CHAPTER 12

 

 

why do the waves

always come back

only to be sent away again?

the anticipation of the kiss

will always call it home

an innocently addictive amen

-Tessa and Unknown (Kip)

 

 

 

KIP

 

It had been inevitable—her finding out.

But he didn’t have anyone to blame except himself for how it all happened.

For shit’s sake, he’d even left all the incriminating evidence right out in the open. He may as well have just handed it to her when she’d walked through the door.

He picked up his phone and shut off the music.

Heavy regret landed on his chest and he fought to breathe through it.

She couldn’t possibly know how important she was to him.

Had always been.

Which is why he’d raided all his old notebooks last night. His heart was having difficulty with the separate memories and he needed to balance them. The girl he’d crushed on so heavily in his youth—the romantic embellishment of a young man fighting death.

And the woman of his present.

The heaviness in his chest increased and he closed his eyes.

He should have known he wouldn’t be able to keep them both.

 

***

 

TESSA

 

The lock turned and Tessa wiped at the tears on her cheeks as Spencer walked through the door.

Spencer stopped when her eyes hit Tessa seated on the couch—a glass of wine in one hand, red eyes, and Taylor Swift singing through the speakers.

She dropped her bag on the floor and allowed the door to swing shut behind her.

“Who did this to you?” Spencer’s voice dropped to a deadly calm. “Was it Kip?”

Tessa forced a watery smile. “I’m okay.”

Spencer’s eyebrows shut up and she blinked once. “Red wine and Taylor Swift? You think I’m new here?”

Tessa huffed a half-laugh half-sob as she cast her eyes to the ceiling to keep more tears from spilling out.

“I’m such a disaster.”

“No,” Spencer corrected firmly. “You’re not. Now tell me who made you feel this way so that I can make them pay.”

Tessa rolled her eyes and they landed on her best friend. “C’mon, Spence. You know it better than anyone. I am a straight up danger to myself.”

Spencer licked her lips and took a deep breath, her initial anger melting away, before crossing the room and joining her on the couch. She sat sideways and folded her legs beneath herself.

“How about you walk me through it?” she suggested softly.

That was exactly what Tessa wanted to avoid.

“How about no?”

Spencer’s gentle smile was all it took for the tears to begin anew.

Tessa took a few calming breaths and a bolstering swallow of wine.

“Do you remember in high school…the anonymous poet I…?” Irrationally fell in love with?

“Had a brain crush on?” Spencer finished. “I remember.”

Tessa nodded. Of course she did.

“Kip.” Tessa shrugged. “It was Kip.”

When Spencer didn’t answer for a full minute, Tessa glanced her direction.

“Wow,” Spencer finally murmured.

“Yep.”

Taylor Swift sang through one more verse and Tessa sighed.

“Also, we kissed tonight.”

Spencer’s blue eyes darted to Tessa’s, her eyebrows raised in an unspoken question.

“And it was incredible,” Tessa said, her voice breaking at the end as more tears spilled out. “And then I found out who he was—or is.” She shook her head in frustration.

“Did—” Spencer stopped, as if trying to ask the right question. “Did he know who he was, er, is?”

That was the issue wasn’t it? Did Kip know who he was to her?

“He knew it was me.”

Spencer’s eye twitched and Tessa knew why. Because it wasn’t really the answer to her question. But it was the answer that she had.

“Also,” Tessa added. “He played a song for me and said that album always reminds him of me.”

Spencer sucked in a breath. “Have you—?”

“Downloaded it and begun the traditional masochistic obsessive listening ritual? Not yet.”

Spencer rubbed her hand across her forehead. “I’m gonna need wine.” She rose and made a beeline for the kitchen to get a glass. “I’ll order us pizza. Get it fired up, babe.”

“Yes, dear.” Tessa set her wine on the side table so she could use her phone with both hands.

Stuffed crust pizza and red wine.

The key ingredients to any emotional flogging. And Spencer knew without even being told.

So what if she was lying about seeing Bo earlier. It seemed so petty in comparison to who Spencer was and always would be to Tessa.

She had her back.

She had her heart.

And you couldn’t buy loyalty like that.

As Tessa cued up the album Andrew McMahon In the Wilderness, Spencer returned with a full glass of wine and a fresh bottle, which she used to refill Tessa’s glass.

As shattered as Tessa’s heart felt in the moment, she was also immensely grateful for the friends she’d been gifted.

She could count on one hand the number of people in her life who cared for her and the state of her heart. Even when she didn’t make sense. Even when her method of emoting seemed counterproductive. Her people loved her through it.

It made her wonder who Kip relied on for his strength.

Anyone?

As far as she could tell, none of his friends knew about his health issues. And he hadn’t ever mentioned being close to his family.

Was his writing the only the way he could express his deeper fears and thoughts?

She dropped her chin to her chest.

Here she was, trying to feel sorry for herself, and all her instincts pointed her to empathizing with Kip instead of being mad at him.

Truth was, she wasn’t mad at all.

Confused. Scared. Embarrassed.

Those were the cycling emotions.

He knew more about her and her heart than she had realized. There was a certain amount of vulnerability she hadn’t been ready to share with him yet, but he’d already had all her weak spots in the palm of his hand.

All he would’ve had to do was clench his fist and crush her.

It had been a terrifying realization.

Especially the part where her heart cried out that it was safe. That being crushed in the palm of his hand would be a glorious and noble way to die.

Which was why she’d had to leave. Her heart was often a super-idiot which needed more protection than a kitten caught in a blue wildebeest stampede.

Spencer reached over and laced her fingers together with Tessa’s. The connection settled her racing thoughts.

“Did you flee?” Spencer asked.

“Like I was on fire.”

Spencer’s one glass turned into two and Tessa finished the bottle. They listened to the album several times through and each time the lyrics made more sense than the time before.

He’d been trying to tell her.

Since that first day when he’d chased her out of yoga class, he’d been trying to find the words to say but just hadn’t yet.

“Are you going to go back?” Spencer asked as they lay on the living room floor in the dark.

“Yeah.”

“Good.”

 

***

 

TESSA

 

 

She didn’t even bother with the front door. She walked around the side of the house and headed for the beach.

Her lips twisted to one side as she chewed on the inside of her cheek, her thoughts mostly blank, her heart beating like she was walking into a warzone.

She wasn’t sure what she was going to say to him yet. She hadn’t planned anything out.

When his silhouette came into view, she slowed her pace. Her chest constricted, or at least seemed to, and emotion crawled up the back of her throat to her eyes.

Kip’s lean frame flowed smoothly into the next asana and she almost smiled.

How she knew he’d be on the beach reaching for sunlight that early in the morning was more instinct than actual knowledge.

She took a seat on the blanket nearby and waited patiently.

It didn’t take long for Kip to notice her presence.

His motion paused as his green eyes flicked over her. The light breeze ruffled his thick dark hair and Tessa’s insides ached.

She wanted to run her fingers through that mess and find the tangles, untie them, and feel them come apart in her hands.

The notion should have startled her. But it didn’t.

It felt right.

Kip crossed the small patch of beach between them and took a seat across from her.

“Hi,” she said.

“Hi,” he responded, a flicker of apprehension in his eyes.

“I need to tell you some things and I need you to let me get it all out.”

He nodded once.

She took a deep breath.

“That year,” she lifted her eyes to his. “The year we wrote to each other.” He nodded. “I wasn’t okay that year.”

It was hard to force the words out. To reveal such an intimate part of her soul so plainly. Spencer and Lo knew all about it because she told her girls things like that. But sharing it with someone else, anyone else, caused a lot of second-guessing and anxiety to resurface—old feelings connected to the original story.

“Growing up, I believed in true love. In my mind, my parents were soulmates and I couldn’t wait to find my prince charming. Their love was everything I hoped to achieve someday.”

She paused, because the feeling was still true, it was still there, beneath the layers of everything that came after that.

“As children we tend to gloss over the faults in our loved ones,” she said softly. “We see what we want to see, and it colors our hopes.”

Kip nodded in agreement as he took a deep breath.

She wondered if he understood because she just made sense, or if he knew in the same way she knew. She wanted to ask, but she needed to finish this first.

“It was the night before my sixteenth birthday and I woke up to the sound of glass shattering. I listened to two people who I’d believed were soulmates, shout at each other. My dad was having an affair. Another one, which was news to me. And my mom had been spending money faster than he was making it, so he’d cut off her credit cards.

“After that night it was like something had permanently broke between them. They fought constantly. Out in the open. At the dinner table. In public. It’s like they took turns trying to be the angriest. And the most justified in their anger.”

She shrugged sadly.

“I had been mostly forgotten. Except for when I could be used to hurt the other one.”

She stopped there, some of the cruel words still echoing in her mind. She waited a moment for it to pass. It didn’t hurt like it used to. But it didn’t feel good either. It was just something that had happened.

“That was the year I learned that love could be a lie.”

Kip’s posture straightened slightly and she watched recognition filter into his expression.

And it was that—that connection they had to something she hadn’t even been able to express to her best friend at the time, but had shared with a complete stranger—that had propelled her to come back today.

Because for her, that connection hadn’t been small, or random, or kind of cool. For her, it had changed everything.

She’d been on a crash course to the darkest side of the unknown when she’d found Kip.

When he’d found her.

“I know it’s so small compared to what others in this world go through,” she said quietly. “The older I get and the more I see, the more I recognize that my life wasn’t terrible. But that year broke me. Maybe that just means I’m not as strong as others, I don’t know.

“For me though, at the time, my world was crumbling. Every belief I had about love and the future was falling apart. And I had no one to talk to about it.”

She closed her eyes briefly and when she opened them, they found Kip.

“Until this anonymous person started talking to me through lines of poetry on a desk. Kip,” she sighed and shook her head once. “You have no idea—you couldn’t possibly understand what that did for me. I had been on the edge of some very dangerous thoughts and suddenly…someone was there to pull me back.”

She held his eyes for a beat.

Maybe trying to wing it hadn’t been the best idea this time. It was too big an explanation to skip through. And there was no way she was doing it right.

“Tessa—” Kip interrupted her thoughts and reached for her hand. Instead of grasping it though, he simply rested his hand palm up on her thigh.

It was a question, an invitation.

She slowly slid her hand into his and they laced their fingers together. Contact with him had become one of her favorite things and her heart responded.

“I should have told you,” he said. “I wanted to tell you it was me. I wasn’t sure at first, but once I figured it out… I was” He took a deep breath and let it out slowly. “Scared.”

“Scared?” she repeated, not expecting him to say that.

“Yeah.” His voice and mouth both flat. “Really scared.”

“Of what? Me?” She tilted her head to the side to try to catch his eye.

His hand flexed and his beautiful eyes finally met hers.

“I was afraid I’d romanticized the entire connection. And I wasn’t sure if I was ready to find that out. Which is so selfish…” he trailed off on a mumble and looked toward the sea. “I should have just told you,” he said so soft she almost didn’t hear it.

“You saved me too, you know,” he said, turning his serious gaze back on her. “That year and the things we wrote, it got me through—” he took a deep breath, but it was as if his entire soul was reliving a moment so exhausting it couldn’t be described.

“It got me through,” he said with a finality that indicated he wasn’t going to be sharing as much as she had.

Tears crawled up Tessa’s throat and she swallowed them back down.

Maybe he didn’t want to be as wordy as she did, but she needed to know a little more.

“It was important to you?” she asked, trying not to fly apart inside. “Our words? That we made together? They weren’t…just…”

Kip shook his head in answer to the question she didn’t have words for.

“But I was in a weird place back then too. And the poetry with you was different than the things I wrote on my own.” He huffed an almost-laugh. “It’s still different from the things I write.”

“You still write?” she asked, too much hope jumping into her words. “More than I saw last night?”

He rolled his lips inward and nodded once, holding her eyes.

“Can I see it?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he replied cautiously.

Her eyebrows arched at his tone. “You have more secrets,” she whispered.

He didn’t deny it and something about that made her heart jump back and forth in her chest. In a good way.

She squeezed his hand, thankful for his presence.

So much had shifted in her soul and life since he’d become a staple in it. While she wanted to know all of his secrets, she realized she’d be fine with uncovering them slowly, one at a time, for the rest of her life.

“I can wait,” she confessed, the words pulled from a place deep inside her she didn’t know she had. Tessa wasn’t a patient person. She pushed and pulled and wiggled until things broke free. Life was better lived out in the open.

“It’s complicated,” he said, eyes narrowed in concentration. Or pain. She couldn’t tell which.

He took a deep breath and sat up straighter. “I want you to know all of that. But I really like what we’ve been doing—getting to know who we are now. Like, a lot.”

He licked his lips and her limbs buzzed with the memory of his mouth on hers just last night.

“Me too.”

“But, I can’t help thinking a normal person wouldn’t be okay with any of this,” he pointed out with a humorless laugh.

Tessa frowned and leaned towards him slightly. “What about me made you think I was normal? I’m a train wreck of possibility and proud of that fact.”

Kip’s laugh burst forth and filled the space around them with joy. He squeezed her hand, his smile radiating pure adoration.

He hummed something in the back of his throat as he gazed at her and she couldn’t help but wonder what it translated to.

It was probably something important.

Maybe someday he’d tell her.

“I’d really like to keep this thing going,” he said. “But maybe keep things slow. Because, you know, reasons.”

She wanted to laugh and cry at the same time.

Because, reasons.

“I think that’s a really good idea.”