His lashes flutter as he stares down at me, chin tucked to his chest. His crown of leaves starts to teeter to the side, but it must snag on his messy black hair because it doesn’t fall.

“Will?

I grin up at him. “Only on one condition?”

“Yeah?”

“Neither of us can die.”

A horn blares, sling-shotting me back to the present.

Fuck. I...I haven’t thought about that day in a really, really long time. The memory now is as vivid as if it just happened.

Him and that stupid, depressing book...

Not that it changes anything. Remembering. It was all a lie, anyway. Everything we shared.

It shouldn’t be that fucking surprising even his dreams of running away were nothing more than empty words, just like everything else he said and did back then.

I clench hard on my molars and shove away the little voice trying to deny it.

“Then why did you?”

I blink and look up at Waylon. “Huh?”

He’s toeing at the grate under his feet, head hanging in front of him. He peeks at me through his lashes. “Why did you come back here?”

My mouth opens, but nothing comes out. I anticipated this question, but it’s like a hand has me by the neck. Squeezing and preventing everything I’d planned on saying from escaping.

The excuse I gave my parents.

The vague mish-mash of truths I gave Mason earlier, and then to Reggie.

The spiral of bullshit rationalizations I’ve been mentally circling about since I made the decision to not just visit but stay. Stay in Shiloh, Pennsylvania.

There are a handful of reasons I could give him that are sure to pass as believable, and yet...

It’s all fucking jammed in my throat.

His gaze finds mine once more when I take too long to respond, and that powerless feeling from earlier returns. Trapping me in that dizzying place between then and now, as I lose myself in the eyes of the first boy who ever broke my heart. The boy I’ve now spent far more time and energy than I ever planned to spend in a single night trying to figure the fuck out.

It’s as if he pulls the truth from the deepest, roughest part of me.

“I don’t know where else to go.”

The words fumble past my lips before I even realize what I’m saying. Crickets and sad guitar notes fill the void left in the wake of my words—in the wake of all that’s unspoken.

He straightens almost imperceptibly, limbs rigid. His hazel eyes glitter with questions—with something akin to pain as he stares warily back at me.

My swallow goes down like a bag of rocks, and I force my throat to clear as I tear my eyes away. “I can’t go back, okay? I needed out.”

I was suffocating.