I pause, the ring dangling in midair.
She puts the back of her hand to her cheek, like she’s guarding her fingers from me.
Her eyes are wide and focused just beyond me, on the lights.
My body is growing cold, because I know this isn’t good, this isn’t happy, this isn’t the way things like this are supposed to go. But my dumb smile is still on my lips, and my dumb lights are still going nuts, and a question I thought I knew the answer to is still in my eyes.
“Stop looking at me like that,” she says. There’s true anguish in her voice. “Please, don’t ask me. I can’t. I just can’t.”
She turns around and runs inside.
CHAPTER 36 Molly
The music stops abruptly, but the house is eerily lit from all the lights outside. It feels like an FBI raid in here.
Seth follows me. He still has the ring in his hand, clenching it so tightly in his fist I hope it doesn’t break the skin.
All I want is a rewind button. Some way to signal to him, five minutes ago, that he should not be asking the question he just asked.
Some way to not be living in a reality in which all I can do is hurt the man I most want to protect.
But I can’t help him, because my heart is thundering with one word: no.
No. It throbs behind my temples, in my chest, huge and certain and punishing and as much a part of me as an organ.
“Molly?” Seth says hoarsely.
I shake my head. Tears are running down my cheeks.
When people talk to you with that sound in their voice, and you are at fault and you can’t make it better, there is no recovering.
“Please,” I say, backing away.
He stops moving. He looks like he’s going to fall over. He braces one hand against a bookshelf.
“It’s okay, Molls,” he says, in a voice that makes it clear that it is not okay, will never be okay. “I get it.”
But it doesn’t matter if he does because the no is getting bigger, enveloping me like it’s a sleeping bag I’m zipped inside, suffocating me.
I need Seth to hold me, hug me, settle me down, make this go away.
But he can’t. He’s the reason I can’t breathe.
I crouch down, gasping.
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Seth rushes over to me and gets on his knees and puts his hands firmly on my shoulders. “Molls,” he says urgently. “Look at me.”
His eyes are filled with kindness.
Jesus, I don’t deserve him. I never did.
“Baby, you don’t have to panic. Everything’s fine.”
I shake my head, unable to speak.
“You’re doing the thing,” he says soothingly. “The bolting thing. And you don’t have to. You’re safe with me.”
But he’s making the wrong assumption. He’s thinking that I don’t already know what’s causing this panic. That when I see the pattern, I’ll calm down. He’s imagining I’ve grown. That I can believe what he says about safety.
But I can’t. My heart is thirteen years old, and I can’t.
“I am doing it,” I say, through my tears. “You know me so well.”
He lets out a ragged laugh. “Yeah. I do. And that’s why—”
I cut him off. “And if you know me that well, then you should also know I was always going to do this. It’s just how I’m built.”
“Molly, that’s not true—”
But it is true. There is no conceivable future in which the answer to his question will be anything but no. I used to worry that he’d leave me because I’m too cynical or too mean for him, but really it’s me who is going to leave, who was always going to leave, because I love him too much to ever stop being scared.
“Stop, please,” I say. “Please. Let’s not drag this out.”
“Don’t talk to me like that,” he says sharply, like the words are being excavated from his soul. “We can take all the time you need. Fuck, Molly, I’m sorry. I timed it wrong, I see that, I understand, but you don’t have to answer right now.”
