Page 54 of Edged
It still was, if the agony in his voice was anything to go by. I stilled my jittery fingers and turned my hand, palm up. I don’t know if I’d expected him to hold my hand, but I knew I hadn’t expected him to curl in on himself and lay on my lap, the side of his head nestled in the cradle of my palm. With my other hand, I petted his hair away from his face because I didn’t know what else to do, but I knew I had to touch him. I had to keep his skin under mine, had to keep the words coming out between us.
“Mandy doesn’t know,” he finally whispered, after his breathing had slowed and the tension in his legs had allowed him enough leeway to stretch them toward the far end of the couch.
“That you’re here? I figured as much.”
“No.” Owen rolled onto his back and looked up at me, the unshed tears glistening in the corner of his eyes. “She doesn’t know I wrote the letter. She doesn’t know that we…she…Arch, she doesn’t know any of it.”
CHAPTER16
OWEN
Archer lookedlike I’d shown him irrefutable proof that the earth was flat.
“What do you mean she doesn’t know?”
There was no stopping the disgusted sound that rolled up and out of my throat in response to his shocked expression. “I wasn’t really in a position to say, ‘Hey, Mandy, sorry but I fucked the man you wanted to marry and now he’s left us both.’ How the fuck exactly did you expect that to go after you left?”
“I don’t know.” He scrubbed a hand down his face, suddenly looking tired. “I honestly didn’t think about it.”
“Oh, believe me, I know.”
“I just…I told her I had an emergency. I’d texted…”
Archer’s stumbling words were the answer to a question that had been sitting in my mind for most of my adult life because, after he left, Mandy had come down to the basement, a little flustered and frenzied, asking me what the emergency was. I hadn’t known what to say, so I’d answered her—for what was maybe the first and only time where Archer was concerned—honestly, and said no.
“She never talked about you after that,” I said quietly, scratching the back of my neck until the tingling memories sank back into the dark corners where they belonged.
“Really?”
“She just…I don’t know. I could tell she was hurt you were gone and I think she knew I was hurt you were gone, and that was enough. The why of it never mattered to her.”
“I didn’t mean for any of this to happen,” he said, shaking his head before glancing at me from the corner of his eye. With his hand cradled around the back of his neck, Archer sucked in a slow and sad breath. “Owen, I…”
“I don’t need your apology.”
“Not that.”
“What then?” I grabbed my coffee off the table and took a drink. I needed something to do with my hands, but the coffee had already cooled a little too close to room temperature to not taste like sludge on the swallow.
“I didn’t know what else to do. I couldn’t go back to her after what we’d done and I couldn’t be with you either.”
“Because I’m a man?”
Archer threw his hands up in the air. “Because ofher, Owen.”
I took one last drink of my coffee and returned the mug to the table beside the cheese. We still had to talk about the cheese.
“How could I explain that to your sister?” he asked, fingers splayed on top of his thighs and his eyes wide. “How couldyouexplain that to her? ‘Hey, Mandy. I’ve been in love with Archie this whole time and I told him that, and then we slept together while you were waiting upstairs. But he loves me back, so you understand, right? You’re cool with the whole thing?’”
Even though Archer had taken on a mocking tone with his questioning, the intent of the words landed how he’d planned. Even then I’d known my dreams were unattainable, short of creating an estrangement with my sister and going away with him, which hadn’t even been an option then. There hadn’t been a future for us. But at eighteen, I didn’t think about futures. I thought about the past and the present, and the only thing I knew was how urgently I needed Archer to love me in the way I loved him.
When I didn’t say anything, Archer kept talking. “There was no winning, Owen. There was no scenario where that went anyway but badly. And sure, running how I did might have been immature, but it was the quickest fix. It was like…I don’t know.”
“Cauterizing the wound,” I supplied, even though Archer’s quick departure had done anythingbut. His abandonment had settled on me and my sister like a festering wound that had taken months, if not years, to fully close. The fact that Mandy and I never spoke about Archer was proof enough that the skin was probably still too tender to touch.
“Basically.”
“And what about you, then? You just up and walked out of our lives like nothing?” I stood up and paced to the other end of the living room, hands braced against the small of my back.
