“Well, Adam still does all the things he used to do,” she finally said. “Party. Let loose. Get into trouble here and there. He didn’t go cold turkey like you.”
“Well, that’s just how I do things,” I said, because it was true.
All my life, I’d only ever lived at extremes.
All or nothing. Now or never. I didn’t know any other way.
The slight tension was palpable in the room as Holland eyed me closely, her gaze dropping from my mouth to my neck to my chest as she played with the ends of her hair. It was the look she got when she had a question brewing.
“Why didn’t you get arrested too that day?” she finally asked.
I paused, only just realizing that she knew about that night.
Then again maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised, since it happened in Jersey.
Adam and I were at the Maxwell house for Thanksgiving. We’d found a closed road in the midst of a night out and chalked it up to the speed demon in us when we decided to race. I was in his car, he was in our friend’s, and we had each other on speaker as we trash talked each other to over a hundred miles an hour.
“When we heard the siren, your brother laughed,” I said as I remembered the day. “He said ‘fuck’ and then he pulled over.”
Holland nodded. “And what did you do?” she asked, a little frown pinched between her eyebrows. I kept my stare pinned tight on her as I answered.
“I went faster.”
Her eyebrows moved and I watched as she processed the fact that I wasn’t in fact the same as her brother.
I was worse.
And thinking back on it now, I could admit that I had lied to myself. Our law school friends didn’t even know the extent of shit that Adam and I got into, but when they debated whose Speed Demon was worse, they were accurate, and their lack of a verdict didn’t mean there wasn’t an answer. Because there was.
Maxwell’s strikes more often, but Thorn’s does more damage, our friend Caleb would say. A fuckton more.
The room was silent and still as I remembered those words. A thousand memories flashed behind our eyes as Holland and I gazed at each other, but the only actual movement came in the warm flickering of the candles in the corners of our vision, one on her nightstand, the other on the desk.
“Do you miss doing these things?” she asked to break the silence. “Getting that adrenaline rush?”
“Probably.”
“What does that mean?”
“That I don’t let myself think about it.”
“Huh.” She nodded slowly, eyeing me. Reading me.
Which was fine, because now I wanted her to.
I kept this part of myself hidden away, a secret from everyone in my life. Clients. Friends. Even Adam and I didn’t talk about it anymore. But I wanted Holland to know now. I needed her to understand because as much as I wanted it—as much as a part of me felt like I needed it—it hurt to have her looking at me the way that she did.
With adoration. All her heart.
“Is that why you keep yourself so busy?” she asked. “To bury the old feelings?”
“Yes,” I said, watching her nod slowly, the understanding washing over her. Because now she knew why I’d been gone from her life for the past five years.
While she was working hard to fix herself the right way, I was working just as hard to do it wrong.
To bury everything deep.
I didn’t think twice about it at the time. I just needed to erase the old me however I could, and considering the urgency, I’d never once regretted the way I went about it. Until Holland. Until I saw the good she’d done for herself. All the hard work she’d put in. It made me wish for the first time that I’d done things the right way. The way that she did.