The Boy and His Ribbon (The Ribbon Duet 1)

I’m sure you can probably imagine.

Maybe I should just let you imagine and not finish. My heart is done. I’m drained. I’m tired. I’ve been tired for far too long, and this is just ripping me into pieces.

All I know is, I can’t write what happened in the forest.

All I can tell you is it was the best time of my life. It makes me miss him with a clawing, violent need that drives me mad. The freedom of living day to day. The joy at starlit nights full of talking and the lazy mornings with chirping birds.

It was total innocence.

Maybe one day, I’ll be able to write a short story on the afternoons that stand out or try to describe the rose-coloured happiness and sun-warmed bliss we lived in. Maybe, I’ll do a poem or haiku on how my love evolved all over again from crush to tenderness to fevered yearning.

Or maybe I won’t.

Either way, it doesn’t change how wonderful those few months were.

Ren and I found our way back to each other, and I wish, wish, wish we could’ve stayed in the trees and never come out. I’ve cried myself to sleep more times than I can count to stay in that joyful place and never slip into the Della I became.

But…it happened.

Winter found us, ice crept toward us, and snow drove us from our heaven back to hell.

And the stopwatch started ticking, inching me closer to the day when I would be alone.

The day when Ren would walk out of my life.

The day when everything would be broken.

Because I’m still here…alone…writing this sorry excuse of a story, pretending I can conjure him from nothing, desperately loving a memory, and killing myself with the knowledge that no matter how much I write about him. No matter what tales I tell you or secrets I spill, he’s not going to be there to tell me off. He’s not going to scold me for telling the truth. He’s not going to notice or care.

I no longer need to pretend I don’t love him.

I don’t need to lie that I don’t want him.

Can you guess why?

I’ve been lying to you, too, didn’t you know?

I made you believe he stuck by me. That he would never abandon me no matter what disasters I caused.

But that is another lie.

Probably the biggest one.

Because Ren Wild…he’s gone.

He left me.

And he’s never coming back.

CHAPTER FORTY-NINE

REN

* * * * * *

2015

FOR TWO YEARS, things were back to normal.

It was just me and Della against the world, but I wouldn’t lie and say I didn’t think about what had happened between us.

Della had shown me two sides of herself in those few days that I hadn’t seen before or since. Sure, there’d been a few incidents in the forest: a few heated looks, an early morning embrace that had been instinct and not thought, and even a couple of fierce arguments.

But we’d ironed out the kinks and found a new acceptable.

As time went on, problems were few and far between.

And that worried me.

Della had revealed she wasn’t just the simple blonde angel I’d raised and adored, but a girl with evolving needs; a trickster who could hide behind a mask and successfully keep her secrets.

Lately, she’d been too amenable—none of her usual fire or willingness to get into trouble for speaking her mind. But no matter how many times I caught myself studying her and no matter how often I tensed in her embraces, there was never anything more to her affection. No tension or undercurrent.

Just natural, sinless love.

It was the same as it had always been: given freely, kindly, wholeheartedly, but most of all, purely with no underlying contraband.

Her smiles were innocently genuine.

Her touches appropriately platonic.

I did my best to relax, but no matter how normal things became between us, I couldn’t let it go. A niggle was always there, searching her actions and tones, knowingly putting a barrier between us that I didn’t want.

She knew the wall was there, just like I did.

But we never addressed it, never tried to bulldoze it, and as time marched on, we learned to live with it. We accepted that the wariness would never fully dissolve and had become a fracture in our otherwise perfect relationship.

I hated it.

I hated that I’d lost the child I loved with all my heart and been traded a girl who had the terrifying capacity to destroy me.

Maybe it was all in my mind.

Perhaps the late-night dreams of phantom kisses with a woman I couldn’t claim was turning me mad. Maybe I’d been ruined all along and that was why I could never give myself to Cassie.

Whatever caused my vigilance, I never found any reason to be suspicious.

Guilt drowned me because how could I pretend to trust Della, when night after night, I was waiting to catch her? And catch her in what, exactly? A confession that she actually loved me in a completely different way to what was allowed? A hint that she felt just as scrambled and confused as I did and couldn’t find her way back to innocence?