Page 29 of Hostile

On the beach as the sun set, he held me and said “I love you” so many times that those words no longer felt like words but became as vital as oxygen—something essential I had been inhaling unknowingly. He said it into my hair, against my temple, and once, quietly, into the wind, aimed at the water, as if he were registering it with a higher office. The sky did its slow, spectacular ruin over the Atlantic, and I stood with my back against his chest, his arms crossed over me, his chin on my head, and I said it back the only way I knew how to say anything that mattered.

“True north,” I said. “Still.”

I felt him smile against my hair. “Still,” he said. “Always.”

Sunday night, before we drove back, he sat on the edge of the bed, pulled me into his lap, and held me for a long time without saying a word.

“You okay?” I asked.

“More than okay.” He pressed his lips to my hair. “I just don’t want it to end.”

“It doesn’t have to.”

He didn’t answer that. He just held on tighter. I thought about that moment a lot, long afterward. The holding on. The not answering.

I thought I understood it at the time.

I had no idea.

CHAPTER THIRTEEN

MEGAN: THE PAST

The last text I ever believed from Wyatt Aldridge arrived Sunday night, twenty minutes after he dropped me off at my dorm.

Early meeting with a professor. See you in Business Law. I love you.

I read it twice. Smiled at my phone in the dark, like the eighteen-year-old I was. Typed back something I no longer remember—I’ve spent ten years trying to retrieve it, the last thing I ever said to him while I still believed the world was as he’d told me it was. It’s simply gone. The mind doesn’t archive the ordinary. It doesn’t yet know it should.

I slept through the whole night. I remember that. No dreams, no waking at three a.m. to relive the day’s exposures. Just the deep, defenseless sleep of a girl who had spent a weekend being loved and had believed every minute of it.

It was the last night I slept that way for ten years.

On Monday, I walked to class alone, and the campus wouldn’t make sense.

I was good at reading rooms. I’d been reading them since I was six—identifying exits, mapping temperature, and locating myself within the architecture of other people’s attention before they’d decided whether I merited any. It was the first skill the iron gate ever taught me. I could walk into any space and know within seconds where I stood in it.

That morning, the quad read wrong.

Conversations stopped as I passed and resumed behind me in a quieter tone. Heads turned in pairs, then in clusters. A boy I’d never spoken to looked at me, then looked again—a slow top-to-bottom inventory that settled on my skin as if something spilled. Somewhere to my left, a laugh cracked and was shushed.

“That’s her.”

“She’s the one I told you about.”

I kept walking. Spine straight, pace even, running diagnostics the whole time. Something on my face. Something on my coat. Some story that had nothing to do with me, some other girl, some misunderstanding that would resolve itself by lunch.

Billy Brown cut across the grass toward me, bolder in a new way, wearing a grin I would spend a decade teaching myself not to see when I closed my eyes.

“Hey, Megan. How about we go out tonight?”

“No. You know I’m dating Wyatt. Why would you even ask me?” The nerve of it hit before the meaning did. Billy flirted the way the sun shone on a bright summer day—ambient, impersonal, easy to wait out. This was different. This was aimed.

“Not from what I heard. He got what he wanted from you, and now he’s moving on.”

“What?” No. He wouldn’t do that to me.

Billy held up his phone. “Yeah, we all got this text from him late last night. I have to say, you look fucking hot. Or maybe I should say, you look hot, fucking.”