“She must have hurt you really badly,” she said.
“She was the daughter of one of the workers here. Really pretty. I... I didn’t have a chance. She showed up, joined our little one-room schoolhouse when we were fifteen. I was a goner. She was really good friends with Nelly McCloud—Tag’s wife. Who wasn’t his wife at the time, but you know. Anyway. She... She played like she didn’t notice me. Like she was too good to have her head turned by the likes of me. I wish she had been. No. Just like...”
And he realized, she was the first girl, so it wasn’t just like those girls always were, not to him, not then. But it was what he had learned. Later.
“I fell for her hard. And we were young, with very little supervision. So...” He remembered taking the trucks out in the middle of the night, parking somewhere, laying a blanket down in the back, and the two of them... They’d get lost in it. In each other. They’d been each other’s first time. And a whole lot of other times after.
He’d been in love. Head over heels. He hadn’t wanted another woman, not ever.
“I wanted to marry her. And I never wanted to get married. Because I never saw it go very well. But I knew that the two of us, we couldn’t fail. Because there was never anything like that. And there never would be again.”
“What happened?”
This was the part he didn’t have any practice with.
“It was summer. We went out swimming. It was dark. We used to horse around by the dock. And we were... We were talking. She... She slipped off the dock, I guess. I thought she was jumping. But she wasn’t. She didn’t come back up. It was dark. I couldn’t see anything. I jumped in the water. I couldn’t feel her anywhere. I couldn’t... Couldn’t see.”
And he just didn’t want to tell the rest of the story. Because it didn’t end well. Because it was a whole lot of images that haunted him. That made him feel broken inside. And that beast in him was snarling. Telling him to keep it safe. There were certain things that didn’t need to be shared. There wasn’t a reason for it. It didn’t fix anything. Didn’t bring back the past.
“She drowned. The best they can figure she hit her head, knocked herself senseless enough that she couldn’t find her way back to the surface. And it was dark. It was dark and we were idiot kids that shouldn’t have been out in the lake.”
“Wolf...”
“It’s really awful. But I don’t need you to take that tone of voice with me. But that’s Breanna. And that’s... That’s it.”
“You said you believed in love,” she said softly.
“Yeah. I do. I can’t deny it. I’ve been in love.”
“Right.”
He hated to think about it. He hated to think about the days following that. Her parents were angry. They’d blamed him.
Hell, he’d blamed himself.
He’d been there with her. They’d been out there in the dark. He’d upset her.
It would’ve been the better thing for him to drown saving her. But he dived down deep, and then he’d come up to the surface. Every time. To breathe. And in the end, when her body had come up without her soul in it, he had wished that he’d stayed down there.
Maybe they could have found each other. Maybe then...
It wasn’t that kind of grief, not anymore. Not the same as he felt that first six months after, when he just wondered why he bothered to take another breath every time he did. Because it felt like there could be no happiness, no nothing on this side of heaven, not without her.
No, that grief had faded. But somehow, everything else had faded along with it. And it had left him who he was.
“That must’ve broken your heart,” she said.
And it was such an obvious thing to say. Because of course it had. But at the same time, he didn’t recall anyone ever addressing that. In fact, he didn’t think he’d ever thought of it in those terms. Mostly because he hadn’t deserved for it to be a heartbreak. It was a loss, for sure and certain. But didn’t he have a stake in that loss? How did he deserve to be broken by it?
“Yeah,” he said. Because whether or not he felt it was deserved, it was honest. And it made a certain kind of sense. His heart had already been damaged, but just... Just enough that he could still love. And then after that, it had been broken. Putting it back together hadn’t been a simple thing. But he found a way to go on. But he’d never been the same. It had never been quite the same way. Not since.
“Yeah,” he said. “I expect it did.”
“I’m sorry that happened. I’m sorry that happened to you.”
That hit him all wrong. “It didn’t happen to me. It happened to her.”
“You’re the one that’s left dealing with it.”