More on this book
Community
Kindle Notes & Highlights
Just when I thought I had nothing left to give him, he goes and finds another piece of my heart to steal. Doesn’t he already realize it’s all his?
He holds me to him as desperately as I hold on to him. This, I think. This is all I need. Oxygen? Who fucking needs it? Shit’s poisonous anyhow.
“You’re not gonna ask if I’m gay?” I blurt instead. Mason’s brows spike, eyes going wide. Smile faltering. Groaning, I pinch the bridge of my nose. “I don’t know why I said that. Just forget it.” He’s slow to respond, as if he’s measuring each word carefully. “Labels are fucking stupid, so no I’m not gonna ask.”
He shrugs. “What? I’m just sayin’. You could tell me you’re gay, bi, pan, or straight-up Will-sexual—”
“It’s funny you see it that way, ’cause all I can seem to focus on is what people will think. People are still gonna see me with a dude and just assume I’m gay. The label is all they’ll see, no matter how happy I am. No matter how I might feel. Maybe I’m bi, but does it even matter? No one will see it like that.”
He’s worth it. Will’s worth it. I know he is. I’m not certain about much, but I am certain about him.
Shit, maybe I am Will-sexual. Is there a checkbox for that?
“Not you. I just… I don’t know if I’d ever have come out, because there’s nothing really to come out about. I fell in love with Will. That’s it. I don’t know what else there is to it, or why it even fucking matters to begin with. It’s stupid and it’s exhausting and—”
Life isn’t a fucking black hole, as much as grief and trauma and pain would have us think that. Light can always prevail. And there is so, so much light to be found. We just need to hold out and wait for the sun to shine, because fuck, when it shines—it shines hard. Harder than any starless night.
“Way?” “What?” “Take the fucking win.” I still. And with that, he starts walking backward, heading back toward the bar. Spreading his arms out at his sides, he says, “We’ve got your back, dude. So just fuckin’ chill. Let yourself be happy for once, yeah?”
People love to leech off other people’s pain. Their drama. It’s the price we pay for using social media. Nothing is private.
They’re finally whole. Still broken, sure. Still a little fucked up. But they’re finally on the same page for the first time in, well, ever. Waylon’s no longer hiding who he is, Mason’s no longer buried in his denial, and Shawn… Shawn’s trying. Change is on the horizon. I can feel it. Big change. There’s just… something in the air that wasn’t before. Like that thrum of energy you feel right before a big storm. But I’m not worried. I’m not scared. The world will keep spinning, and, yeah, there’s no telling where we might be flung tomorrow, next week, next year… But I know we’ll be together,
...more
I look at Waylon, and he looks back at me, and we’re smiling like a couple of damn idiots in love. Because it’s this, I realize. This is what I’ve been searching for all along. Not just three months ago, when I was lost. When I felt like I had nowhere else to go, and this tiny middle-of-nowhere town from my past beckoned like a little red dot on a map labeled, Here! Here! You belong here!
So maybe, just maybe, all along… I was running to him. Waylon. The boy who kept that piece of me all these years. The boy who’d help me find my way back.
“Every day,” he whispers against my lips a second later. “I’ll prove to you every day I’m not going anywhere. Even… even if it gets to be too much sometimes, I’ll always, always find my way back to you.”
“Exactly. I’m not going anywhere, okay? I still might have no fucking clue what I’m gonna do with the rest of my life, but if there is one thing I am sure I was born to do, it’s love you. Capiche?”
Let him see all my broken, desperate pieces. If wanting to survive this is wrong—if my love for Will is wrong—then God, strike me the fuck down right now because I will not spend what could be my last few moments on this planet not loving Will with everything that I am.
I don’t regret a second of our story—what led up to this—because it’s ours.
“You would die for him?” He nods at the guy molded to my side. I blink. “In a fucking heartbeat.”
But we lived it. We will always have to live with it. Him and me. Will and Way. Always.
If anything’s going to put me in an early grave, it’s going to be him.
Will, the person who my heart beats for. The guys I call brothers. My cousin who’s always been more like a sister—just like the one whose ghost walks these paths. The one we came here to celebrate, along with her twin brother… They’re my family. Blood might be thicker than water, but us? We’ve got thorns. There is no pulling away without one of us bleeding out. It’s codependent. Toxic as fuck. Messy and raw in a way that most people will never understand or accept. And I wouldn’t have it any other way. Pun absolutely intended.
watch as Waylon smiles and laughs, and I’m pretty sure my heart’s somewhere in my eyes.
And with just three simple words, they say goodbye to one chapter, and welcome in the next— “We’ve got him.”
“Hey, City Boy,” Waylon whispers as Mason carries out the bridge, pitching his voice as high as it can go. “Hey, what?” I say dropping my gaze. “I’m happy.”
Shit’s not perfect—far fucking from it. But if there’s anything I’ve learned these last few months, it’s that we don’t need perfect. We just need each other.
No, we’re not lost, I think, smiling against his cheek. Not anymore… But found.
Ivy raises her shot at them. “To family. To our Lost Boys.” She grins. “May you always find your way home.”
But it might as well be the first, because this time, there’s no flashing lights to hide behind. No crowded dance floor full of strangers to lose ourselves in. No blind desperation fueling his actions… There is only love. Peace. Pride.
That stubborn, reckless heart of his, beating heavily against my chest. Way and Will, Will and Way… Two halves of a fucking whole. Always.
“Where there’s a will, there’s a way,” I whisper. “A reminder,” he says back just as quietly, his blue eyes drifting back and forth between mine, “that the sun will always rise, right?” I nod faintly, remembering. “You just need to find a way to make it through the night.”
Hell, maybe that’s what love is. Just moments stacked on moments that we never want to end. Isn’t that how this all started after all? One stupid, mundane moment among a sea of stupid, mundane moments—a moment that somehow becomes the foundation of everything…
The sun rises slowly but surely over our heads, spinning his hair gold, but I hardly notice this time. All I see in this moment—all I know—are those deep, bottomless blue eyes looking back at me… As I let the ocean carry me away. Once and for always.
