In my head, I saw it: the way it almost went.
Teddy didn’t scream—didn’t cry out for help, or loose a wordless, terrified shriek on the way down. He fell, silent, and if his body made a noise when he hit the rocks, I couldn’t hear it over Ben’s wretched wail.
We reached the wall as the river took him, saw it pitch his crooked, broken limbs against the cliff face, until the current sucked him under. Until the sky split open, bathing us in light. He was gone before my voice ran out.
That’s how it could’ve happened, had my cousin been even one step farther from the wall.
Ben was a blur of adrenaline and reaching hands, catching fistfuls of Teddy’s shirt. He lost his grip almost instantly, rocked backward onto his ass. I tripped over him, scrambled the rest of the way on my knees as Teddy fell sideways instead of backward. He landed hard on top of the wall, and I caught his arm, pulled with all my strength, anchoring him as he clung to the rocks. Barely registered Ben beside me once more, hauling him the rest of the way to safety.
We lay in a pile at the foot of the wall; me on my back, Teddy’s shoulder digging into my ribs, one of Ben’s legs crushing my arm. Teddy sat up slowly, taking inventory of his injuries—bruised palms and skinned elbows, forearms scraped raw and bloody. T-shirt speckled red, too, from a long, nasty scrape across his torso. His face was wild, eyes wide, skin drenched in rain. Still breathing.
Still here.
“Fuck, that’ll hurt in the morning.” It came out as a laugh, twisted and torn. Profane in a way unrelated to the word itself. “Everyone okay?”
“Okay? I should throw you over that goddamn wall myself.” Ben clambered to his knees, fingers crooked and clawing at his own flushed face. “You trying to get killed up there?”
“Nah, I’m solid. Good thing you work out, though, Benny. If Ames had grabbed me, I’d probably have dragged her right off the edge.”
“You’re joking now. Fuck you.” And that was the swan song of Ben’s coherency as he hunched forward, braced his hands against the marshy earth. Gasped for air through the wind and rain, bent double in the grip of a full-blown panic attack. Something caught in my gut like a fishhook, slammed the hatch on my heart and spun the wheel, locking down the threat of tears. Smoothed my features into tranquil brushstrokes as if there was nothing wrong at all.
God, but we were broken.
Teddy scraped himself off the grass, crawled over my prone form. He was on his knees, hands on Ben’s hands, then on his shoulders, lifting him upright. Pulling him out of the mud and out of his head.
“Hey. It’s okay, man. You’re okay. Count it out.”
He nodded along with the rise and fall of Ben’s chest, counting to three over and over. Ben regained composure long enough to smack his hand away.
“Get off me. You need your fucking head checked, dude.”
“It was an accident, okay? And anyway, look at that water—this is the deepest part of the river for miles in both directions. Even if I had gone in, worst case I’d swim until the shoreline starts and crawl out there.”
“No—worst case, you’d die. You’d die, and then what?”
“Ben, stop,” I said, putting myself in between their familiar glares—the same fury of that day last summer etched across both their faces. As if we’d returned to the cove to find that moment lying on the ground, picked it up and polished it off, carried it up the hill to start the scene again, exactly where it ended. I shook the hair out of my eyes, tried to make my voice louder than the wind. “He’s okay—it’s fine. Everything will be—”
“It’s not fine. In fact, I’d say it’s pretty damn far from fine, wouldn’t you, Teddy? What do you think would happen to Amy if she lost you? What do you think would happen to me?”
“To you? If I died? Christ.” He sat back on his heels. “There’s not a damn thing on earth you can’t somehow make all about Benny, is there?”
“It’s not about me,” Ben howled. “It’s not, don’t you get it, asshole? It’s always, always been—”
His words ran into wheezes once more, but this time he didn’t double over. Instead, his fist flew in a wide arc, catching Teddy on the shoulder. Instead, he scrambled up and took off, heading for the house—my cousin, bent and shattered. Rushing away from us in a gust of rain.
I didn’t realize how drenched I was until I stood. My shorts were muddy, my hoodie soaked through. My hair was string plastered to my cheeks. Teddy was still on his knees, looking even more bedraggled than I felt. He stared into the distance—not at Ben’s retreating form, but past the wall, over the river. His mouth worked at the corners, fixed itself into a neutral line as he climbed to his feet.
“We’d better get back.”
He motioned to me to tag along, picked his way across the lawn and into the woods. I followed in a daze, ground my knuckles into my stinging eyes, wanting nothing more than to scratch away the almost—Teddy, slipping from Ben’s grip. Tilting backward instead of forward. Disappearing and dying, over and over, no matter how I tried to push it down.
What if. What if.
My feet drifted off the path, stumbled over the roots of a gnarled oak tree. I pressed my shaking palms against the trunk, letting the rough, soggy bark dig into my flesh. His footsteps paused, then doubled back.
“Ames, you okay? Oh God. Don’t cry.”
“No, I’m not fucking ‘okay.’ You can’t keep doing this shit like nothing matters.”
“I know. I’m sorry.” His arms crept around my rigid form from behind and pulled me into a soft, careful hug. I sagged against him, felt his grip tighten, like he couldn’t draw me close enough. “It’s fine, City Girl. I’m safe.”
My sigh chased the shiver that raced across my skin. I turned in his arms to face him, reaching up to tuck a string of soggy hair behind his ear. Wondering how the world had managed to get so utterly fucked.
“You’d better be—I need you to be safe, Teddy. I need you.”
“Amy.”
My name was an anvil, flat and heavy, iron cold. His arms went slack then fell away, leaving me to stand on my own.
I hadn’t meant that the way it sounded. I’d meant to reassure him, at most. Let him know that he was important, and I was here—that he didn’t have to claw through hell alone. Instead I’d flayed the skin from my own facade, in a way that opened the worst of his wounds. To even acknowledge my own wishes at this point was unthinkable.
“Never mind,” I said, wincing at the sting of heat across my rain-chilled face. “What I meant, was—”
“I think we need to… move past all that.”
I blinked up at him, realization rushing in, tugging me off my feet. Dragging me beneath the surface of his careful gaze. His eyes shifted past me, drained down to a deliberate blankness. My mouth opened and closed, seeking words that never managed to form. I backed up until my shoulder blades met the tree trunk, then slipped past him and stalked away so he couldn’t see my face collapse. He followed, of course, stepped into my path, his hands on my shoulders stilling my feet.
“Ames, wait. You’re my best friend. That’s the only thing that matters anymore.” He grimaced around the words, squeezed his eyes shut and breathed through a surge of grief. “You’re all I have. If we try for more and it falls apart, or if Ben blows up again—didn’t you hear what he said up there? That goes all the way around the circle. I can’t lose you guys, not now. You can’t ask me to take that chance.”
“I wasn’t asking you to.” I fixed my gaze on his, determined to be what he needed. To bleed, if I had to, as long as we were okay. “It came out wrong, is all, and I just—”
“It doesn’t matter. I won’t risk it.”
Silence pulled between us, heavy and long, broken by the steady spatter of rain on leaves. A damp wind stirred the branches overhead, lifted wisps of his hair, stung my nose with the sharp, green bite of mangled grass. We’d all but buried what we’d had. My eyes burned at the thought of sifting through the broken bits, scavenging a future from the wreck of what we’d become.
“So there’s no chance, ever,” I said, resenting the flat, hollow thud that was my voice. Hating every word that left my mouth. “Even after everything that happened before.”
A question that wasn’t a question. It flexed its claws and hooked in, refusing to pass unanswered. A bitter laugh escaped him, scattered at our feet like broken glass.
“My sister was alive before.”
And that was it, really—the starting point, for the rest of forever. That irreversible shift of the world. How selfish was I, to let even an accidental flutter in my heart manifest in real time? How pitiful, to ask anything of him, or think for a second I was more than a blur in his periphery.
A raindrop fell from his nose, landed on my lips, and I drew back, let the storm blow into the space between us. He gave my shoulder a final, perfunctory squeeze as he brushed past me, resuming his trek downhill. It should’ve been easy enough to retreat—to sever myself from that voice and that heart, and the way it never stopped working its way into mine. It should’ve been so simple to just keep breathing.
“If you don’t want me, I’m not about to beg,” I burst out, throwing the last fuck I had to give straight into the blustering wind. “I just need to know—is this really how it is now, Teddy?”
My words stopped him. I didn’t turn around but saw him anyway: saw his shoulders tense and square; saw his head drop and his hands clench into fists. I steeled myself, then pivoted, took a step toward him as he turned back, his face a puzzle of regret and affection, pain and defeat. The edge of the universe lay sharp beneath my toes; one misplaced step or careless word would send us both hurtling over it, falling away from each other into nothing.
If he let me, I knew I could catch him. If he reached for me, I’d never, ever let him go.
“I don’t know how it is,” he finally said, voice breaking. Sweeping me over that edge as it dropped to a mutter. “Unfortunately, falling short of expectations is sort of my thing.”
I watched him leave me, took in the contrast of his bare arms against the soft, worn white of his shirt; the wet strands of dark hair, the way they clung to his work-hardened shoulders. Not one of the banal, well-heeled boys at school would ever look like that. No gilt-edged prodigy would ever map his life by the lines of his body, or tear open my world with a glance.
I stayed where I was and listened to him walk away, every step a boot print on my own crumbling heart.