“Yes! It was watered down! It was… it—” Her jaw snapped shut.

Finally, she sighed and said, “I was afraid. I was afraid that I would only push you away like I did everybody else. Especially if you knew the truth. You looked at me like I was beautiful. Perfect. And that’s what I wanted to be for you. I never wanted to shatter your image of me by telling you the truth. I was embarrassed and ashamed.”

“Of what?” I said with disbelief.

Her eyes began to fall away from mine. I pulled on her hands to shake her attention back to me.

“Seventeen years I’ve known you, Bray. Seventeen years. I have loved everything about you. Your foul mouth. Your crazy-ass, brazen antics. Your fearless attitude. Your highs, your lows, whatever they were, I only saw a girl with a vivid personality. A girl who sometimes did give me whiplash, I won’t lie, but I liked that about you. You kept me on my toes. You challenged me. Don’t you understand? I went out of my way to be around you because of the way you were. And if you were ever going to scare me away or make me think badly of you, would I have made you the center of my world for seventeen years?”

I caught a tiny smile hidden in her eyes.

I let go of her hands and stood up from the sand.

“Out in the open. Everything. Right now. No more secrets or lies between us.”

I began to pace, but then stopped and looked down at her and said, “When I was fifteen, and we crashed at Lissa’s house that night of her birthday party, I touched your boob when you were sleeping.”

Her mouth fell open with a spat of air. I was smiling from ear to ear.

“Pervert!”

I nodded. “Yeah, I was. A total fucking pervert. Hell, I still am. I always will be. But yeah, I touched your boob without your permission or you knowing about it. And I don’t regret it.”

She just shook her head, smiling the more I spoke.

I rested my chin in my hand for a moment, pondering. Then my index finger shot up. “OK, you want another one?” I slapped my hands together. “Senior year. You were supposed to go to the prom with that jack-off—what was his name?—anyway, he called you and cancelled because I threatened him.”

“What?”

I nodded again. “I did. I knew he was a fucking douchebag. The thought of him trying to get in your pants made me fucking mental. I tried to talk you out of going with him, but you were hell-bent. So Mitchell watched the restroom door while I cornered him inside right after he had taken a piss. I told him that if he didn’t back off, I’d fucking kill him.”

“I can’t believe you did that,” she said and she wasn’t smiling anymore.

“Well I did, and I’d do it again. Are you going to leave me now? Have I run you off?” I knew I hadn’t. I was trying to prove a point.

She shook her head.

“You want something worse about me?” I asked and at this point, even I was a little afraid to go on. But this was our moment of truth. If I was going to make her understand anything, I had to show her a side of me that I knew she wouldn’t like.

I reached out and took her hands, pulling her to her feet.

“I did coke for a year after you left,” I said. “And twice, when I couldn’t find any—because I was becoming addicted fast—I actually smoked crack. Right off a soda can. That’s about as fucked up as it gets.”

She looked like I had just slapped her across the face.

I put my thumb and index finger a centimeter apart in front of us and said with a squinted eye, “I was this close to becoming a full-blown addict. This close to being strung out twenty-four-seven, sleeping in fucking Dumpsters, giving blowjobs for blow. It was why I think I was so hell-bent on helping Mitchell get off that meth. I saw what it was doing to him. The same thing my shit almost did to me.”

Bray let out a long, concentrated breath and dug both of her bare feet deeper into the sand.

Then she looked back up into my eyes. “Did you?”

“Did I what?”

“Ever do any of those things?”

I shook my head. “No. In fact, what sobered me up quicker than anything was when I went to a drug house with this guy—I didn’t even know his name—and I was offered a line of coke. Primo shit. The other guy there, the one selling the stuff, was going to blow me. He would’ve given me a line and all I had to do was let him suck my dick. I almost did. I thought, hey, at least it’s not the other way around. But then the guy who I went there with, he stepped up before I could answer and said he would let the guy do it if I wouldn’t. And then two minutes later, there I was, watching this drug dealer suck this guy off who I rode there with. I thought, that could be me, getting violated for drugs. Willingly.” I took a breath, softened my face and said, “And then I thought of you.”

Bray took my hands into hers, consolation and understanding and even a little bit of horror lay resting in her face.

“I thought of you and of when we were kids swimming in that pond. Just seeing your face looking back at me in my head made me want to stop that shit. It didn’t matter to me that I thought you were engaged—” I pointed at her. “I was pissed about that, just so you know. I thought that should’ve been me. Anyway, it didn’t matter to me that you were in love and that I thought I’d lost you forever, I wanted to be a better person for myself and because I knew you would hate to see me like that. I never touched coke or crack again and I never will. None of that life-killing shit. No fucking way. And smoking weed became a rare recreational thing for me.”

Without giving her a chance to respond, I added quickly, “Would you have left me if I said yes? If I admitted I took part in something like that?”

This time, even though my heart told me that no, she wouldn’t have left me, another part of me felt ashamed enough about everything I had told her that I thought maybe she might. It was when I truly understood what she went through with me all those years. I didn’t agree with how she handled things, but I understood it at least.

“No,” she said softly. “There’s nothing you could do or say to make me leave you.” And even though we had both said this very same thing to each other a few times in the past two weeks, it felt new and more real every time it was said.

She leaned in and kissed my lips. “Now it’s my turn,” she said.

I honestly didn’t expect it. I knew I had told her that I wanted us to get everything out in the open. Right there. Right then. But I think a part of me assumed she had no other secrets. Hell, the ones she had been keeping were pretty bad in and of themselves. What else could she have possibly been hiding from me?

Chapter Seventeen Bray

My hands fell away from his and rested at my sides. I took a step back, swallowed, and announced, “I like sex. A lot.”

He raised a brow. “And that’s a problem why, exactly?”

I wanted to laugh at that, because it was funny to me admitting to a guy that his girlfriend loved sex and he was supposed to frown upon it. But I couldn’t laugh because it was the next part I was the most afraid to admit.

“Well,” I said, “it’s a problem because I… I’ve been with quite a few guys.”

He’s going to be so disgusted with me and just walk away, I know it…

“The same can be said about me with girls,” he responded casually. “Did you use protection with them?”

I was dumbfounded by his response. Not his admittance, but his lackluster reaction to mine.

“Yeah,” I said. “I-I mean, once or twice it didn’t go down that way. Heat of the moment, I guess. Stupid as hell, I know, but I always did after that second time. And I’m clean. They tested me for everything when I was in the hospital.”