{18+ COMPLETED • COLLEGE ROMANCE}
When a college freshman with a learning disability and a reputation collides with a straight-A, straight-laced girl in the dorm kitchen one night, he sees the darkest parts of himself reflected in her. But the two o...
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M A D I E
November Eighteenth
Two
I'm a little more broken
than I thought.
--
Bren didn't keep me at a distance, not like before. He held me at night, during the day, all the time. Sometimes it seemed like he was searching for any excuse to touch me, even though he didn't need one. He was ready; I could tell.
But I realized I wasn't.
I had wanted so badly to be ready for Bren. He made me feel so good at a time when I felt so bad. Never a distraction but maybe a drug, something I used to relieve the pain when it became too much.
But then he'd stormed down the stairs with my hospital discharge papers shaking in his hand, and I unraveled. I gave in. Let him push me until I fell over the edge and felt all the pain. The confessions were a broken damn. A wrecking ball into my heart with walls falling down and everything flooding out. Everything that I'd lost. Everything that I'd gone through. And it hurt. It hurt so damn bad.
I saw it in Bren's eyes. I saw when he realized just how bad it was. Just how much pain I'd been hiding. When he offered to take it all away, to make me feel something other than this gut-wrenching sickness, I nearly gave in.
But I was falling for Bren.
I was falling for him, and I wanted to know what it would feel like to be with him without the lingering pain beneath the surface. Just him, nothing else. And that was when understanding dawned on me.
Bren never let himself lose control completely, and it was because he wanted what I did. He wanted to know that when we were together, it was us and only us. And shit, that made my heart hurt too, but in an entirely different way.
So I sank into the discomfort. The pain.
I owed to him. But mostly, I owed it to myself.
It morphed between the physical pain in my head and the pain that tore through my heart. More than anything, though, I was struck with terror. Terror because of how close I'd come to, well, dying. Or living a life that would have been a lie. I wasn't sure which one would have been worse.
I embraced it all. The first night after Bren got me to spill everything, my tears had soaked the pillows in our bed, leaking from me like my secrets. Bren held me until it stopped, and I'd never felt so safe. It was nearly a heart-stopping realization, how I trusted him to care for me in a way no one else had. And that led to my final confession.
The next morning, I admitted to Bren that the parts of me that Quinton broke hadn't been pieced back together yet. There was a pounding in my skull that came and went. Fatigue that blasted through me without warning. Disorienting fog settled and lifted, defying any rhyme or reason.
