She breathes like I took her on a marathon, not a sprint. “You’re in another league.”
I skim her cheek with my fingers. “Yeah?” I smile. “You’ve finally found the league you’re supposed to be playing in, Dais.”
“I like it here,” she whispers. “The better than chocolate league.” She wraps her arms around me, and I press my lips to her head. “How long do you think this’ll last?” Her voice turns serious, fear creeping in. Now that we’ve slept together, we could lose so much more if someone pulls us apart.
“As long as we want it to,” I tell her. “I’d fucking fight for you, Dais. You just have to let me.” She can’t be worried about hurt feelings. We’re going to upset people eventually, but if they love us, if they want us to be happy, they’ll accept this.
“Even your brother?” she whispers, her eyes closing as she dozes off.
“Even him,” I breathe, watching her begin to fall asleep. How long it’ll last, I’m not sure. I sit up and turn off the flashlight. I zip open one flap that faces the woods, the moon bathing our tent in a serene glow. I lie back, not closing my eyes. She eases into a peaceful slumber.
And I stay up and recount what I have with her and how much more I want.
One day can change everything.
So I keep hope that one day we’ll finally be there.
*
An hour must pass before she wakes up, unable to sleep. She notices that I’m already awake, and she rolls onto my body and traces the outline of my tattoo again, grazing her finger over the dark ink. I hear the faint sound of crickets outside our tent.
Her finger trails the inked chain on my side that’s bound around the feet of a phoenix.
“Am I the anchor?” she asks, skimming the tattoo on my waist.
My eyes darken. “Why would you think that?”
“You never told me what the tattoo meant when you got it.”
She was with me almost every time I went to the tattoo parlor to have more of the design filled in. She asked only a couple times what it meant. I would give her a look, and she’d drop it. I didn’t think she’d draw this conclusion. Not back then, and definitely not now.
“I’ve weighed you down the past couple of years,” she elaborates off my dark gaze. “I just thought—”
“I’m the fucking anchor,” I tell her suddenly.
“What?” Her brows furrow.
I know I need to give her the whole explanation. I can barely meet her eyes as I do. “When I was seventeen, my dad came to one of my track meets. He tried to watch as many of my competitions as he could.”
I stare at the top of the tent, remembering the heat of the summer in May. Jonathan Hale in the bleachers, wearing a suit and nodding at me as I met his sharp gaze. He smiled. Genuine pride.
“My mom was there. She wouldn’t look at him,” I say. “And when a lady leaned in to ask my father who he was there for, I heard his answer.” A bitter taste fills my mouth. “He said, ‘my friend’s kid. That one.’ He motioned towards me.”
I remember flipping him off, and that pride vanished from his eyes.
I didn’t care anymore.
Daisy places her hands on my abs. “What happened?” she asks with a frown.
“I still had to run, and I had two fucking choices. I could reach the finish line or just walk away. I took my fucking mark, and right when I started the race, I began to slow down. And then I fucking stopped on the track, took a couple deep breaths and walked off.” My heart beats faster at the memory. “My coach pulled me aside and he told me something…” I shake my head. “It’s stayed with me for so many fucking years. It changed me.”
I meet her eyes that are filled with my pain, sensing the hurt that travels through my body, thinning the air.
I can practically hear my coach in my ear, see him standing on the sidelines, one hand on my shoulder. “He said that I could be anything and do anything, and no one can stop me but me.” I say what he did, “You are your own anchor, Ryke. When you fail, you hurt yourself more than anyone else. Do you want to keep burning or are you going to let yourself rise?”
My brother—I don’t think he ever had someone to tell him this. He just kept failing until there was no way he could ever succeed.
I reach out to Daisy and tuck a piece of hair behind her ear. “So I’m the anchor and the phoenix, and it was around this time that I learned to run for me. I stopped winning for my fucking mom, for my dad. Every achievement, every good grade—that was mine. I started living my dreams and I stopped living theirs.”