Page 73 of Lovefool

I don’t remember a time where I just…turned…my brain off.

Sated like a big cat after a pride-wide hunt, he strokes my hair, staring up at the same fabric of space that reminds me just how lucky I am to have found him, out of eight billion people in the world.

I rest my head in his lap, and maybe it’s the pessimism that’s been steadily instilled into my body, but I mourn when we’ll have to return to our regularly scheduled lives.

“That’s Cassiopeia,” I say, pointing to a conglomeration of stars overhead. “You can tell because it forms an ‘M’ shape in the spring.”

I can feel Sutton’s deep, buttery chuckle vibrate through me. “You know about constellations?”

For a split second, everything freezes. My contentment curdles into guilt, and it feels like a tectonic crack radiates outward from my chest, similar to the frozen surface of a lake being blunted by a temperature change. I’m glad it’s dark, otherwise the flicker of grief on my face would be all too noticeable.

“I used to stargaze with my sister,” I tell him, sorrow pulling at my heartstrings like an overeager puppeteer.

“Oh, baby. I’m so sorry.”

“It’s—it’s okay.” The words splinter in my throat as tears sizzle in the corners of my eyes. “I just…the only time I was ever really still was when we were looking up at the night sky together. Nothing else mattered in that moment. Not the past, not the future.”

Contrary to popular belief, grief doesn’t have an expiration date. It gets easier to deal with over time, sure, but there are still bursts of inconsolable sadness that steal all the progress you thought you’d made. And people, well—I’ve learned that they only say “sorry” to comfort themselves.

Ever since Audie passed, I’ve been living in survival mode. Never stopping to breathe, always running from something, filling the empty spaces with movement because even a second of stillness would trigger a tidal wave of terrible memories. Sutton is the closest I’ve had to peace in a long time.

“Why didn’t you say anything? We could’ve done something else.”

I shake my head, and it feels like eels are writhing in my overfull belly. “I wanted to. It’s been years, and every memory I have of her is still steeped in agony. I don’t want to remember her like that. I want to celebrate her life.”

Sutton tips my chin up so I meet his eyes. They’re darker than I’ve ever seen them before—a reflection of the dreary ether above us. “Tell me about her. What’s your favorite memory of her?”

There’s a fuzzy demarcation between danger and safety—vulnerable and guarded—and to my surprise, it doesn’t even take me a beat until I start spilling to Sutton. “Oh, gosh. There are so many, but my favorite has to be when she crawled into my bed one night because she was scared of the monster under her bed.”

“Well? Was there a monster under her bed?” he asks.

“According to her, yes. And according to the scary videos she was apparently watching on our family’s shared computer.”

“I don’t blame her for being terrified. There’s some messed-up stuff on the internet.”

“I told her that I would build her a pillow fort so she could be safe. I told her that I’d stay up all night to watch over her and make sure none of the pesky monsters got to her. But she couldn’t go to sleep, so we ended up marathoning all the Barbie movies together—snacks included. Cheetos, gummy worms, the chocolate chip cookies my mom forbade us from eating because she was convinced we’d get nightmares if we ate after midnight. I remember holding her in my arms and laughing for hours. Needless to say, my mother was pissed when we were both too sleep-deprived to go to school the next morning.”

“She sounds like a wonderful kid,” Sutton tells me.

In a split second, however, the depression is back, rotting in my chest like a pathogen infecting fecund soil and shriveling up the roots of a new growth mindset—one I’ve desperately tried to water over the years. “She was.”

He notices my emotional shift. “Tell me what I can do to help. I’ll do anything.”

“You’re already doing enough,” I promise, and the tears clustering on my waterlines seem to be there for a completely different reason now. “For the few months I’ve known you, you’ve shown me that there’s life after death. You’ve shown me that there are people in my little circle who care about me. I was so self-destructive after everything happened. I was hurting my mom and my brother and was too blinded by anguish to notice. You’re the first person I opened up to about Audie—the first person who didn’t look at me like I was some…monster.”

There was no metaphorical smokescreen to sway Sutton’s perception of me the night I broke into Buford’s house. He saw a fearless girl who was hiding her pain thanks to life’s unsparing curveballs, and instead of lambasting her, he let her heal. The only way she knew how.

Sutton stares down at me with a smile that could outshine the stars, and the faintest gloss of moisture can be seen in his eyes. “You’re not a monster, Lake. You’re not unlovable. And anyone who gave you shit after you were struggling to come to terms with Audie’s passing is a horrible person.”

I still remember the looks of shock after word got out, flimsily concealed beneath sympathy that never had a long shelf life. Every day, I was balancing on a knife’s edge between the future and past, wondering when I’d have to face some cosmic retribution for the crimes I committed.

Blame it on that one psychology class I took freshman year of college, but I believe everyone has their own event horizon. A point of no return where something so traumatic happens to them that shapes the rest of their life. Mine just happened to find me sooner rather than later.

Was it a blessing in disguise to have spent so little of Audie’s life with her so the pain wouldn’t hurt as badly when she died? I don’t know. She was just a kid, and she didn’t deserve it. Any of it. Her death wasn’t painless; it wasn’t expected. She woke up that morning believing she’d walk into town with me the next day to pick up some of her favorite saltwater taffy from the family-owned grocery store on the corner.

That was the first promise I made to my sister that I couldn’t keep.

It’s taking everything inside me to stay calm right now—to not ruin Sutton’s perfect date that he worked so hard to plan.