Page 91 of All That We Are Together

“How? Tell me.”

“We don’t argue…”

“Couples argue, Leah…”

He paused a second, then went on: “Dammit, I never wanted…”

“I know,” I interrupted him.

“What does he have that I don’t?”

It was hard for me to let the words out, to be sincere.

“Security. Trust.”

“You don’t trust me, babe?”

“Trust is something you earn, Axel.”

I ignored the pleas in his eyes and looked away when the pain got to be too much. I didn’t want to hurt him, but I didn’t want to lie to him either; the truth was all I had now. With Landon, I felt protected. With Axel, I felt like I was skydiving. Maybe that was why I didn’t say as much as I might have said just then: that trust had to be earned, and that a person could do it with effort, good intentions, honesty…but love? No, real, passionate love, the kind that makes you shake from head to toe, that gives you butterflies in your stomach, wasn’t something someone could earn; it just came, whether or not you wanted it. Because the heart is more powerful than reason. Because there is no secret formula to keep you from falling in love with the wrong person, a person full of defects, someone who’s taken, someone who might never even notice you exist…

And that scared me. Bad.

But even as scared as I was, when he got up, I told him, “You shouldn’t have asked.”

With one hand on the doorknob, he said, “What was I supposed to say, then, Leah?”

“You should have asked what I was looking for. Because you know what?” I sniffled, feeling empty, broken, and lost inside. “You were right. I needed to go to college. I needed to get out of Byron Bay and face things on my own. But when I did it, I realized I didn’t need you. Life went on.”

In his face was an infinity of emotions…

“I’m proud of you for it.”

“You shouldn’t be. Because when that happened, I understood you weren’t irreplaceable. I understood that nothing is, that romance like that doesn’t exist. And a part of me was lost the day I pushed that idea out of my mind. The part that believed in idyllic loves that were worth fighting the whole world for. It sounds silly when I say it out loud, right? I guess it is. So, as always, you win.”

His entire body was frozen, apart from his heaving chest.

“Goddammit, Leah. I’m sorry to tell you, but I was wrong. So I guess that means we both lose. You for listening to me and not trusting yourself. And me for being a fucking idiot.”

He walked out.

And all I could do was try to breathe…

81

Leah

We barely talked the next three days. If Axel cooked, he’d tell me he’d left me something in the fridge. If I went out for groceries, I’d ask him if he needed anything. The tension gathered in the corners like dust. And the silence. The fleeting glances. Weirdly, the situation felt familiar to me, because it wasn’t the first time we’d lived like that under the same roof, avoiding and seeking each other out at the same time, walking around each other in circles as if we were expecting something.

A part of me that I wished I could silence kept remembering the electrifying feeling when I felt his lips on mine. So warm. So hungry. So wild. And I felt guilty for it, and angry with myself for remembering.

Another part of me was still mad at him.

I’d tried for years to digest what had happened. Constantly chewing it over, never managing to fully process it. Maybe that’s why I couldn’t forgive him. It wasn’t what he did, but how he did it and why. I was frustrated that he’d been so weak, and worse, that he’d made a decision for me, but at the same time in spite ofme. Treating me like a girl after all we’d lived through together. He wasn’t the sincere boy I’d fallen in love with. He’d let me down…

Disappointment. That was the word. The fault must have been partly mine, because believing he was perfect, idolizing him in that way, melting every time I saw his crooked smile for as long as I could recall, gushing over his intense eyes, his casual stroll… Saddest of all was the way Axel used that image of himself as free and sincere to hide how, in reality, he’d always had his hands tied. Or had tied his own hands, actually, limiting himself, deciding it was easier to stay on the cliff than to dare to jump. And even worse, had I known it all since the beginning, I wasn’t sure it would have changed our story that much. Because it was Axel’s lights and his shadows that had always drawn me to him, his complexity and his contradictions.

All the things he was in Paris, but with more intensity.