Sloane: Send help.
Summer: Help with what? Are you guys okay?
Sloane: I’m so hungover. I want to die.
Willa: Nice. Shame spiral. Did you bang him?
Sloane: No. We gave each other facials and passed out awkwardly.
Willa: High five. I love it when Cade gives me a facial.
Summer: Good god.
Sloane: That is . . . not what I meant.
I really nailed it when I said I was going to feel like total shit in the morning.
It’s like I had a premonition or something. Because my head is pounding, there’s a heavy weight that reminds me an awful lot of shame pressing down on my chest, and the silence in the truck is fucking deafening.
Jasper and I exchanged good mornings. He asked how my nose was, and I rolled my eyes at him. He’s acting like he hit me with a fastball, not lobbed a flimsy bottle of water at me that sort of rolled down my face.
Because yes, I remember everything about last night in excruciatingly clear detail. I was just drunk enough to not give a fuck about anything, but not drunk enough to forget it.
Most times I would say getting hammered and not blacking out was a win. But I’d have happily blacked last night out. It would have prevented me from running that tape in my head on repeat.
The sky above us is dark gray, and snow falls in big fat flakes, landing in loud wet slaps against the windshield. The windshield where we both keep our gazes fixed.
Because shit is awkward this morning and it’s probably because I went all green-eyed on fans of his and then dragged him back to our hotel room where I asked if he’d sign my melons and give me a facial.
What can I say? We all have our breaking points, and it would seem I’ve hit mine.
I glance over at the speedometer, and we’re going a good chunk below the speed limit.
You live near the mountains long enough, and you know what heavy snowfall looks like before it hits. And this is that.
I know it. And Jasper knows it.
And I know Jasper well enough to know that inside his head right now, he’s agonizing over our safety. That’s his default mode.
“You must think I’m an idiot,” is how I open our conversation.
His head flips my way so sharply that I wonder if it hurt his neck. His face softens when his eyes land on me, and my heart skips a beat. Within seconds that chiseled face turns back to the road, knuckles white on the steering wheel.
“I absolutely do not think you’re an idiot.”
“My life is in shambles and I’m ignoring it by choice. And I was definitely an idiot last night,” I joke, turning to stare out the passenger window at the rocks and trees crowding the mountain pass so tightly it feels like I could open my window and touch that dark, craggy stone. Icicles cling to the sharp edges from the hard frost that hit overnight.
“No. You deserved to let loose. You were funny. I needed it. I had fun. We had fun.”
“Hmm.” I let his words bounce around in my head. We had fun.
“I’m sorry if I embarrassed you.”
“How could you have embarrassed me?” He sounds genuinely confused.
“With those girls. I was a major cockblocker.”
He chuckles quietly now. “And I appreciate the blocking.”
“You’re just saying that. Let’s not pretend you don’t enjoy female company.”
He shocks me when he responds bluntly, “I like sex. The rest is too much.”
I try to swallow and end up choking on my saliva—like the winner I am right now. He’s always so damn quiet. I didn’t expect the word sex to crest his lips so effortlessly. Let alone the part about him liking it.
I recover with, “I’ve seen you out with women at those fancy awards and stuff. So nice try.”
He shrugs, and his thick biceps rise and fall with the motion. “Looks can be deceiving. Sometimes it’s just a friend of a friend. Usually it’s someone I only see now and then. Who gets what I want and doesn’t ask for more.”
“Like a fuck buddy?” I almost want to say friends with benefits. But somehow the thought of him actually being friends with some other woman is worse. Sex is sex. Friendship though? With Jasper, friendship is love.
He clears his throat. “Basically.”
That’s such a fucking Jasper thing to say. Elusive and secretive.
“Whatever that means.” I roll my eyes and stare back out at the mountains. I don’t know how to handle this newfound tension between us. Before, it was just me in my head. Now his eyes linger a little too long, and so does his touch. Fingers twined with mine. Hand on the small of my back.
“It means meeting someone who actually likes me for who I am and not what I am feels downright impossible at this point in my career. It means I can spend surface-level time with people, but it always comes back to what I do for work or how much money I make or how famous I am. It means I can never just meet a person without that notoriety hovering over me, and that means I question everything and everyone.”
My tongue swipes over my bottom lip and my chest tightens as I unravel everything he just admitted.
“Even my mom pops up when I’m in the news or if she sees me on TV.”
I still. Jasper never talks about his parents.
“She does?” My voice is small, and I regard him carefully.
“Always.”
“Just to . . . say hi?”
He scoffs, and one corner of his lips tip up. But it’s not in amusement. It’s more of a wry twist, a cover for a deep hurt. “No, Sunny. For money.”
“I’m sorry. Do you know where she is?” It’s not enough. It’s not nearly enough. But I don’t know what else to say to him. I’m out of my depth with his accident and everything that came in its wake.
It strikes me as unfair that so many terrible things can happen to one person. That one human can defy the odds so thoroughly. That the universe couldn’t have sprinkled a little of Jasper’s pain over more people to make his burden just a little bit lighter.
His sister.
His mom.
His dad.
Now Beau.
It’s cruel, and it makes my heart ache for him—it always has. Those sad fucking eyes on that first summer day that I drowned in them. A dark blue abyss. Sometimes I feel like I sank to the bottom of that deep ocean and just took up residence.
I got lost in Jasper’s eyes and never left.
“She comes and goes. You know how she is. In the wake of Jenny’s death, she started self-medicating. And within a year, she was another person, living another life. One that took her from flophouse to flophouse. From prison to rehab. To . . . I don’t even know anymore.” He pauses, and all I can think is she became a person who broke her son more thoroughly than he already was. “It’s my fault.”
His words strike a heavy blow.
I’ve lived such a pretty and privileged life, one tied up with a shiny satin bow. I’ve never even been hit. Never lost a family member. Never experienced physical pain that wasn’t my doing. Sure, my parents have their quirks, but they’ve never set out to hurt me, or cared so little about me they would do something that might cause me pain.
But I imagine this is how it feels.
“It is not your fault.”
“It is. And I send her the money to atone for that.”
A quiet, groaning sound aches in my throat. Nausea roils in my stomach, and I can’t be sure if it’s the hangover or the topic of conversation. “You have nothing to atone for.”
“I d—”
“No,” I snap at him, clapping my hands firmly to cut him off. “Nothing. Nothing at all. I’ve told you before and I’ll keep telling you until the day I die. You were a child, she was a child, and it was an accident.”
His breathing sounds heavy, almost labored, as we both stare out the front window.
“I still remember the night I told you what happened. I remember you crying, which was even worse than saying it all out loud. Watching you cry . . . so young and naïve . . .”
I did. I sobbed. I broke for him, wanting to take some of his pain and make it my own. If the universe wouldn’t help him share the burden, I decided that I would do it on my own.
That night, with only the moon as his witness, a devastated boy divulged his deepest, darkest secrets to the most inconsequential person he could find. A girl who never looked at him with pity, only adoration.
And he shredded his heart for her. Left all the jagged, torn pieces at her feet.
And I became the keeper of those pieces. I didn’t balk at the rawness of the moment. I don’t think I even really understood it, but I picked up every little scrap and stowed them all away in my heart for safekeeping.
With time I made sense of his story. I mulled it over. I became a part of it, inserted myself somehow. And those pieces became seeds. Seeds that I watered and tended to and kept safe for him.
But seeds grow and now the roots of him and that night are wrapped so tightly around my heart that I’ll never be able to extricate myself from Jasper Gervais.
There isn’t a soul in the world who can remove those roots and the stranglehold they have on me.
“I learned with my parents that no matter how fiercely I love someone it isn’t enough to make them stay. But you? I told you every dirty little detail and you could have hated me. But you stayed. You danced.”
“I could never hate you, Jas.” Tears prick at my eyes. I did the only thing I knew how to do. Under the light of the moon, in a field of lush green grass, I got up and let the movements flow through my body. The classical tune played in my head. The only real music was the hush of a suffocatingly warm summer night on the prairies.
And the only person in the audience was a beautiful boy with haunted eyes who watched my every movement and told me it was beautiful when I finished. Then he left. And I could only hope that he’d sleep. That he felt a little lighter.
He might have been an abandoned teenager and I might have been some naïve, little kid, but that night we were just two souls with one secret. And after that, unlikely friends.
“I’m surprised you didn’t laugh when I told you.” He chuckles darkly.
I turn and punch his arm, feeling a little irritated with him for still being so goddamn hard on himself. “Shut up.”
“What are you gonna do about it?”
“Probably throw a water bottle at your face.”
A relieved laugh escapes him, and I watch his hands twist on the steering wheel, eyes still fixed on the road. “I didn’t throw it at your face. Not my fault your hand-eye coordination is trash.”
“Tell my nose that.” I rub it dramatically, even though it doesn’t hurt at all.
“The huge new bump on it suits you. Adds some character to that otherwise perfect face.”
He’s trying to divert back into playful, friendly banter. The kind we do so well. The type that cropped up between us once everything was out on the table. After that night, I never hesitated to tell Jasper anything. Of course, as we got older, things changed, but we had this foundation of raw honesty I could always fall back on.
I trust him, and I think he trusts me. I don’t know why he trusted me that night. Perhaps, he just needed to unload, and I was the puppy-love-riddled girl who was already up watching him, who just “happened” to be out for a walk.
Either way, it connected us. For life, it would seem. Because I don’t think he’s told another soul the entire details of that day. That he held his hand up in that signal. That his family fell to shambles in the wake of it. That he feels responsible. That Beau found him living in a car in a field behind the school because his mom was missing and his shithead dad had started a fresh life and failed to keep coming home for him at all.
The mention of perfect face brings a hush back through the cab, and with all the quiet, my mind wanders.
My curiosity gets the best of me when I ask, “You hear from him at all?”
He knows I mean his dad without even saying it. Harvey has filled that void for him the best he can, but there’s no getting over a parent who leaves you by choice. A parent who blames you for the worst day of your life.
He clears his throat, glancing at me from under the brim of his cap. “No.”
I nod, tamping down the rage that his biological dad always stirs up in me.
“I drove there once, you know. Just to see. Parked on the street and watched his house for an entire day. His wife. His kids. A fucking cat. I always wanted a cat, and he wouldn’t let me get one.”
“Did he see you?”
“Eventually.”
“What did he say?”
His throat works in tandem with his hands on the wheel, and he shrugs.
“I could kill him,” I mutter, rubbing my hand over my lips as though I can press back in the words I want to spew about this “man” who abandoned his only surviving child to start fresh without him. Grief twists us all in unusual ways, and I wish I could bring myself to be more forgiving considering what he went through.
But I just can’t. All I see is Jasper and what it did to him.
I know my dad can be a domineering dick, but he cares about me in his own way.
Jasper chuckles sadly. “That’s the thing, Sunny. He said nothing at all. He saw me. We made eye contact. And he just closed the door and flicked off the porch light. Went to bed.”
“I’m sorry.” My voice cracks when I offer the apology, and I reach out to wrap my fingers around his shoulder, fingertips dusting the curls that trace the back of his neck.
He inclines his head toward me, and the pads of my fingers rasp over the bone at the top of his spine. I rub a slow circle there and feel his body relax under my touch.
It strikes me again that it isn’t enough to heal his wounds. But it’s what I’ve got.
I can be a person who really knows who he is rather than what he is. I can listen.
When he talks, I’ll always listen.
“Shit happens to the best of us, Sunny, and I am not the best of us.”
“To me you are,” is what I tell him.
My eyes catch on the diamond that sits on my finger, and I recoil at the sight. I need to take it off, but I’m stalling. And not because I miss Sterling.
It’s because I worry that if I take this ring off, I’ll do something stupid and desperate where Jasper is concerned. It’s like a mental seat belt for me at this point—one of the few things keeping me safe from myself and an impulsive decision.
But I reach out, take his nearest hand off the wheel, and link my fingers tightly with his over the center console.
And the ring doesn’t stop me.
