I Hope This Doesn't Find You

“It’s us, Sadie,” he says, like that’s answer enough. “When have we been bad at anything?”

can’t even believe the words coming out of my own mouth, but it feels good. I’m so tired of playing nice, of smiling as people walk over me. What I’m realizing is that if you’re quiet about the things that hurt you, people are only going to mistake your tolerance for permission. And they’re going to hurt you again and again. “Yeah, I know it was you,” I say coldly, folding my arms across my chest.

“You know what? I hate you,” I breathe, because it’s easier to say I hate you than you hurt me. Because both options might shatter my heart, but at least one of them leaves my pride intact. And maybe because I simply crave the sharp, perverse pleasure of hurting him back.

“Not even if they did this?” he asks quietly, and he leans forward. All at once he’s too close, overwhelmingly close. I’m frozen to the spot as he pauses on purpose, his mouth bare inches from the base of my neck, so I can feel his breath trembling against my skin. “Do you need me to demonstrate further?”

closes the distance between us and hangs the medal around my neck.

“I’ll give you the medal as a present,” he says, already turning around. “Just wait.”

“Screw the others,” he says fiercely. The heat in his voice shocks me. Burns me to the core. “I don’t care about them. I only care about—”

Somehow it’s his voice that cuts through everything else, the blur of noise and colors in the background, the oblivious cheers of the crowd. Clear as the sky, familiar as my own heartbeat, a line to cling on to out at sea.

My head buzzes. I can’t believe it. It’s like spending years of your life training for a game only to realize you understood the rules all wrong.

“I’m going to make that soup now.” Mom stands up. “Stay here.”

And then she heads into the kitchen, leaving me to reassemble all the pieces of my life I was once so certain of.

“Oh, no, we weren’t happy. We weren’t in love with each other. We were simply polite,” she says, looking over my shoulder now, as if she can see her past projected onto the bare walls. “I almost wish that we had fought more, that we’d cared enough to challenge each other and bicker over the little things. Better that than just swallowing our resentment and staying quiet until we couldn’t take it anymore.”

I feel like somebody has knocked me upside down. Like I might throw up at any moment. “That’s not possible,” I tell her. “I should have sensed it. I would have known—”