She closes her eyes and ducks her head, and I wonder if it’s seeing us side by side that is freaking her out. It feels a little surreal to me, too.
“I just have one more thing to say, and then if you want me to, I’ll walk away,” I say, watching as tiny droplets ripple across the water. “I’m trying… not to be such a control freak anymore. So if it’s what you want, I’ll leave you alone. I promise.”
I take a deep breath, collecting myself, and start in on the words I’ve finally found. I don’t know if they’re the right ones, but they’re mine. “Of all the sleeping people you could have talked to in that hospital, you chose me,” I say. “I have to believe it was for a reason. The same reason that I couldn’t help but hear you, Marley.”
I turn to look at her, taking in her profile. The freckles on her nose. The circles around her eyes, the bright hazel I remember, still tired, dulled. I want to take this weight from her, but she has to give it to me. I know that now. “We were meant to find each other. And now here we are. Together, but… not.”
I think of the two of us tumbling onto the grass at the park, the kite drifting away. Of our kiss under the mistletoe at the Winter Festival, Marley’s cheeks a deep, rosy red from the cold. How it felt to just hold her hand, her fingers enclosed safely in mine.
“There was a place where I loved you, a place you built with your words, and the happiness we shared was as real as anything here in the real world,” I say, my heart beating unsteadily in my chest. “We knew each other there. Because we talked to each other. We told each other everything. And I fell in love with you—the heart of you. The you in your stories. That Marley—you couldn’t have just made her up. I’m ready to start our story over, at the very beginning, if you’ll just give me a chance to make you happy.”
I notice tears welling up in her eyes, see her breathing through it, fighting them off.
I want to know what’s going on in her head, why she’s fighting so hard. Why she’s hiding.
She takes a deep breath, her chest rising and falling.
Finally she whispers a single word.
“No.”
I’m so ecstatic just to hear her voice again that I almost don’t register the meaning. Then my lungs collapse in on themselves, that one word pushing all the air out of me.
“I can’t,” she adds, her voice scratchy, barely audible. “I can’t be happy.”
Her words from that last night come back to me all at once.
We were never meant to be this happy.
“Why not?” I ask, trying to keep my voice steady, as if my whole world isn’t riding on this moment.
“If you really know me,” she says, still staring at her reflection, “then you know why not.”
“Laura.”
The thing that pulls her away from me each time she gets close.
“I understand how hard her loss must be, believe me, but, Marley—”
“She died because of me!” she says, her voice cracking. “I saw that car. I saw it and I couldn’t move. I didn’t save her. I didn’t even try.” She sucks in a long breath, continuing. “Laura would have saved me. She would have…”
She stops and fights the tears back again.
“Then wouldn’t Laura save you now?” I ask her, leaning closer, desperate to make her see. “Wouldn’t she tell you to be happy—”
“I don’t get to be happy. I don’t get to cry and feel bad about Laura, because I’m the reason she can’t feel anything,” she says, frustrated, heartbroken. “So I can’t love you, Kyle. I won’t.”
Those words bounce around inside my head. I can’t love you, Kyle. I won’t. She said my name like she’s said it a thousand times before, like she knows me. Like… she already loves me. Because how can she say she won’t love me if she doesn’t already want to?
That’s when I realize that her fingers are clenched tightly around mine. The feeling is so familiar to me that I don’t even know when she grabbed me. I just know that her hand is in mine.
I turn my palm up, twine my fingers with hers, and I silently plead with the universe to let this work. Please, please, please let this work.
“I traveled many roads to find this lost treasure, this piece of me,” I say softly.
She looks up, startled, as I reach into my pocket.
“But it was you who found it and returned it to me,” I say as I hold up my hand, palm up between us, fingers closed around something. “Now I wish to give it to you.”