Impossibly His

Chapter Fifteen

Dedicated to caligraephy for my amazing new cover. Thank you so much, I love it!

Also, important author's note at the end of this chapter! Please read it. Enjoy!

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"Do you remember the book I brought back to you in your classroom the day we got into that fight?" He asked me.

"Yeah..." I trailed off, not really seeing where he was going with the conversation. He pulled something out from under his bed and tossed it beside me, and as I glanced down, I saw that it was in fact the same book he was talking about, Confess by Colleen Hoover. "You read it?"

"I'm about halfway through. I was bored and didn't feel like going back to class that day so I ran by the school library and got it."

"What does this have to do with anything?" I questioned, looking at him with narrowed eyes.

"Easy. Page sixty-eight; Owen and Auburn each write a confession."

"So?"

He stood up and dug through his closet for a while before he finally resurfaced through all of the junk and flopped back down on the bed beside me. He waved the beaten old notebook that was in his hand in the air, his raised eyebrows hinting that I should have connected the dots by this point but as my mind scrambled for an explanation I could only frown in response.

He sighed an exasperated breath before explaining very slowly. "We-" he gestured to me and himself. "-are going to write down a confession."

When realization finally hit, panic encompassed me. "Reth, wait-" I began, but he was already reaching across from me to grab a pen and ripping a sheet of paper out of the notebook. He handed me half of the sheet and a pen, holding his own in his hands encouragingly.

"Come on. Write something down that no one else knows. Something that you can't stop thinking about but want to get out of your head."

"And what about you?"

"I'll do the same," he replied.

I looked down at the paper hesitantly, bringing the pen to hover over-top of it as I contemplated on writing something, but couldn't put together the jumbled words that swam around my brain.

"I can't," I reasoned. "I don't know what to write."

"Excuses excuses," he tisked. "Write your confession."

Huffing a breath, I looked back down at the torn paper, reaching to the deepest depths of my mind to unveil the darkest part of me that I never let show. The wall that I had put up years ago was too strong for even me to break.

"See, it's not as hard as you thought," Reth chuckled, and I hadn't even noticed my hand moving over the page as I scribbled down whatever thought had been running through my head.

I'll never be able to say 'I love you' to anyone ever again, because every time I do, I get hurt, even by the people I love most.

I looked down at my scrawl inked onto the paper, reading over the words before I hesitantly folded it in half, and he did the same to his own once he had finished.

"What now?" I asked him.

"Now," he began, holding his paper out to me. "We trade."

"No!" I said quickly, snatching mine back. "You're not reading mine."

"That's kinda the point of a confession, Clare," he told me. "You actually have to confess."

"No," was all I said, shaking my head at him.