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I expect him to say something, anything, but there’s only silence, the awkward kind before his eyes deceive him and he briefly glances at me. Do you notice it? If not, look closer. That expression—that one right there—wordlessly tells me what I need to hear. He remembers. Oh yeah, he fucking remembers me all right, but the stubborn boy I fell for is still inside him and he won’t admit it.
“Do you remember me?” I press, my voice trembling.
He crumbles me with a look, the only one I’ve gotten since he came back. Ender doesn’twantto remember me. He left me and wanted the memories to do the same. His jaw flexes, deep lines forming in his creased brow. “Why would it matter if I did?” he asks, his eyes on the lake, avoiding any reaction I might’ve had. Agitated and aware, he takes his worn baseball cap from his head and runs his fingers through his mop of dark hair before replacing it. “It doesn’t change anything.”
Just walk away, Hads. Walk the fuck away and save yourself the humiliation.
“Because it fucking matters.” I shift my weight from one foot to the other. My eyes drift to his. He stares at my feet, probably wishing they’d move, wishing all of me would move away from him, but I can’t. “How can you say you don’t? After everything we experienced together.”
“I’ll be your first everything, Hads.”
And he was… so what the hell is going on?
Crossing his arms over his chest, his body tenses even more and his eyes slowly slide to mine. “If it mattered so much, why didn’t you ask me first?”
Feeling the sudden panic rise, my hands and heart tremble as I decide what to do next. “Ask you what?”
He scowls at me, and I can’t tell if it’s anger, annoyance, or sadness. I think, maybe, he knows about Eddie. And then he mumbles, “If I was okay with you telling our story.”
My heart sinks. He knows about the book. While part of me is relieved he only knows about the book, the other part is terrified. When I started writing about Ender and me, I never intended for anyone to read it. Yes, I wrote it about us, but I can honestly say itwasn’tmy intention for anyone read it. Ever. Until it was published, and I knew eventually he might, but the possibility was slim. Why would he pick up a romance novel?
“I thought you said you don’t remember me. So how do you know I wrote a book about us?”
“And you said our love was ours.” He looks hurt, betrayed, and everything I experienced when he left me standing in the driveway by myself. “I guess we’re all telling lies these days.”
I think about the book and the love sealed by the banks of the South Georgia water. It’s pages and pages of nights I don’t regret. It’s memories of legs on the dash while singing Marshall Tucker and his arm around my shoulder. Memories of camping out under the stars and swimming after the sun went down.
Everything is in that novel, even the parts I want to forget. The truth is, I left out specific details in fear he would read it someday. I left out the parts I couldn’t bare for him to know—the ones he didn’t deserve to know.
And suddenly, before I know it, I’m living my life through the dirty pages of that novel, thirteen again and falling for the first time. I can still recall the way the sun shined on the lake, the days long and hot, sticky and heavy—everything his memory is.
How’dPaper Heartsstart? Well, it’s started at this lake, eleven years ago.
When a boy branded me with his love. That reckless, indecisive and headstrong boy took a young, innocent teenage girl and showed her how messy love could be.
4
WHEN I MET ENDER JAMES
Eleven years earlier
Thirteen. Moody, hormonal and on the verge of everything I don’t understand. It’s the worst age when you’re a girl. One day I like you, the next I won’t. I can’t explain it, and neither can any of the other girls I know.
If you ask me, I’m like most girls my age, and then again, I’m nothing like them. I purge my thoughts in journals because I can’t express them verbally. I daydream, contemplate, spend hours staring at the sky and wonder if someday this floating rock through space is going to burst into flames.
I have friends, had a few hour-long boyfriends, have yet to be kissed, but know enough to sometimes get myself in trouble. I also read way too many romance novels and carry around an unhealthy expectation of what love is.
This summer, my parents—struggling to keep their marriage alive—decide it’s best for our family of seven to head up north. My dad, Justin Hayes, owns a small family electrical business that allows him to work wherever during the summers. With the majority of the summer business being up in the Alpharetta and Atlanta area, we went there, as it’s a short drive for them and a chance for us to go swimming all summer.
With my oldest sister, Hazel, coming home after being away all year at college, it’s clearly my dad’s attempt at bringing us closer together.
I think my family is happy, but I know looking at our parents, they have the weight of the world on their shoulders. Raising five teenage daughters, trying to put one through college while running their own electrical business, can’t be easy, and even I see it at my age.
I hate being the youngest of five girls. It blows. Sure, being the youngest has its perks, but it also has a lot of annoyances too. Like hand-me-downs. When will I have a chance to get new clothes?
And curfews.
Hazel was given a midnight curfew when she was sixteen. While Hazel is probably the purest, most educated of all us girls, that curfew stuck for her. She’s afraid to step out of the box, and most would say she has her head on straight. Dating the star football player at the University of Georgia, and well on her way to getting her degree, she has her life set, or so it seems. I think she’s like any other girl and one day, she’s going to snap out of the good-girl phase and go wild.