Chapter 7
I buried my face in his chest and mumbled, "Samuel, why are you so good to me?"
He chuckled softly and ran his fingers through my hair. "It's not that I'm good. It's that you deserve it."
That night, Samuel held my hand, and we walked through campus for what felt like hours.
The moon hung bright overhead, stretching our two shadows long across the pavement.
He smiled the entire way, his eyes soft and crinkled at the corners, like he was holding the most precious thing in the world.
"You know," he said suddenly, "I first noticed you freshman year."
I stopped short. "Freshman year?"
"Yeah." He turned his head to look at me, moonlight pooling in his eyes. "You sat diagonally in front of me. During class, you always liked to tap your chin with your pen cap."
I had no memory of that at all.
"One time it rained, and you didn't have an umbrella. You were standing under the overhang outside the main building, waiting for it to stop.
"I actually had two umbrellas on me that day. I wanted to walk over and give you one, but I kept hesitating, and in the end, I never worked up the nerve.
"Then I saw Lucas walk up with his umbrella. You lit up, grabbed his arm, and ran off into the rain with him.
"I remember standing there thinking, this girl has the most beautiful smile. And maybe someday, she'd smile like that for me."
He stopped walking and turned to face me. Moonlight fell across his face, and his expression was so tender it almost didn't seem real. "Leah, I waited three years for this day. Thank you for finally seeing me."
My eyes burned again.
All those years I'd spent chasing after someone else, someone had been watching me in silence the whole time.
All those days I'd spent loving and not being loved back, someone had been carrying me in his heart, cherishing me quietly and carefully.
I stood on my tiptoes and pressed a soft kiss to his cheek. "Samuel, from now on, it's my turn to be good to you."
He froze.
A second later, the tips of his ears turned red so fast it was almost comical. "You—"
I tilted my head and smiled at him, eyes bright. "What, I can't kiss you?"
He didn't answer, but his grip on my hand tightened.
Then he dipped his head and placed a kiss on my forehead, feather-light, barely there, and yet it sent a burn straight through me that left my heart trembling.
"We'll take it slow," he murmured. "We've got all the time in the world."
Of all the words anyone had ever said to me in eighteen years of life, those were the most beautiful.
While Samuel and I were slowly growing closer, a thousand miles away in that small town, Lucas was living through the worst collapse of his life.
I only pieced all of this together later, from scattered bits my high school classmates told me over the years.
From what they said, the few days Lucas spent choosing his college turned his entire household upside down.
His father slammed the enrollment form on the table and jabbed a finger at the Northbridge University cutoff. "You scored a 1416! You could get into any top school in the country, and you're telling me you want to go to a community college?"
His mother sat on the couch, wiping her eyes, her voice barely holding together. "Sweetheart, I am begging you. Don't throw your future away like this.
"If that girl really loves you, she'll understand. Go to a real school, make something of yourself, and come back for her later. She'll still be there."
Lucas stood there and said nothing. Then, finally, he spoke. "I made her a promise. Wherever she goes, I go."
And right in front of both his parents, he picked up a pen and wrote Susan's community college on the enrollment form.
His mother clutched her chest and collapsed on the spot.
By the time the ambulance came screaming into the neighborhood, Lucas was on his knees, completely frozen. His mother spent three days and three nights in the ICU.
The doctors saved her life, but she never woke up. A brain hemorrhage had left her in a permanent vegetative state, and the chances of recovery, they said, were almost nonexistent.
His father slapped him across the face in the hospital corridor, right in front of everyone. "Are you happy now? You did this to your mother. Are you happy now?!"
Lucas knelt outside the ICU doors, sobbing so hard his entire body shook. But none of it mattered anymore. It was too late.
The cruelest blow came the very next day, when Susan sent him a text.
[Lucas, you didn't actually give up a good school for me, did you? Don't be an idiot. I can't take on that kind of responsibility. And my mom said with everything going on at your house, I should stay away from you.]
She added: [So let's just call it quits.]
Lucas called her back in a frenzy. She didn't pick up. He sent dozens of texts after that, and the only reply he got was one line.
[Stop blowing up my phone. It's pathetic.]
He stood in the hospital corridor with his phone in his hand, and his whole body went cold.
He had given up his future for her. He had put his own mother in a hospital bed.
And she had walked away without a backward glance.
Then, in that silence, he thought of me.
He remembered how I had scaled the dormitory wall to buy him medicine when he was burning up with fever, scraping my knees bloody on the way down.
He remembered how I had sat beside him through all those late nights of studying, quietly organizing his review notes without being asked.
He remembered the way I used to look at him, with so much light in my eyes it could have blinded him.
But back then, he had taken all of it for granted. He had even found it annoying.
He tried calling me. The call wouldn't go through.
He had been blocked.
He tried texting me. Every message bounced back undelivered.
He searched for me on social media and found that I had deleted him from everything.
Every single line of contact between us had been severed, cleanly and completely, as though I had never existed in his life at all.
He crouched at the end of the hospital corridor with his head in his hands, bawling like an idiot for the first time in his life.
But it was already too late.