I just stared at her.

Ocean water continuously pushed against the shore. The clatter of voices and music steadily funneled from the beach house many feet away, though faint and not at all distracting. The wind was mild, moving between the two of us quietly, as if it had a mind of its own and wanted to give us this time together without interruption. Bray sat Indian style with her hands in her lap. Tears still clung to her lashes, but she couldn’t cry anymore. I could sense that she wanted to look me in the eyes, but now that she had told me all of this, she was ashamed.

I reached out and took both of her hands into mine and I turned her wrists up. She didn’t protest, but she watched me curiously. I wedged my thumb and index finger between the bracelets on her left wrist and when my finger found the scar, I caressed it. Then I lifted that wrist to my lips and I kissed it. I did the same to the other one and then placed both of her hands back into her lap, and I held them there.

“Before I have to say what I intend to say to you,” I began, “You have to tell me how I was partly to blame for this.”

Confusion flickered in her eyes. She shook her head no, her eyebrows drawn inward creating tiny wrinkles in her forehead.

“No, Elias,” she said. “No part of you was to blame for this.”

I didn’t speak. I didn’t want to. I only wanted to listen.

“Two days before I did it,” she said in a soft, distant voice, “I started thinking about the last phone call I had with Mitchell. He had told me that you were in love with Aline, and I knew that I had lost you forever. You were all I had. The thought of never having you in my life just made my mind-set worse. It made everything worse. I thought of you when I put that blade to my skin. I thought of when we first met. Our first kiss. Our first everything. Yes, I thought of you, but it wasn’t your fault.”

“And it wasn’t yours,” I said. “You know that, right?” I held her hands more firmly.

She nodded. “I know.” It seemed like she wanted to say more than that, but she looked back down into her lap instead.

“I’m really pissed off,” I said, and her head shot back up before I could finish. I wrenched her hands. “Why didn’t you ever tell me? You told Lissa. You confided in her. You sit here and basically tell me that I was the only person who loved you enough to understand, that I was all that you had.” I stared harshly into her shrinking face. I wanted this to sound as angry and as resentful as it did. It needed to be said that way, to be taken that way. “Yet I was the one person you didn’t tell, the one person you didn’t confide in, the one person you didn’t go to for help.”

Tears stung the backs of my eyes. I took a deep breath to contain them.

“I was the one person you knew loved you more than anyone ever could, yet you didn’t trust in me enough to let me be there for you.”

I had hurt her. Tremendously. Her bottom lip began to quiver and her hands began to shake beneath my own. But I refused to let go of her. She was going to face this truth if it was the last thing I ever said to her.

“Why didn’t you come to me? Why did you constantly push me away?”

“I told you why!” she roared.

I remained calm. “No, you didn’t. You told me that everything you said was a lie, a watered-down version of the truth.”

“Yes! It was watered down! It was… it—” Her jaw snapped shut.

Finally, she sighed and said, “I was afraid. I was afraid that I would only push you away like I did everybody else. Especially if you knew the truth. You looked at me like I was beautiful. Perfect. And that’s what I wanted to be for you. I never wanted to shatter your image of me by telling you the truth. I was embarrassed and ashamed.”

“Of what?” I said with disbelief.

Her eyes began to fall away from mine. I pulled on her hands to shake her attention back to me.

“Seventeen years I’ve known you, Bray. Seventeen years. I have loved everything about you. Your foul mouth. Your crazy-ass, brazen antics. Your fearless attitude. Your highs, your lows, whatever they were, I only saw a girl with a vivid personality. A girl who sometimes did give me whiplash, I won’t lie, but I liked that about you. You kept me on my toes. You challenged me. Don’t you understand? I went out of my way to be around you because of the way you were. And if you were ever going to scare me away or make me think badly of you, would I have made you the center of my world for seventeen years?”

I caught a tiny smile hidden in her eyes.

I let go of her hands and stood up from the sand.

“Out in the open. Everything. Right now. No more secrets or lies between us.”

I began to pace, but then stopped and looked down at her and said, “When I was fifteen, and we crashed at Lissa’s house that night of her birthday party, I touched your boob when you were sleeping.”

Her mouth fell open with a spat of air. I was smiling from ear to ear.

“Pervert!”

I nodded. “Yeah, I was. A total fucking pervert. Hell, I still am. I always will be. But yeah, I touched your boob without your permission or you knowing about it. And I don’t regret it.”

She just shook her head, smiling the more I spoke.

I rested my chin in my hand for a moment, pondering. Then my index finger shot up. “OK, you want another one?” I slapped my hands together. “Senior year. You were supposed to go to the prom with that jack-off—what was his name?—anyway, he called you and cancelled because I threatened him.”

“What?”

I nodded again. “I did. I knew he was a fucking douchebag. The thought of him trying to get in your pants made me fucking mental. I tried to talk you out of going with him, but you were hell-bent. So Mitchell watched the restroom door while I cornered him inside right after he had taken a piss. I told him that if he didn’t back off, I’d fucking kill him.”

“I can’t believe you did that,” she said and she wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Well I did, and I’d do it again. Are you going to leave me now? Have I run you off?” I knew I hadn’t. I was trying to prove a point.

She shook her head.

“You want something worse about me?” I asked and at this point, even I was a little afraid to go on. But this was our moment of truth. If I was going to make her understand anything, I had to show her a side of me that I knew she wouldn’t like.

I reached out and took her hands, pulling her to her feet.

“I did coke for a year after you left,” I said. “And twice, when I couldn’t find any—because I was becoming addicted fast—I actually smoked crack. Right off a soda can. That’s about as fucked up as it gets.”

She looked like I had just slapped her across the face.

I put my thumb and index finger a centimeter apart in front of us and said with a squinted eye, “I was this close to becoming a full-blown addict. This close to being strung out twenty-four-seven, sleeping in fucking Dumpsters, giving blowjobs for blow. It was why I think I was so hell-bent on helping Mitchell get off that meth. I saw what it was doing to him. The same thing my shit almost did to me.”

Bray let out a long, concentrated breath and dug both of her bare feet deeper into the sand.

Then she looked back up into my eyes. “Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Ever do any of those things?”

I shook my head. “No. In fact, what sobered me up quicker than anything was when I went to a drug house with this guy—I didn’t even know his name—and I was offered a line of coke. Primo shit. The other guy there, the one selling the stuff, was going to blow me. He would’ve given me a line and all I had to do was let him suck my dick. I almost did. I thought, hey, at least it’s not the other way around. But then the guy who I went there with, he stepped up before I could answer and said he would let the guy do it if I wouldn’t. And then two minutes later, there I was, watching this drug dealer suck this guy off who I rode there with. I thought, that could be me, getting violated for drugs. Willingly.” I took a breath, softened my face and said, “And then I thought of you.”

Bray took my hands into hers, consolation and understanding and even a little bit of horror lay resting in her face.

“I thought of you and of when we were kids swimming in that pond. Just seeing your face looking back at me in my head made me want to stop that shit. It didn’t matter to me that I thought you were engaged—” I pointed at her. “I was pissed about that, just so you know. I thought that should’ve been me. Anyway, it didn’t matter to me that you were in love and that I thought I’d lost you forever, I wanted to be a better person for myself and because I knew you would hate to see me like that. I never touched coke or crack again and I never will. None of that life-killing shit. No fucking way. And smoking weed became a rare recreational thing for me.”

Without giving her a chance to respond, I added quickly, “Would you have left me if I said yes? If I admitted I took part in something like that?”

This time, even though my heart told me that no, she wouldn’t have left me, another part of me felt ashamed enough about everything I had told her that I thought maybe she might. It was when I truly understood what she went through with me all those years. I didn’t agree with how she handled things, but I understood it at least.

“No,” she said softly. “There’s nothing you could do or say to make me leave you.” And even though we had both said this very same thing to each other a few times in the past two weeks, it felt new and more real every time it was said.