And then I just stared at the list of results, my finger wanting to click the mouse button. But I couldn’t. As much as I needed to know, I was too afraid. Bray and I were having such a great time together, able to forget about the looming future that I knew would eventually come, but I wasn’t ready to bring it on sooner. I wasn’t ready to see that smile on Bray’s face I woke up to every morning disappear and become only a memory.
I wasn’t ready.
I erased my search from the browser’s history and then closed the page out, leaving the room the same way I found it. Dark and empty and with all of the answers.
I went back into the living room, and as my gaze fell on the couch where Bray had been sitting, I saw that she wasn’t there. I looked around for her, casually making my way from room to room and between Tate and Jen practically f**king each other while still dancing to “Pony,” which seemed to have been put on repeat. As I glided past the sliding glass door in the sunroom, I saw Bray sitting outside in a patio chair talking to Grace.
Feeling playful and deprived of screwing with Bray’s head the past four years, I quietly crept my way out the door and approached the two of them from behind. It was much quieter out here; I heard the sound of the breeze coming off the ocean and the calm waves brushing against the dock nearby. The bumping music inside the house was muffled by the walls.
I snuck up quietly, intent on scaring Bray enough to make her pee herself. But as I drew nearer and caught snippets of their conversation, my steps began to slow and my ears began to burn.
“God, I just can’t imagine…,” I heard Grace say with a gasp.
I saw the top of her head from over the back of the patio chair, and she leaned over as if to look down at something.
“Grace, just… please don’t say anything else about it,” Bray said, and I noticed her move her hand from between their chairs. “I don’t want Elias to know.”
Grace nodded slowly. “Yeah. Sure. Not a problem.” And then she added, “Is that why you wear so many?”
I stepped up as close as I could to better see, but not enough to be seen. Grace was looking down again. I cocked my head at an angle to get a better view between their chairs, and I saw Grace’s fingers probing the hemp bracelets around Bray’s right wrist.
And then Bray noticed me standing there.
She jerked her hand back from Grace again and scrambled to finger the bracelets back in place. I walked the rest of the short way over to them.
“Hi baby,” she said to me, looking over the back of the chair with a forced smile.
I leaned down and pecked her on the lips.
I glanced at Grace and then back at Bray, hoping Grace would get the hint and leave. But she didn’t. I looked down at Bray’s hands, my eyes scanning the bracelets.
Suddenly, I felt betrayed by them. Not by Bray, but by the bracelets.
I gave Bray a moment, a chance to just fess up, because she must’ve known that I’d heard parts of their conversation that she never wanted me to hear. But no one said anything. It was an awkward moment; Grace being there was what made it the most awkward.
“What did you not want me to know?” I came out with it.
Bray looked away.
I glanced over at Grace again, but now that she felt trapped, she wanted out of there. She looked back up at me squeamishly, stood up and said, “I need to find Caleb,” and then scurried across the brick walkway, which was laid out in a mosaic pattern.
A new song filtered into the night air for a moment until it was shut off by Grace closing the sliding glass door.
I pulled the empty chair around in front of Bray and sat down. Her knees were drawn up, and to the side, her bare feet on the seat. She wouldn’t, or couldn’t, look at me.
I reached out for her hands. “Are you going to tell me?” I turned her hands in mine, my thumbs caressing the delicate skin of her palms.
“No, Elias. I can’t.”
I pressed down on her hands with all of my fingers and she tried to pull them away. “No,” I said and held them tighter, forcing her gaze. “I want you to tell me.” I searched her face for emotion, her eyes for information, but found only pain. I already had an idea about what I was going to find, but I didn’t want to believe it.
She tried once more to pull her hands away, but I held them firm in mine and gently pushed my thumbs underneath the bracelets. My heart fell. I stopped cold. I couldn’t move or say anything to her. And she still couldn’t look at me for longer than two seconds at a time.
I took a deep breath into my lungs and then rubbed the pads of my thumbs over the scars on her wrists. I closed my eyes to compose myself, but my moment of calm was shattered when Bray snatched her hands away when I was at my weakest, leaped from the chair and ran past me.
“Bray!” I ran after her. “Stop! Please!”
She kept running, over the mosaic bricks and then through the landscaped grass and past the dock, heading toward the rocky beach.
“Stop! God damn it, stop!”
I grabbed her by the elbow and she swung around to face me, her long, dark hair whipping about her face. She tried desperately to push my hand away, but I refused to let go. The more she struggled, the firmer my grip became.
“Please, Elias! Just leave!” she roared. Tears streamed down her face.
I pulled her toward me, but she still fought, and with her free hand she tried to shove me backward.
“Talk to me, Bray!” I screamed. “Tell me why you did it!”
Having no other option, she let her weight drop and she fell against the sand. I let go before I went down with her. She wailed into the night and buried her face between her knees, rocking back and forth. I sat down in the sand with her. I tried to comfort her. I tried to touch her. Talk to her. Understand her. But she was inconsolable. I was lost. This wasn’t the Bray that I knew, the girl that I grew up with. This wasn’t the fun and crazy and life-loving beautiful girl I shared my entire life with. She was still the girl I loved, no matter her flaws or her weaknesses. That would never change. But this girl sitting in the sand in front of me with suicide scars across her wrists and such pain in her heart that it shook me to my core… this was another side to that girl I loved. A side that I never saw, never even knew existed.
“Please,” I said softly, in a last desperate attempt.
She raised her eyes and gazed out at the dark ocean. Tears clung to her long, dark eyelashes. But she wouldn’t speak.
I could only wonder what she was remembering…