, I just—I want to warn you that you’ll probably see me differently after this,” she confesses with a heavy heart, eyes telescoped on a spot of grime discoloring the cement.

A tumor of worry pulsates in the pit of my gut, and I take two fingers and hook them under her chin, imploring her to face me. She obeys the sleight of my hand, the normally brilliant blue of her eyes dreary and overcast with a shower of unshed tears. It’s like all the life has been siphoned from her body, leaving behind the husk of a girl who’s had to accept pain as her new norm.

“That’s not possible.”

She doesn’t argue with me or laugh my comment off with that lighthearted smile of hers that could cure this world of rot and sickness and the clotted wound of immorality that coruscates under every jaundiced streetlight in a seedy back alleyway.

Her throat bobs with a swallow, and when her voice breaches the stagnant air, it doesn’t sound like it belongs to her.

“It was July fourth, and I was fifteen. My parents were outside drinking with some extended family, and I was responsible for looking after Max and my little sister, Audie. We were playing tag like we always did. It was getting dark outside, and I wasn’t looking where I was going, and—and something happened. Something bad.”

I’m sick to my fucking stomach because I know what she’s going to say, and for her sake, I almost cut her off. But I don’t. She needs me to listen to her, not fix something that’s unfixable.

I nod—a wordless reassurance that she’s safe from judgment.

“It all happened so fast. One second, sh-she was in front of me, laughing, and the next, she was on the floor, lying in a pool of her own blood. She had cracked her head on the corner of the coffee table. I screamed for help, but nobody heard me over the fireworks. I just sat there, with my sister dying in my arms, and I did nothing. When the paramedics arrived, she was already dead. There was nothing…th-they could do,” she sobs, a string of tears threading through her lower lashes, glimmering like pearls surfacing on a distant shore.

“Oh, Lake,” I coo.

She wipes her face roughly against her forearm. “She was so cold. I-I couldn’t hear anything. All I remember is the look on Max’s face. He was confused and scared and I just stood there. I fucked him up, Sutton. I ruined our family. My dad couldn’t handle it and bailed. He’s not in Max’s life anymore because of what I did. I was supposed to protect Audie. She was my responsibility.”

The tears fall at an unprecedented pace, streaking through her foundation and merging into one rivulet that disappears under her chin.

Damning the fault line between us, I embrace her in my arms, providing her with the support that she never got from the people who were supposed to protect her.

Lake burrows into my frame, and I stroke the back of her head. “It’s not your fault. None of it is your fault. You were just a kid. It shouldn’t have been your responsibility to look after her.”

I feel her ball the back of my shirt into her tiny fists, her cries breaking off into hiccups that wrack the entirety of her body. She clings to me as if I’m the only lifeline she has—and it terrifies me to think about what would happen if she chose to let go.

“It doesn’t matter. My parents trusted me to watch her, and I failed them. I should’ve done more to stop the bleeding. I just…froze, and I’m going to be paying for my mistake for the rest of my life. It should’ve been me that night. It should’ve⁠—”

“Please don’t say that,” I beg, feeling the wetness on my cheeks before I register that I’m even crying.

I rarely cry in front of people because I’ve been conditioned to compartmentalize my feelings, but I’m so tired of keeping people at a distance. Lake’s pain is my pain. Aside from my father, nobody has ever meant this much to me.

“It was a mistake. A horrible mistake, but a mistake all the same. You aren’t to blame, Lake. Nobody is to blame except for your parents putting all that heartache and grief on you.”

For the first time in minutes, Lake pulls back, still looking as beautiful as the first day I met her despite the twin waterfalls that cascade down her puffy skin.

She’s somewhat of an incorporeal mirage in my own line of vision, blurred around the edges, plucked straight from hypnagogia and dropped into a liminal space of consciousness. A walking dream of my innermost desires—an empyrean heaven. There aren’t enough words in this universe to express my undying devotion to her.

“I’m a terrible person. I ruin everything around me.”