Page 103 of Bend Toward the Sun
They stopped again, where she’d helped him breathe last autumn. She swung around with a thumbnail notched between her teeth, posture softening. A war waged inside her—her mind and heart were the battlefields. But who was she fighting? Him? Or herself?
“I know I don’t have any claim to you,” Harry said. “But I deserve to know where I stand. Tell me what happens after your interviews. Do I just wake up one day, and you’ll be gone?”
“I can’t believe you’re springing this on me hours before I have to leave.”
Every moment was a tick on a clock he’d never get back, and damn it, he was tired. Tired of drifting in existential limbo. Tired of not knowing what his life would look like a month from now, a year from now. Ten years. Fifty.
“I’m retaking the board qualifying exam in Philly in a few days, and Sinclair needs me to commit to a return date by the end of the month. Tell me what to do,” he said.
“It’s your decision, Harry. Not mine.”
“It’sourdecision. I’m talking about what’s going to happen tous,Rowan.”
“Us,”she said. “There’s no us.”
The wildflower hung loose from her fingers.Don’t drop it. Please don’t.
“I love you,” Harry said, plain and steady, like it was a universal truth.
When she sucked in a sharp breath, Harry knew he’d made a mistake. A dark thing he’d never seen before crystallized in her eyes, and she shrank away.
His left foot was bleeding. “Rowan. Do you love me?”
“I don’t know.” Her voice was flat.
“Answer the question.”
“I don’t know, Harry. I—”
“Say it,” he demanded.
“I thought you didn’t need me to say—”
He cut her off. “I changed my mind.”
“This is some kind of emotional ultimatum—”
“It’s not complicated, damn it—”
“You’re always interrupting me,” she yelled. “I don’tknow!”
A blackbird shot noisily out of the grass near them, sending Harry’s heart further up his throat.
His patience fractured. “How can you not fucking know?” he shouted back. Disgusted with himself, he kicked at a rock, missed, kicked again, connected. Bare toes met stone. Pain twisted up the nerves in his leg like barbed wire. Harry poured his anger into that ache, redirecting it away from Rowan. Quietly, he said, “I don’t understand.”
“I know you don’t. That’s the problem.”
“Help me, then.Help meunderstand.”
“I can’t. I don’t know how.” She rubbed both hands over her face. “I’m not like you. And I don’t have a family to run and hide with when things inevitably fall apart.”
He recoiled like her words had shoved him solidly in the chest. “That’s not fair. They love you, too.”
A wretched, laughing sob ripped from her throat before she pressed her lips tight and shook her head. In that moment,Harry felt the reality of her withdrawal even more acutely than when she’d been physically running away. He felt it so distinctly, he shivered in the summer morning heat.
“I need to get my head right for this trip, Harry.” Her voice was toneless. The flower dropped from her hand. “Please, if you care for me, let me go. Make this easy. For both of us,” she whispered.“Please.”
Then she ran from him, just as she did the first night they met.