Page 84 of Let the Game Begin (Kiss Me Like You Love Me #1)

Fuck, even Selene.

There had been a photo of her as well. She was also a potential target, and all because I’d allowed her to get close to me. I didn’t mean to, but I had dragged her into my shit.

That, after all, was what being around me meant: certain doom.

“I knew I’d find you out here.” Logan approached me at a leisurely pace. He was wrapped in a gray sweatshirt due to the cold.

Lost in my thoughts, I hadn’t realized how late it was. When I isolated myself like that, time seemed to lose all meaning.

“Just like I knew you’d spend the day locked up in the pool house. Selene asked about you earlier, and I told her you needed to be alone for a while.”

Logan did know me better than anyone else, and I’d often wondered what I would have done without him; what would have happened to me if I hadn’t had a brother like him?

“You do know me.” I stuck a cigarette between my lips and lit it. If people really did have soulmates, then Logan was mine: he was definitely the better half of me.

“You’re my fucked-up big brother; of course I know you.” He smiled and sat down on the chaise next to me, hands stuffed into the pocket of his sweatshirt. I gave him a thin smile and kept smoking, watching the dense smoke cloud rise up into the air.

“The cold freezes the memories, right? How long have you been sitting out here?”

Logan really did know everything there was to know about me. He could interpret all the details, every tiny quirk of my bizarre behaviors. I was vulnerable to him, stripped of all my barriers. I became nothing but myself, with all my endless flaws and issues.

“About five minutes,” I answered, pinching the beige filter of my Winston between my lips. They were my favorite brand because they relaxed me without leaving too much of a nicotine aftertaste on my tongue. Every one of my quirks had a reason—they were waiting to be discovered.

“Can I bum one?” Logan pointed at my pack of cigarettes, and I shot him a skeptical look. I didn’t like him smoking, though I knew he wasn’t addicted like me.

“No, just finish mine.” I took one last drag before passing it over to him. He took it in his fingers and lifted it to his lips to try it.

He almost never smoked, except when he was nervous.

“So, tell me about it. Do you like her?” he asked, looking at the glowing cherry on his cigarette rather than at me.

I could have pretended I didn’t know what he was asking about, but I knew that would have been pointless. But, hold on… Wasn’t he still pissed off at me?

“You know that I get confused about stuff like that,” I answered, vaguely but truthfully.

I was confused by human relationships in general and with women in particular.

For one thing, since I was child, a woman had never provoked anything more than a physical interest in me.

For another, there were my sexual inclinations, which the monster inside forced me to impose on everyone.

Especially on blonds.

“Do you think the world might be less scary for you if you had someone by your side?”

I turned to examine my brother, trying to figure out why the fuck he was talking like this now.

“Need I remind you that you were the one who said I was unstable?” I threw his own words in his face and he sighed.

“Nah, I still think that and the reasons why I do are clear, even for you. But that doesn’t mean you can’t at least try to open your heart to someone.”

What the hell was he doing? First he was warning Selene away from me and now he wanted me to…date her? Try to start a relationship with her?

“Did you come here to play Jiminy Cricket for me? Why?” It would have been insane to open myself up like that to anyone, let alone someone like Selene. It would have been like a death sentence for her, and I didn’t want Babygirl to die—I wanted her to live.

To live by the side of someone much better than me.

“They aren’t all like Kimberly or Scarlett. Have you ever tried just talking to a woman? Have you tried really getting to know someone and figuring out if you want her in your life and not just your bed?”

The answer was obvious: I never showed an interest in anything about a woman beyond her body. But I didn’t answer and Logan kept talking:

“You should give yourself a chance. You can’t keep forcing yourself to relive that torture all the time. I know that sex is nothing but pain for you.”

Something cracked open in my chest at the sound of these words because…Logan saw me. Or maybe he had always known the truth about my behavior, deep down.

“I do it for the Boy…” I whispered, rubbing a hand over my chest where the patter of my heart was suddenly loud, so loud and then something abruptly caught my attention.

It was the Boy himself, the one who couldn’t rest, the one who forced me to soothe him in the most illogical way.

I saw him.

I saw him right there in front of me, standing on the other side of the pool with his blue shorts covered in dirt.

His knees were scraped up, golden eyes filled with tears, long brown curls hanging over his forehead, his Oklahoma City basketball jersey and a ball tucked under his forearm.

It was the same one he used to play with out in the yard. By himself.

We stared each other down and then he shifted his gaze to the clean, clear water in front of him for just a second before looking back at me. I frowned, unsure if he was trying to tell me something but I didn’t know. He smiled at me and then dropped like a dead weight into the water.

“No!” I screamed, leaping up to run for the edge of the pool.

But the Boy was gone. He had vanished. I searched the bottom of the pool and the paved area all around it but h-he…wasn’t there. Instead, the memories came to take his place.

Those fucking memories…

***

It was raining.

It was the middle of the night, and my parents were asleep.

I got out of my bed and left my room.

I padded barefoot down the hallway, glancing briefly at my brother’s closed bedroom door.

Silently and on tiptoes, I descended the stairs. I was only wearing my underwear because I had taken off my pajamas and neatly folded them before putting them away in my drawer.

It was pitch-black outside, but the orange glow of a garden lamp filtered through the large window, cutting the floor into neat segments. It was this light that guided me outside.

I opened the glass doors and walked out onto the lawn, under the pouring sky and the slashes of lightning. I brushed my wet hair out of my face with one hand and proceeded toward the pool.

I didn’t yet know how to swim, and that was exactly why I was there.

I glanced up at the dark sky, and it seemed as though the storm had waited for me.

Like it didn’t want me to cry alone.

I had learned to endure the pain, but I could no longer keep it inside. In that moment, I felt like a wild bird beating its wings against the storm, knowing it would never survive the tumult, would never watch the sun come out from behind those black clouds.

I opened my hands and held them out, letting drops of rain patter against my skin.

I saw them; I heard them. I was alive, but I was still filthy. Too filthy. All the water in the world wasn’t going to make me clean again.

Every drop of rain in my hands felt like another piece of me that I could no longer hold together.

I balled my hands into fists and stared into the pool in front of me. It looked like the deep, dark pelt of a sleeping animal.

It had never been so scary as it was in that moment.

In that moment, I felt a fear more ancient than any other emotion: courage, excitement, insanity, desperation.

I didn’t look back once as I opened my arms up wide. I looked just like an angel then. Or maybe not.

I would probably become an angel, though, after I went through with it.

Mom wouldn’t have been happy with my choice, but I didn’t care. I couldn’t go on the way I was.

Just then, the garden’s flowers bent against the rain, wind shook through the leaves on the trees, and the world looked like a painting.

Fate had spoken, and it had told a story about a boy who was ready to stop fighting.

He’d already stopped hoping, and he couldn’t keep living with the sadness, with the dulled colors and the knot that constantly tightened around his heart.

I thought about the note I’d left on my desk for my family:

“When the rain is over, I will be on my way to Neverland.”

And so, after one deep, final breath, I shut my eyes and let myself fall forward, held fast in the silent arms of the storm.

***

“N-Neil,” Logan stammered, but I didn’t look at him. Instead, I just kept staring at the water, which now reflected my adult self, my powerful body and mature features.

“He, the Boy… He was just here… He was here just a second ago.” I pointed vaguely in front of me, but I felt completely disconnected from reality, shaken and confused.

Where did he go?

“There was no one there, Neil.” My brother sighed and put a hand on my shoulder to get my attention. I turned and the pity in his eyes made me crouch down at the edge of pool, in total surrender

“There’s no one,” he repeated miserably.