Chapter 25 Chapter 25

Chapter 25 Chapter 25


He pulled up at seven exactly, black car, engine low and quiet, the kind of car that suited him, nothing flashy, nothing that asked for attention. I was on my front step when he arrived. Jacket on, bag in my lap, the cold air doing its usual job of making everything feel slightly more manageable than it had indoors.

I got in.

He didn't ask how I was.

He didn't ask what happened.

He just looked at me once, a quick, reading look that told him whatever he needed to know and then he pulled out of the street and drove.

I did not know where we were going.

I did not ask.

The car was warm. The kind of warm that came from the heater running for a while before you got in, so it was already settled and not the aggressive kind that hit you in the face. There was something quiet playing through the speakers not a song I recognized, just something low and steady that took up the right amount of space.

I looked out the window.

Silver Ridge moved past. Streets I had known my whole life, the corner with the florist that had closed last year, the hill where Chloe and I used to race our bikes in sixth grade, the gate of Westfield where everything had started to change and shift and become this new shape I was still getting used to.

Chloe had known.

I had not let myself think it in those words yet. I had let it sit at the edge she knew, she was involved, she made a choice but I had not said the full sentence to myself until right now, in this car, watching Silver Ridge pass outside the window.

Chloe had known.

The ten years were still there. The trellis and the window-knocks and the vanilla perfume and the way she tucked her legs under her when she was feeling something large. That was still real. You could not make ten years not real.

But she had known.

And she had held my hand at the vanity while she was part of the reason I needed holding.

My throat tightened.

I had promised myself I was not going to do this. Not in front of him. I had been holding it together through every version of this , through the locker room and the garden and the library and the corridor today and the eleven minutes in the bathroom. I had been holding it for weeks through will and cold water and the stone floor place inside me that had no windows.

My throat tightened again.

I pressed my hand flat against the door panel. Cold, like the fence. The cold helped.

"Breathe," Jax said. Quiet.

"I am breathing."

"You're doing the thing where you breathe around it instead of through it."

I opened my mouth to argue. Something came out that was not an argument. Something that was somewhere between a breath and a sound and neither of them was as controlled as I needed it to be.

Jax said nothing.

He kept driving.

The streets changed less familiar now, more open, the spaces between buildings getting wider as we moved out of the town's center and up the road that curved toward the ridge that Silver Ridge had been named after. The hill. The actual hill, not the school.

Ten minutes later he pulled off the road onto a flat stretch of gravel that had been a viewing point at some point, there was an old wooden post where a sign had been, long since taken down. Below and ahead, the whole of Silver Ridge spread out in the dark. Every light, every street, every building I had grown up inside. The school in the center. The rooftop where Jax had first sat on the broken railing and looked like he had nowhere better to be.

He turned the engine off.

Not the heat. Just the engine.

The music stopped.

The quiet was the kind that happened far from roads thick and real and completely indifferent to anything either of us was carrying.

I looked at the town below.

"Chloe knew," I said. Out loud. The first time.

Jax said nothing.

"She went after Jax after you," I corrected, "because Liam asked her to. To keep me distracted. He offered her an internship." My voice was even. Steady. The performance still running out of habit. "Ten years. She's been my person for ten years and she looked me in the face every day for months and…"

My voice cracked.

Just once. At the end of the sentence. Like something that had held as long as it could and then finally gave at the place where it was thinnest.

I pressed my lips together.

Jax turned slightly in the driver's seat. Not to look at me. Not to say something. He just shifted so his shoulder was toward me in the dark and his arm moved and rested on the back of my seat. Not around me. Just there. Near.

Present.

The warmth of him on my right side. The wide, indifferent dark in front.

Something in my chest cracked open the rest of the way.

Nothing fell apart in the dramatic way it happened in films, nothing that looked like a storm. It was smaller than that, the quiet collapse of something that had been holding too much for too long and had finally run out of room.

My shoulders came down.

My face let go.

And I sat in the passenger seat of Jax's car above Silver Ridge and the thing I had been walking around the edges of for weeks finally moved through me, not just the Chloe of it, not just the Liam of it, but all of it together, the whole accumulated weight of performing and pretending and making myself small and calling it perfect.

Jax did not say it's okay.

He did not say she doesn't deserve you or you're better than this or any of the things people said that were meant to comfort but mostly just made the person saying them feel useful.

He sat beside me in the dark and he was warm and present and completely quiet and he let it happen without making it about him at all.

After a while he said. "See that ledge at the far end of the viewing point?"

I looked up. Wiped my face with the back of my hand. There was a small raised ledge of stone at the edge of the gravel, maybe twenty feet away, where the hill began its drop.

"Yes," I said.

"Walk over to it," he said. "Lean over the edge as far as you're comfortable. And scream."

I looked at him.

His face was completely serious.

"Jax."

"Not for anyone. Not at anyone." He held my eyes. "Just to get it out of your body. Some things are too big to think your way out of. You have to move them out."

I looked at the ledge.

I looked at the town below.

I got out of the car.

I walked to the ledge. The wind hit me immediately, stronger up here than down in the streets, cutting and cold and real. I stood at the edge and I looked down at Silver Ridge — every light, every building, every person who thought they knew exactly who Sienna Cole was — and I took one breath.

And I screamed just sound. From somewhere below my ribs, below the stone floor, below the place where I kept everything I had been refusing to feel. Raw and long and completely private in the wide dark above a town that couldn't hear it.

When it was done the wind took it.

I stood at the ledge breathing hard.

Behind me I heard the car door open. Jax came and stood beside me, just standing, both of us looking down at the lights and he didn't say anything about the scream or the crying or my perfect relationship or any of it.

He just stood there.

"Better?" he said finally.

I breathed in.

Out.

"A little," I said honestly.

He nodded.

We stood there for a while in the dark above Silver Ridge.

Neither of us needed to say anything else but I can say I'm feeling intense toward Jax.