Page 48 of Always Been His

“I will if I have to,” he snarls, so close to me I can see the steam coming off him.

“Why? So you can keep having this dumb excuse to fucking hate me?” I bark back, my throat raw and sore from all the salt in my chest.

“I don’t hate you,” he says, low.

“Then what do you want from me, Grayson?” I take another step toward him in the rain, the wet grass soaking through my socks. “Because you can’t show up here and ask me if I meant what I said and then tell me to leave. Pick one.”

“I want you to tell me the truth, for once,” he says, his jaw tight. “I want you to tell me you were caught up in the moment, and it didn’t mean anything, and you’re going to get on a plane and go back to your life and let me get back to mine.”

“I can’t tell you that.”

“Try,” he says.

“Grayson.”

“The truth,” he says again, harder. “Tell me the truth.”

“I did! I am!” My voice cracks on the last word in a way I didn’t plan for and can’t take back, and the crack sits between us in the rain, and neither of us pretends it didn’t happen. “I’ve been telling people things that are not true for two years. I told myself it didn’t matter that you stopped answering. I told myself I was fine. I told Iris I was fine. I told twenty thousand people a night I was fine and I wrote it all down in songs and put it on the radio, and none of it was true, and I am not doing it anymore.”

His chest rises and falls in quick succession. The dark clouds fall over the harsh lines of his face, and despite the snarl on his lips, he still looks like an angel. He looks so good it fucking hurts.

“You want to know what I think?” he says, his voice scraping low. “I think you are very good at saying things that sound like the truth. I think you’ve been doing it for so long you don’t know the difference anymore.”

“Then let me be very clear,” I say, stepping closer, close enough now that I have to tip my chin up to hold his eyes, close enough that the rain running off his jaw hits the front of my hoodie. “I was heartbroken when you left Boston. When I thought you heard that song and walked out of that building, I fell apart. And I know you have your version of what happened that night, and I have mine, and somehow they don’t match up, but I need you to believe me when I tell you that I did not walk away from you. I have never in my life wanted to walk away from you.”

His eyes are almost black in the rain.

“You left me in Boston. You had Nicki escort me out and had her hand me a fucking fan tote bag as a thank you while you caught a flight to fuck knows where,” he says. “And you did this after singing that fucking song about me. You played me, Sienna.”

“She told you I was gone?” I say. The words land flat and final, and I go still.

Nicki told me he left before the song ended. She said he didn’t even make it through the bridge, that he slipped out the side exit while I was still on stage singing every word I’d always been too scared to say to his face, and I believed her. I believed her because it made the most sense. Standing on that stage and singing the song I wrote about Grayson made my feelings impossible to ignore, and I’d always believed on some level that loving me from a distance was easier than loving me up close.

“You didn’t even come backstage after the show,” he says, a muscle jumping in his jaw. “And you never called. Not that night. Not the next morning. You only asked me not to hate you.” He chuckles lifelessly, running a hand over his face. “And if you knew me. Like really fucking knew me, you would know I could never hate you.”

The sentence knocks the air out of me. I can barely keep myself from crying with all the thoughts and emotions jumbled up inside me.

“I didn’t know,” I say, my voice barely audible above the rain.

“Sure you didn’t,” he says, quieter now, some of the heat leaving his voice. “Because you blocked me shortly after that.”

“No, you blocked me,” I say.

He sucks his teeth. “I was going to ask you to be my girlfriend. I had a promise ring and everything.”

“No, no, no…” I shake my head. The rain, and my tears, blurring my view of him.

“I had a ring,” he repeats. “I had it made. I drove four hours to Boston with it in my pocket to tell you I was done with five minutes a week, and holiday visits under a fake name, and I wanted you out loud… And she handed me a fucking tote bag.”

I feel the tears before I know they’re coming, hot against my rain-cold face, and I don’t try to stop them because there’s no point.

“Grayson,” I say, his name breaking in half.

“I don’t want your sympathy,” he says, his voice rough. “I’m telling you this because you keep acting like this is my fault, and you’re not taking responsibility for your own actions.”

He is right. I know he is right and the knowing claws at the center of my chest.

“Grayson, I meant it,” I say. “I meant every word of it.”