But her biggest flaw was her inability to form bonds with other people. Friend. Boyfriend. Even family. She had never really been close to anyone. The first time I saw her interact with her parents, I thought that her family was very different from ours. My mom and dad always told me they loved me before I went anywhere or before we hung up the phone. Bray and her parents never said that to each other, at least not that I had ever heard. Bray’s parents didn’t seem to mind that she went where she wanted whenever she wanted. My parents were strict, and I had a crazy eight o’clock curfew up until I was fifteen years old. It took me a long time to truly understand why her parents treated her the way they did. And it wasn’t until many years later that all of the pieces of the puzzle that was Brayelle Bates would fall into place and explain everything.

I was all that Bray ever really had.

Her attachment to me, her closeness to me, I knew all along was love. But she didn’t know, because she had never really experienced love like that before. She grew up pushing people away from her, because it was all she had ever known. When someone started getting too close, she turned on them in an instant, as if a warning siren was going off inside her brain.

She wasn’t a broken girl. She had never experienced abuse or had much of a hard life growing up. She was just cursed with the inability to recognize and filter and react to certain significant emotions.

Despite all of her flaws, all of her crazy antics and sometimes over-the-top personality, I loved her more than anything in this world.

And I knew that I always would.

But it was time I put my foot down.

“It won’t be like this forever,” I said, looking down into her glazed-over eyes. “We can’t spend the rest of our lives being just friends and neither of us getting involved with other people.”

Her tears shut off immediately and she froze. “What are you saying?” she asked.

I softened the look in my eyes, trying to be as delicate as possible with what I was about to say. My hands moved up her arms and rested against her cheeks. I brushed the bone under her eye with the pad of my thumb.

And then I lied to her.

“I can’t do this with you forever,” I said. “I want to be in love, to be loved back. I want to get married one day and maybe have a couple kids—call me old fashioned, but whatever.” She wanted to tear her eyes away from mine, but she couldn’t; she was still frozen in place, her body rigid. “I’ve imagined that person being you. It’s always been about you. But if you don’t want to at least try to be her, then maybe we should stop being friends. This… thing we have, this… relationship, it’s unhealthy.”

She stepped back and away from me, still holding her unblinking gaze.

“Is this what you want?” she asked, her soft features appeared vacant, but her eyes held a profound amount of suppressed pain.

“What I want is to be with you. That’s what I want. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.” My hands collapsed into half fists out in front of me. My whole body was consumed by emotion, a desperate need to make her understand how much I loved her without having to say the words. In the moment, they didn’t seem right to speak aloud. I was afraid she’d run the other way.

I thought this was going to be the end. The end of us, the end of everything that we stood for. The last thing in the world that I wanted was for her to turn and walk out that door so I would never see her again. But that was what I expected. The truth is, I would’ve waited forever for her. I couldn’t imagine myself in a serious relationship with any other girl. Sex? Sure. I’m a guy and I like sex. But to love someone other than Bray seemed eternally impossible. So yes, I lied when I told her that it couldn’t be the way it had been any longer. Because I would’ve waited for her forever. I would’ve stayed just like we were, unconventional best friends who shared a lot more than secrets and sleepovers. But with Bray, I knew I had to be harsh. I felt like I had to be the one to make her understand that our relationship might not be what she wanted. As much as it hurt me to do it, I had to let her know that it was OK to go our separate ways. I didn’t want her to cling to the thought of us for the rest of her life and continue pushing people away because of me.

I just wanted her to be happy.

With her back to me, Bray’s arms uncrossed and fell to her sides.

She turned around.

I waited, subconsciously holding my breath.

And just when I thought it was all going to be over, she said, “OK. I do want to be with you. I want to try with you.”

That night after the party, we had sex for the first time since we’d known each other. But it wasn’t what I had always hoped it would be. Bray changed. I noticed her change as I lay on top of her, peering down into her beautiful, blue eyes. It was as if she knew before it actually happened that if we had sex it would alter everything between us forever. And then as the days wore on, we grew further apart. We broke up after four months. Two months later, she moved away to South Carolina.

I was never the same.

Chapter Four Bray

I know what you must be thinking: What a bitch. And you’ll get no argument from me on that one. I was pretty messed up back then. I loved Elias with all my heart, and that scared the hell out of me.

But I should get something out of the way before I dive into the excuses of why I was the way I was. I’m sure Elias sugarcoated me with his bias and all, but if this story is going to be told, then it needs to be told in its truth and entirety, without Band-Aids and training wheels.

I was fucked up.

No, no one raped me or beat me or bullied me as a kid. My parents loved me. Maybe not as much as my sister, Rian, but I believed they loved me. They just showed it in different ways than Elias’s parents did, usually with the best toys for Christmas and birthdays, a steady allowance, and the occasional pat on the back for doing a good deed. Sometimes. But every pat on the back I ever did get felt like an obligation, like they were being forced. I had issues. There’s no doubt about that. And for much of my young life my parents did whatever they could to help me. They just gave up trying to fix me somewhere along the way. But I don’t blame anyone for the way I was. A psychologist appointed by the State to evaluate me when I had my little run-in with the police and a stint in juvy called it bipolar disorder. I, on the other hand, called it just one of those things. We’re all different. We all have our own quirks and flaws and dark secrets. All of us are fucked up on some level, whether or not we want to admit it to ourselves. And I like to believe that not every problem or issue that we deal with in our daily lives must be labeled with a fancy title.

I’ll say it again: I was fucked up. It was as simple as that.

Well, just so you know, I didn’t leave Elias and Georgia because I lost interest or fell out of love with him. Quite the opposite. I left because I fell even harder for him, which I didn’t even know was possible. I’ve never really been scared of anything, except of Elias. I think that in the back of my mind I figured if I left him first, if I was the one who put a stop to any kind of relationship that we had, it might not hurt as much as it would have if he had ended it. It gave me a sense of control. At least, I fooled myself into believing that all the way to South Carolina. But once I got there—I moved with my friend, Lissa, who wanted to be closer to her brother—it didn’t take long for me to see that I had made the biggest mistake of my life.