"No, I flew on a magical carpet. Of course I drove here."
r /> "You shouldn't have," he walks toward me but stops abruptly a foot in front of the armchair on the other side of the table. "You're exhausted. What if something happened to you?"
"You'd care?"
"Of course," he exclaims, throwing his hands in the air.
I stare at him, confused. And maybe it's the confusion, or the inexplicable wisp of hope that blooms in my chest, but asking the dreaded question isn't as daunting as I feared. Still, it doesn't come out stronger than a whisper.
"Then why did you break up with me?"
He clasps the back of the armchair with both hands and stares at the metallic contour with an uneasy frown.
"I'm not good for you, Serena."
Not the answer I was expecting. It's not even an answer really, but the bloom of hope explodes in a thousand tiny drops of relief at his words. It wasn't because of something that I did after all.
"Why don't you let me be the judge of that?"
He snorts. "Because I had a taste of how our life together would be, and you wouldn't put up with it for very long. Not that I'd blame you."
"What are you talking about?"
"The scene with Parker."
"What about it? We discussed it and put it behind us."
He shakes his head energetically. "No, we didn't. That's not how it works."
"That's not how what works? Stop acting like a crazy person and tell me what's going on."
Silence. I don't know how many minutes pass before he asks quietly, "Do you want to know how Lara died?"
Wham.
A punch square in my chest wouldn't cut my breath short the way his words do. I can't form any kind of answer but he goes on anyway.
"We'd been dating for most of high school. I wasn't the best of boyfriends. I was… let's say extremely jealous is a mild way to put it. We fought constantly. Especially our senior year—things turned really, really ugly. She wanted to go to Harvard, even though she'd been accepted to Stanford as well, and I was trying to change her mind by any means. The fight on graduation day was the worst of all. She said I made her life a living hell and took off in the car her parents gave her as a graduation present. She never showed up at the graduation ceremony."
He takes a deep breath and I clasp my palms to fists, my nails cutting into the flesh, because I think I know what will follow.
"The police found her a few hours later. She had crashed into a tree with the car."
I jerk up straight, covering my mouth with both hands. "That wasn't your fault, James," I whisper through my fingers.
"Wasn't it? The police didn't rule out the possibility that she might have crashed… willingly."
Torment and despair, in depths the likes of which I plunged myself during my darkest days, plague his voice. And his gaze. A painful knot forms in my throat when he finally looks up at me.
"She could've just lost control of her car. It happens to so many teens."
"Maybe. But even if she did, it's still my fault. She was so upset when she left."
So that's why he can't let go. It's the same reason I can't.
Guilt.
It consumes him still … for all the things he did.