Total pages in book: 86
Estimated words: 81375 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 407(@200wpm)___ 326(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
Estimated words: 81375 (not accurate)
Estimated Reading Time in minutes: 407(@200wpm)___ 326(@250wpm)___ 271(@300wpm)
“Angled slightly. Here. Let me.” He holds out his arms, and I transfer the box into them, every bit as ungainly as expected. He doesn’t drop it. He has no problem making his way at just the right angle so the box doesn’t tip the pizza all over the place while he gets through the screen door.
Inside, the place is sparsely furnished. The cottage is wide open, with a tiny kitchen, a round wood table, a floral sofa, a small TV, a tiny bathroom, and one small bedroom at the back. It’s probably not more than three hundred square feet.
Luca sets the box down easily on the table.
We both stare at it.
I break first, laughing at how it takes up more than the whole table. He laughs too, reluctantly at first, but then the rich, rolling sound of it takes over the husky start. I laugh until my eyes start tearing up. I have to stop or I’m going to cry, and that’s going to turn into sad tears followed by ugly crying. And not about the pizza.
My emotions are a mess.
“I’m sorry,” I whisper, brushing my knuckles over my eyes.
“Me too,” he murmurs.
My head snaps up. “What do you have to apologize for?”
“For the past two and a half decades? For losing myself. For parts of me ceasing to exist.”
I flip the top of the box open. The pizza looks exactly like a pizza. Just jumbo-sized. If we flipped it out of the box, it would probably cover the whole table’s surface just about perfectly.
I get two plates from the cupboard and hold one out like a peace offering. “That just happens when people age.” Right. So says I, who wasn’t even born when all this went down with Luca and my dad. “Saying goodbye to the past isn’t necessarily a bad thing,” I mutter, my face getting red. Fantastic. That should look glorious with the raccoon makeup. “I understand it was a disagreement. My dad doesn’t see it that way, but if you… err… if I talked to him, I think he’d be open to changing his mind. You don’t have to apologize to me. It’s all good.”
“It’s not, though.”
“It’s not, but you know what I mean.”
I work on pulling out one of the pizza wedges. It’s so big that it fills up my entire plate. After not eating all day, my mouth waters. I guess it helps to have your appetite stimulated by someone who smells divine enough to eat.
That and the fact that Luca’s peace offering has worked wonders for my anxiety.
“What’s more gut-wrenching than looking back at the past and knowing you left things unresolved, and it hurt someone badly? That they never properly moved on?”
I just about drop my plate on the floor. Cue anxiety back up. Big time. “You can’t be responsible for someone else.”
“But you can be responsible for your own actions,” he argues. “I thought I could move past it. And I did, in so many ways. In others, it was just buried in a shallow hole, and it was often exposed to the elements or stumbled on when I least expected it. Sometimes, I’d imagine how things could have been different, but that’s useless and frustrating. Imagination does nothing other than create a figment of itself that causes you to pine for it and makes you feel worse.” His eyes flick down to the table, then back to my face. The shadows in them crush my chest. “I’m sure you think I’m quite black hearted.”
“I like black hearts. They’re so much better than the red ones. But I have to say, the purple ones are the best, though.”
“I want to have my life back. Not the old life I gave up, but the old old life. The old me before… before I… was anything at all.”
I set my plate down on one of the chairs so freaking fast. Then, I just stand there. Fighting everything in my body that screams at me to close the four feet of distance between us, but in that space, all the complications of why I can’t do that hang heavily. I don’t have any right to touch him, not even a brush of my finger over his hand.
“You were something. You were a lot of somethings.” Words don’t begin to do anything justice. Not when a hug would convey everything I want to say.
“That came out wrong,” he says, and his hands clench his jeans like he physically needs to restrain them. “I don’t know how to explain it.”
“It’s okay. You don’t have to.”
His face goes from reluctant to fuck it in five seconds. He’s going to attempt to explain, even though he just said he has no idea how. “That accident changed so much for me. Physically, mentally. I have scars on top of scars, and most of them aren’t visible.”