“Do you love me, Savannah?”

She didn’t say anything for a long time then, as though it was a secret or something to be ashamed of, she whispered, “Yes.”

And I didn’t even feel joy, because I knew, looking at her, that she wished she didn’t.

“God, listen to you,” I said, wanting to laugh. Wanting, actually, to scream. “The only person on the planet who thinks love is bad.”

“It’s not bad,” she said. “It hurts. I know you don’t think you’ll hurt me, but you will. It’s what people do. It’s unavoidable.”

“Do you believe me when I say that I’ll be back?”

Savannah licked her lips, her shoulders straight. “I believe that right now you mean it.”

“I don’t know how to convince you,” I said. “What can I do?”

Savannah blinked and blinked again, silent and damning. She would never believe me. She would never be convinced of my love.

Suddenly it dawned on me, what the rest of my life would be like if I returned to her.

“Every day would be a test,” I said. “I could come back, move in. Start my life over with you. But it wouldn’t be enough, because every day you’d be expecting me to walk out. Every day I would have to prove myself to you.”

She looked down at her hands, and a big fat tear splotched across her knuckle. “Please come back,” she said. “Please. I will try, I really will. I will try to trust—”

I was overwhelmed by an anger and a heartache so big I almost collapsed under its weight. “No, Savannah,” I whispered. “I won’t. I can’t.”

Her eyes, blue and wounded, flew to mine. “Wh-what?”

“I can’t give you faith,” I said. “I can’t make you have it, or force you to feel it. You’ve got to do that part on your own, Savannah. If you love me, really love me and want to spend your life with me the way I want to spend my life with you, you have to have faith in me. In you. Us. You have to come to me, otherwise we’re doomed.”

My hands fumbled as I pulled out my wallet and dug out a card. I took her hand, memorizing the fine long fingers, the calluses across her palm that she’d gotten working alongside me. I pressed the card into her palm then dropped her hand. Another minute and I wouldn’t go. Another second and I’d do this her way and we’d never have a chance.

“I’ll be waiting, Savannah,” I whispered.

And before I lost the strength to walk away, I left. I left my bag. My clothes. My heart. Everything.

I had my wallet, the keys to my car and the clothes on my back.

I’ll never see her again, I thought and wanted to die.

SAVANNAH

It was the last day of summer school and I watched from my post at the returns desk as Owen’s former girlfriend, The Cheerleader, got cozy under Garrett’s arm.

Garrett had a black eye that was fading to yellow and Owen had made friends with some new kids on the other side of the computer bank. New kids who were eyeing me over their screens.

“I heard he killed a guy,” one of them whispered. “It was an accident, but still.”

“He’s like some hotshot architect or something. He was just pretending to be a gardener.”

“Shut up.” Garrett sneered. “Like Ms. O’Neill’s got a boyfriend. Give me a break.”

Shut up indeed, I thought, trying hard to block out the whispers as well as any thought of Matt. It was like a small electric shock every time I allowed a memory of his touch, or his laugh, or the look in those green eyes when he said he wouldn’t be back, to flicker through my head.

I was tired, so tired of resisting the pain.

Particularly when it all hurt anyway.

“Don’t you listen to what they say,” Janice whispered, bringing a pile of books from the oak tables to the desk for reshelving. “They’re a bunch of foul-mouthed jerks.”

“It’s true,” I said in a clear speaking voice that sounded like machine-gun fire in the hushed atmosphere of the library.

Janice dropped the books.

“All of it.” I kept talking, driven by some need to protect Matt from the fate I was drowning in. My eyes met the astonished eyes of the high school kids. “Every single thing you’ve ever whispered about me, totally true.”

“Savannah.” Janice tugged on my arm. “Maybe lower your voice.”

“No!” I said and the echo was so nice. So loud and hard and cold.

“You’re having some kind of psychotic break,” Janice said and I laughed, the sound rolling and rolling and rolling through the library, filling the corners with its hysteria.

“Probably,” I said. “I am an O’Neill, after all. I slept with a married man and my mother is a thief and liar. My brother is a gambler and my grandmother—” I turned to Janice “—what would you call my grandmother?”

Tags: Molly O'Keefe Notorious Romance
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