Total pages in book: 49
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 48039 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 240(@200wpm)___ 192(@250wpm)___ 160(@300wpm)
“Axel,” I whisper.
“I know.”
“Stop apologizing.”
“I’m trying.”
I reach for another. My tears drip on the page and bead there, perfect, ridiculous. I have the urge to apologize to the paper for ruining it.
March 5
I saw you at the grocery store. Not you—you know what I mean. A girl with your walk. I was in front of the peaches like an idiot and I forgot how to breathe. Guys at work keep telling me to let it go. I told them the day a river stops finding the low ground is the day I’ll forget your last name. I’m sorry I’m a cliché. I miss you. I bought the peaches anyway because they smelled like July and you used to bite them over the sink and laugh when juice ran down your wrist.
I laugh then.
He closes his eyes, relief breaking across his face like dawn. “God,” he says, half a prayer, half a curse.
A gust slides through the trees and brings the high cold of the ridge with it. All at once I’m aware of the dark pushing closer to our little halo of light, and of his hand warming mine, and of the way the fire paints his profile in gold and shadow. His lashes throw tiny bars on his cheek. His mouth is set like he’s keeping himself off a cliff.
“Savannah,” he says, barely above a whisper. “If this hurts you, say the word.”
“It hurts,” I say. I squeeze his fingers until the tendons shift. “But it’s the right hurt.”
He nods without looking away from my face, like he knows this pain—this specific ache of finally touching the thing you’ve been circling.
I draw a deeper letter—the pages are many, the fold soft from being opened and closed a hundred times by hands that never mailed it. May 27. The first line steals whatever air the flames didn’t.
I love you. I love you, I love you, I love you. I’ll write it until the pen dries, until the paper gives out, until the word stops spinning. I’m sorry for the roof and the jump and the way the night smelled like ash and rain. I’m not sorry for being the boy who looked at you and saw a life he wanted. I miss you. I’m still that boy and it’s humiliating.
A tear breaks and runs into my mouth. Salt and smoke. I swallow it. The fire pops and sends up a burst of sparks that look like tiny planets escaping gravity.
“I thought I wanted apology,” I say, eyes on the page. “I thought that’s what would let me breathe.”
“And?” His thumb strokes my wrist again, slow.
“I wanted to know I wasn’t the only one who kept living inside that night.” I turn my head and look at him full-on. “I wanted to know it mattered to you the way it mattered to me, and that you didn’t let go. You didn’t.”
“No,” he says. “I didn’t.”
“Why didn’t you send them?”
He inhales like he’s lifting something. “Because every letter felt like asking you to stand in the ash with me. Because I didn’t know how to love you without making you carry my ghosts.”
“You could have asked.” My mouth twists. “I’m good at triage.”
He huffs. A ghost of a grin. “Yeah. You are.”
We sit. The fire eats quietly. The river continues its dark hum. The lights overhead swing and steady and swing again.
“Savannah,” he says after a while, voice the shape of a confession. “I was going to wipe your tears.”
“I saw.” I tighten my fingers around his because I can’t put my mouth where I want it, not yet. “This is better.”
His breath stutters. He stares at our hands like they’re something sacred and dangerous. “If I touch your face, I won’t stop there.”
“Good,” I say before I can stop the word. Heat climbs my neck. I add, softer, “Soon.”
He curses into his chest, gentle and filthy. My toes curl in my boots.
“Okay,” he says on a hard exhale. “Soon.”
I lift the box and shuffle deeper, strings of dates and months passing under my thumb—proof that time is a real thing and not an enemy we invented to explain our losses.
“Pick one,” I say, offering the stack to him.
His head jerks. “No. They’re yours.”
“Pick one,” I insist. “Read it to me.”
His eyes search mine for the trap. He doesn’t find one. He plucks a medium envelope from the middle, the paper wrinkled from being carried around.
He clears his throat. The firelight warms the words as they come.
September 2
I saw a girl in a red raincoat on the ridge and thought it was you coming home in weather like a dare. I followed her too far and felt like a fool when she turned and wasn’t you. I apologized in my head like that counts. It doesn’t. I miss you. I started running in the mornings. It doesn’t help and I keep doing it. I think about putting new wiring in every old house in town with my bare hands until the skin peels as if that’s how you fix the part of a night that doesn’t have edges. I wish you were here to tell me to eat. I wish I’d told you to stay.