Into the Tomorrows (Bleeding Hearts Book 1) (16 page)

Too bad he was completely wrong.

“You do know me,” I lied, reaching down to grab my discarded clothing, and wondering how many times I say that to Colin. “Well, it sounds like you’ll have fun while I’m gone.”

“Oh, definitely. We’re going to go longer this time, get up higher. I didn’t want to push you too hard on your first hike.” It sounded as if he’d already planned to go, which meant he’d already planned to leave me behind.

“Nice of you,” I said with a concealed venom in my voice. I couldn’t help it—the bitterness was so strong. Colin didn’t know me. And he’d basically just told me that he’d taken me on a baby hike and since I’d be gone, he’d do it for real this time.

“Then I guess I’ll be gone for a few days. If you’re fine with it.”

“Why wouldn’t I be? Jude will be super busy. You’ll probably be bored out of your mind.”

“I’m sure I will be,” I said, agreeing to him even though the anger in my veins wished to lash out at him for making me sound like someone who couldn’t even enjoy themselves. “But why are you worried about Jude leaving, Colin? There’s something else.”

Colin pursed his lips as he thought. He opened his mouth once but then snapped it shut. It was fascinating, watching the thought play over his face. “It’s a promise we made to our moms.”

“To look out for each other?”

He nodded. “You really want to go?”

“Yes,” I said and squeezed my hands tight into fists. “It’ll be good for me to get out. You’re right. After going several months not seeing each other and now seeing one another all day every day, we need some time apart.” I wasn’t sure if that’s what we needed, but if Colin was happy not having me around all the time, I would be happier away from him.

His eyes stayed on me for a beat as he listened to me. I didn’t want to sound too eager, but I also wanted to make it clear that I wanted to go. And I also didn’t want to analyze exactly why. When his gaze became too heavy, I turned my back to him to look at his closet—to the foot of space he’d made for me.

I was a hypocrite, an alien, in my own skin. I was telling my boyfriend I wanted to go on a trip so soon after I’d kind of moved in, a place where he’d made space for my life to meld with his. And the trip would mean more time with another man, a man who was not mine and it was terrible, horrible, selfish and insane to even want that kind of temptation and yet, here I was—a liar of the worst kind, keeping these thoughts to myself and not telling him a lie for him to at least examine—to determine if I was telling the truth or not.

“What are you thinking?”

I turned to where he lay on the bed, reclined, his black hair flopping over his forehead. If I stared at him long enough, I could see the boy I’d fallen for six years before, a boy with smiles and a comfortable ease; a boy with a love for everyone around him—not just his girlfriend. But now, when I looked at him I saw the dimples and the gaze of a man who wasn’t sure what to do with me. Quite a place we’d boxed ourselves into. One slice of a razor was all we needed to reveal the mess inside.

If I closed my eyes to the Colin in front of me, I could imagine the Colin who’d reached for me—with his hands and lips and his eyes. But it took effort, because the Colin now was like a familiar stranger. Someone you passed by every day, maybe shared a smile in greeting with or a “how are you?” but not someone you could claim to know.

He moved off the bed toward me, placed a hand first on my forearm. One black curl formed a nearly complete circle over his lobe. Because that was what I focused on, something minor, when he looked at me like that. Like he wanted to tilt my neck and kiss the crease.

Instead, the grip on my forearm eased and I thought for sure he would let go, and resume being feet away on the bed, miles away from my heart. But he didn’t.

“Hey,” he said, placing his fingers on my chin and turning my head so that I looked in his eyes. There was a time, years ago, when I’d imagined his eyes as the color of the sky at dawn, the palest blue—sometimes green—as it battled against the dark. But now, everything with Colin was a blur, smeared with wax. “I love you, you know?” He said it as if he was reminding us both and it made my skin tighten.

“I love you too,” I said, but the words were opaque. I let go of the mild irritation that had adhered itself to me when he questioned me and gave him a smile that wasn’t a smile at all, just a curving of lips and lies.

That seemed to have unlocked something within him, because that time he did lower his lips to my shoulder and just rested his face there. I held my breath—not in anticipation, but with dread. And then I squeezed my eyelids shut. I’d gone so long without this kind of intimacy with my boyfriend that I felt like he was that familiar stranger again. I’d need to get used to the way he touched me. Relearn how to play our music again.

His lips pressed a kiss to that spot—his favorite spot—and I wished to be seduced by it or to open my mouth and tell him no. But instead of those things, I just stood there, letting him kiss my skin as I clenched my fists.

I felt him sigh against my skin, sending warmth down my back. “You always smell so good,” he said.

I softened a little at that, the edges of the Colin I’d fallen in love with pushing through. “It’s just lotion.”

He rubbed his face along my shoulder. “It’s amazing.”

And, unwittingly, a picture of Jude slid into my head. Jude, who was articulate and in touch with how I felt. And, still unwittingly, I found myself relaxing against Colin’s touch. And when Colin turned me so his lips could find mine, I did the worst thing I could have done.

I imagined it was Jude.

W
hen I walked
into the kitchen, it was after nine and Jude was at the stove, his back to me. He wasn’t wearing a shirt again, and my eyes traveled over the muscles of his back and the ink that wrapped around his body. The heat that filled me annoyed me. I didn’t want to find him as sexy as I did. Because he was—so unbelievably sexy. Everything about him, down to the way he moved his hands illuminated the heat in me.

My boyfriend should be causing this reaction. But instead, a man who had kissed me on the roof of the apartment we shared with my boyfriend made my insides melt in a puddle of lust.

I wasn’t sure what to say. We’d left things in a weird place the night before, and I didn’t know how to move on from what had happened on the roof.

“Good morning,” he said without turning. His good arm picked up a skillet and moved it back and forth. “I’m making eggs, if you want any.”

“That’d be great,” I said tentatively, slowly sitting at the counter.

He shut off the burner with a click and turned around. I couldn’t look at his face, into his eyes. So my gaze landed on his left arm and traced the trees that grew from his wrist to his elbow.

“So. Do you want to talk about it?”

Startled, I looked quickly back at the hallway where Colin could come from any second. “No. I don’t.”

I saw him nod out of my periphery and couldn’t bring myself to meet his steady gaze.

“Do you like ketchup on your eggs?”

I wrinkled my nose and shook my head. “No, thanks.”

He placed a plate of steaming eggs in front of me. I reached for a fork that wasn’t there, and it was then that I finally looked up at him. He was holding the fork, inches from my face, waiting for me to look at him.

“Good morning,” he repeated, now that we were looking right at one another.

“Good morning, Jude,” I said, aching to sound unaffected. There was a knowing look in his eyes, something that told me we wouldn’t be able to brush this aside as much as I wanted to.

I took the fork from him. “Thank you.”

He braced his hands on the counter and leaned forward, so our faces were only about a foot apart.

“That’s…” I said, but the word was sticky in my throat. “That can’t be good for your shoulder.”

His eyes were dark, not in anger but from what looked like a lack of sleep. He waited a beat, and then another before he shrugged, not wincing at all. “I do a lot of things that aren’t good for me,” he said, and I remembered immediately how he’d said that to me before.

“Did you sleep well?” I asked as if I couldn’t tell from the circles under his eyes.

“No.” He remained a foot from me, and though it intimidated me a little, having him so close to me, I refused to let it show. “Did you?”

“I slept great.” I poured as much enthusiasm as I could into that sentence, but it sounded fake even to me.

Instead of calling me out on it, he said, “Glad to hear it.”

He buttered two pieces of toast that popped up behind him and set them on my plate.

“You’re still up for talking about the website tonight?”

I had a mouth full of egg so I nodded.

“And we’ll talk about Yellowstone,” he said, and I felt that familiar leaden brick fall into my stomach.

Could I really go to Yellowstone with Jude, knowing that I’d be thinking about how it’d been kissing him? Could I stand to be several days away from Colin, without telling him about the kiss?

Jude must have seen the emotions war across my face because one side of his mouth lifted up, and I couldn’t stop staring at the curve. My gaze slid over the short beard he was growing around his mouth and I had a flash of that facial hair scraping along my cheek and my chin as he’d kissed me.

I so desperately wanted to touch my face in memory. But then he’d know for sure what I was thinking about. So I shoveled another forkful of egg into my mouth and chewed, keeping my eyes in all the spaces that Jude didn’t occupy.

A minute later, Jude disappeared from the kitchen, so I took the opportunity to start doing the dishes and cleanup myself. When Colin came into the kitchen, he put his arm around my waist and kissed my neck.

“Hi,” I said, wanting to move from his touch without seeming like I was brushing him off. Was he being more affectionate than usual? Or was I just noticing it more now? I couldn’t be sure.

“Is anyone awake yet?

“Jude is,” I said, not turning around as I squirted the dishwasher detergent into the machine and snapped it closed. “I don’t know about Mila.”

Colin laughed. “Mila will probably sleep past noon—she was up late with me last night, herding the rest of our friends out the door.”

I wasn’t sure what to say to that, so I started the dishwasher and stepped aside, subtly out of Colin’s arms. “What’s on your agenda today?”

Colin grabbed two mugs from the cupboard above the coffee maker and poured the coffee from the carafe into both. “I’m going to the gym soon. Nothing better for a little alcohol hangover than the gym.”

“I always heard a greasy breakfast was good for those.”

“Well, maybe for you,” he said lightly as he poured milk into his mug.

I watched as he put the milk away without offering me any. And then I berated myself for looking for a fault. Why should Colin know how I take my coffee?

I waited until he closed the door on the fridge before I opened it again and poured the milk into my mug. Colin had already moved on to a plate of eggs and paid me no mind as I stirred sugar into my coffee.

Was I searching for fault in him? He chewed his eggs as he flipped through an app on his phone, smiling intermittently at whatever was on his screen. I remembered when Colin had given me his first, dazzling smile.

We’d been dating a couple weeks by then, when our romance was fresh and not sullied by my indecision or his neglect.

“
S
ee you in Chem
,” Colin called out to the kid in the backseat, the one he’d told me to pull over for on our way to school. He’d been walking in the rain, puddles splashing around his ankles when Colin had hollered out the window for him to hop in.

I ran my hands over the silver emblem on Colin’s steering wheel, both shocked and relieved I hadn’t crashed his car on my drive to school. After the backseat door closed, he said, “Now, put it into gear and back up a few feet.” He placed his hand on mine on the shift and negotiated it to reverse.

“Okay.”

The car moved slowly and anxiety pricked my arms. “Whoa, stop!”

I slammed on the brake with both feet, alarmed.

“No,” the voice out my window called, “she’s on my foot now.”

“Oh my god,” I squeaked, as the kid we’d given a ride too tapped on the car. “I backed over his foot?”

Colin laughed lightly and encouraged me to ease off the brake until the student’s foot was free from the tire. “You okay?” he called out as the freshman maneuvered quickly around the car.

He waved to us, though his face was wincing in what I knew to be pain. “Sure. Great.” And then he was off, across the field and toward the west wing of our school.

“Shit,” I whispered again. “I ran someone over.”

Colin turned toward me, took in my face, and then his mouth stretched wider than I’d ever seen and he laughed, his eyes crinkled and his body shaking. “You ran someone over. In my car.” Tears formed at the corners of his eyes.

He yanked me to him, kissing me firmly on the lips before pulling back and laughing. Brushing the hair from my face, he said, “You make me so freaking happy, Trista Kohl.”

I nuzzled into his neck as his hands became more urgent, running over my body. “We don’t have time,” I whispered.

“Fuck class,” he said gruffly, lips hot on my skin. “Let’s ditch.”

So we had, driving over to a parking lot across the street, at the back of the church. We laughed together as we took off some of our clothing, peeking out the windows in between the kissing. He made me so happy, feel so alive.

And all I could think was that I’d never seen happiness like that—utter joy—directed at me.

“
C
olin
,” I said, softly. He didn’t look away from his phone, only grunted a little in acknowledgement. “Do you remember when I ran over that kid’s foot?”

His thumb paused on the screen and I watched his face lose the smile he’d been wearing while looking at his phone. “No.”

The smile had been about to curve my lips in response; I’d been so prepared for him to tell me, “Yes, I do,” with a laugh. But he didn’t.

It was true that I didn’t have many recent happy memories, but the ones I did were enough. However, if I was the only one who remembered them, did it count?

He drank the rest of his coffee noisily and then set it down with a thud.

And when he walked back out of the kitchen moments later, I wondered who those people in my memories were. It was as if we now lived our lives parallel, never intersecting.

* * *

I
scrubbed
the counter with vigor, my muscles warming with each bend and extend. The counters weren’t dirty—far from it. But my limbs held so much tension that I needed to warm them and then let them relax again. It was like my arms had been asleep and suddenly they were awake and needing to be worked thoroughly.

Clutching the sponge in my fingers, I moved down the counter near the fridge. I needed to exert myself a little. If I could just keep pretending that everything was okay, maybe I’d start to believe it.

Atrophy may have plagued my heart, but it was easy to hide if the rest of me kept moving.

“What are you doing?” I didn’t startle and spin around, but I did pause my movement.

“Cleaning.” I pushed harder against the counter, but snuck a surreptitious glance at him, instantly thankful that he was wearing a shirt.

“Are we slobs?”

I shook my head, but continued scrubbing. “I just like to clean.” I moved further down the counter so I was next to the fridge and started scrubbing its side. “And since you and Mila are letting me live here, at least temporarily, I’m trying to earn my keep.”

“Colin is paying half of the rent for the apartment.”

I didn’t want to ponder why that made my neck break out in sweats, but it did nonetheless.

“Colin is?”

“Well, his parents are.”

“Ah.” I still didn’t look at him, just flipped over my sponge and continued moving up the side of the fridge with my scrubbing.

“I’m going to just sneak past you,” he said.

On instinct, I backed up to move out of the way, but in doing so my back hit his chest and a hand came to my arm, steadying me. I froze, hoping he didn’t feel the gallop of my pulse under his hand.

“Whoa,” he said softly. Without immediately removing his hand, he opened the fridge and it hit me with its chill. I held my breath as he reached around me with his other hand and snagged a root beer. His whole body brushed up against my back and I kept myself completely still, with much effort.

Three more seconds, he stayed behind me. I felt his breath on my neck but didn’t turn. He made a noise like he was going to say something, but he backed up instead. His hand on my arm squeezed gently once before he let go.

I knew immediately when he was gone without turning, such was his presence.

When Colin had touched me in the bedroom, I’d been thinking too much—about how foreign it felt until I imagined someone else touching me the same way. When Jude touched me, I didn’t think at all, but when he let go it was like his touch had been a brand.

Colin, Colin, Colin. I repeated the word over and over until it started to sound strange, until my tongue grew tired of tapping on the roof of my mouth.

I set the sponge down, but my hand felt no lighter. I sat at the table, opened my laptop, and saw first, Facebook. Colin’s face. The photo was of him on the mountain, presumably taken when we’d gone hiking. His smile was wide and his eyes were shining and he had captioned it, “I climb mountains to be seen. When I’m up this high, the whole world can see me.”

The initial instinct to roll my eyes was sharp, so fierce that I had to stop myself from doing it. This was my boyfriend, I reminded myself. But why did I need to keep doing that?

My grandfather had asked why I stayed with Colin all these years and my answers had varied, but fundamentally they were the same thing: because he was familiar, because he was comfortable, and because I was a coward. A part of me remembered when he’d been the first boy to give me a shiver, to bring a smile to my face, and I knew if I let him go—I’d lose that. I was selfish, I knew that. And I was a coward. But so much of my life had changed since Ellie died and I knew that letting go of Colin was another step forward in letting her go, as he was my last—my only—remaining tie to her.

I pulled up my blog, intending to write something. I coveted its anonymity, how it kept me free to express but protected from being outed. It was titled, “The Void.”

I scrolled through the most recent posts, not wanting to reread them just yet, and scrolled down to the first poem I’d written. The reason for the name of my blog site.