“Can we call a truce?” Carter asks, rolling to his side and facing me.

“A truce?”

“I don’t want there to be this awkwardness between us anymore.”

I sigh, my walls of defense slipping with the comforts he’s surrounded me with. “I’m trying. I swear to you I am. But this is really hard. You … humiliated me.”

“I hurt you.”

The thought to deny, deny, deny is so strong I grind my teeth together to stop words that we both know won’t be true and slowly jerk my head into nod. My jaw slowly relaxes, and I swallow, my throat tight, still holding the words to fight. “You hurt me a lot.”

“You couldn’t fall in love with me, Pipe, not then. We were young. I was leaving. You had ambitions and goals, and I didn’t want to get in the way of those. I tried to solidify it all by believing that Brad would hate me if we tried the long-distance thing, but to be honest, I never gave two shits what Brad thought. I just knew you deserved more than that.”

I avoid looking at him because my thread of hatred toward him has been stretched to the very brink of snapping, and based upon the softness of his tone, I’m sure with one look, I would be a goner.

“Believe me, you would hate me more if we had slept together that night.”

My head whips up, my shoulders arching as I back into the farthest corner of the fort, the seat of a chair biting painfully into my spine. My lips are parted, but no words pass through them. I know logically I shouldn’t hate him because of that night. That my own pride is what makes me dislike him so fiercely. Carter has never done a single thing to make me loathe him. To make me think that he’s a bad person. A horrible friend. Nothing except refusing to sleep with me after spending a night celebrating his acceptance to the college he had always dreamed of attending in New York.

I had been heartbroken to learn the news. Carter was more than just my brother’s best friend—he was mine. Since I was little, he had been a constant in my life, just as present as Em but oftentimes understanding me when it came to things I didn’t. Like when he’d antagonize me until I blew up at him because he knew I needed to vent. I hated him when he did that because it always made me feel terrible and ill with guilt afterward and I’d have to tuck my tail between my legs and seek him out to apologize. He never took it personally though, explaining to me he knew I hadn’t been yelling at him personally. We went through stages where we would annoy the hell out of one another, tease and bicker, but I think at one point, somewhere in the midst of recovering from first crushes, first kisses, and first heartaches, we realized they had all been a premonition leading up to something much bigger. We had been fighting our feelings for one another for so long they finally combusted one night before my junior year following a large bonfire. He was getting ready to leave for New York, and the kisses that night both deepened and held together the fractures of my heart.

He called me the night he left, his voice happy but lacking his usual warmth, and neither of us brought up either the kiss or our feelings. We continued to touch base for months, our conversations filled with topics about school, our families, the weather. Our calls kept getting shorter, causing me to worry. Then, that Christmas, he came home, and I barely saw him. I cried my heart out to Em for weeks, and we decided that it had been a mistake. A stage. An experiment. I hated those descriptions more than I had searching for the tinsel on the living room carpet to ensure it didn’t break yet another vacuum.

I began dating that spring. One I only dated for a matter of weeks, and the second guy I dated for a couple of months. We had been set to go to prom together, and then he broke up with me. Carter had called randomly. He didn’t call each night like he did at the beginning of fall but sporadically, and our calls were always brief. He’d asked how I was doing. I tried to brush him off. I wasn’t in the mood to talk to him about the weather and certainly not about my breakup. But he did it again. He pushed every button he knew so easily to activate, and I exploded and told him everything.

After that, he started calling me every night again, and our conversations grew longer with time.

He arrived home for the summer in late May, a week before my junior prom, and I asked him to be my date.

He said yes and drove me in his old Chevy, skipping out on the limos many of my friends rode in. I didn’t care. I could have walked and would have been perfectly happy because I’d been on cloud nine. We kissed again that night. It was our third slow song and when Emily was still dating a guy in our class. The decorations were tacky, and the music was worse, but that kiss was somehow even better than our first.

I saw Carter every single day of summer, and when he called me in September, the day he got back to New York for his sophomore year—he told me how much he wanted to kiss me again.

We never became exclusive. Never made any promises. We didn’t need to.

Senior year was the calm before the storm. The beautiful time. The perfect time.

It was after I graduated from high school and Carter was home for the summer that chaos hit. Carter and I were engaged in a make-out session to end all make out sessions that was quickly leading to something we had never done together—sleeping together. Our clothes were distant memories, our hands served as our eyes as we explored one another, and while we had been in that same situation before, things had never been that intense. And then he put a stop to it all—including us.

“I thought I was doing what was right. I thought you should experience New York without the ties of a boyfriend. You were already trying to plan how to be close enough to my school and where you needed to be for acting classes and auditions. I didn’t want you to give up your dreams for me.”

“That’s bullshit and you know it. Don’t try to tell me you did it for me. You did it for yourself. I wasn’t planning to move in with you or marry you. I was eighteen and thought we were going to try being a couple who saw each other more than a few times a year.”

“You’re right.” His quiet words aren’t as gratifying as they ought to be, because Carter was right this morning when he accused me of wanting to fight. I do. With him. “You’re … you. You were everything, and I was so afraid that things would go so wrong and that we’d lose it all. I admit I didn’t go about things the right way, but you completely shut me out. You wouldn’t call me… You wouldn’t even talk to me when I came to your apartment.” There’s fierceness in his voice that I’ve never heard from Carter, and it twists my stomach and calls to my own temper. “I—” he starts again.

“You messed up,” I say, cutting him off.

“I messed up,” he repeats quietly.

He releases a deep breath and then moves so that he’s lying down. After a few moments of silence, I shift and lie beside him, our arms and legs barely touching.

We don’t speak, but our breaths are loud because both of us are struggling to contain years of emotions, frustrations, and pain and neither of us knows how to broach it without screaming.

I know I need to sleep. Tomorrow is Christmas Eve, and I want to enjoy the day with Em and my family. But the fort feels warm, filled to the brim with memories from Christmases past and summers at the lake, entire weekends spent sledding, bonfires, and of my heart, because that is what Carter O’Brien has always possessed—my heart.