Rock & Roll Nights: The Lila and Rivers Edit

45. Rivers

45

RIVERS

T his didn’t feel good.

It didn’t even feel a little bit okay .

It felt wrong and unnatural, like I’d just cut off my own arm intentionally and voluntarily, and then thrown it to wolves who were definitely going to eat it and keep me from ever being able to attach it again.

Worse than that, actually, since it wasn’t my arm I’d just destroyed but my heart. I’d carved it out of me and thrown it to the ground, where it now lay with what was left of my soul and everything good inside me. Turning to dust.

Sending Lila away and then watching her actually follow the order was like…

I didn’t even have the words for it, honestly, but I knew that nothing had ever hurt this much. Not my mother leaving me. Not the foster parents who had hit me and done things I’d worked hard never to think about again. Not the fires or the dead animals or coming home to the orphanage where every kid except the three I’d befriended hated me.

Nothing could ever have prepared me to watch the girl I loved running away from me, her hands over her face and her shoulders shaking with sobs as her heart broke right alongside mine.

But there was a good reason, I reminded myself, leaning one shoulder against the shed for support. This wasn’t just something I’d done without any thought. I’d done this for reasons . Lila was too good for me. She was too bright and optimistic; a rich, well-mannered girl from a good family in Nashville who didn’t know the meaning of heartbreak. She’d never gone hungry, never watched someone who was supposed to love her desert her. She’d never known how it felt to be thrown away by the person you needed the most in the world.

She wasn’t broken the way I was, but if I kept her around I would eventually break her. I broke everyone I knew. It was why I’d worked so hard to keep them all at arm’s length: to protect them. She just needed more protection than most. She also needed more convincing than most. She was perhaps the most stubborn person I’d ever met, and no matter how many times I’d backed away from her, she just kept coming back.

Kept trying to save me.

Kept, most annoyingly, believing she could save me.

She was wrong. I was broken deep down inside, irretrievably damaged. My mother had been able to see it and had dumped me at the first opportunity. She must have known that eventually I’d start breaking her, too. At some point, everyone figured that out.

Until Lila.

The truth, now that I was thinking about it, was that she’d refused to be broken. Every time I’d turned away from her or done something she hadn’t expected, she’d shrugged and laughed it off. Shaken her head at me as if she was disappointed…and then tried again the next day. Hell, I’d been trying to push her off for the last week—okay, not all the time, but most of the time—and yet she’d set this whole thing up with me meeting my family, and though it hadn’t gone well, I was sure she’d thought it would fill some of the hole in my soul.

She wouldn’t have done it if she didn’t think it would help me. Because Lila didn’t have one cruel bone in her body.

She was made up entirely of sunshine and love.

And the truth was…

God, the truth was, I didn’t need this trash family. I didn’t need the mom who’d deserted me or the brother I’d never known but who was evidently just as horrible as my mother. I didn’t need them to make up for what they’d done to me when I was a kid. I might have needed my mom to save me back then, but these days?

These days, I realized, I needed someone like the girl who was running away from me right now.

I needed a girl who had seen me for exactly what I was, looked right through me and seen the truth, and started trying to help me from the moment she met me. I needed a girl who’d looked at me like she knew exactly what was wrong…and had taken my hand and tried to understand how she could help.

I needed someone who loved me so much that she hadn’t given up on me no matter how much I’d pushed her away.

And for the first time in my life, I thought that person might actually want me back.

If I could figure out a way to convince her that she’d finally reached me.

If I could get back to her before she cut me out of her life the way I’d just told her to.