Page 92 of The Same Backward as Forward

Her sister is dead.

And though Hannah should leave this place and all it entails behind, myself included, for some reason, she can’t.

She turns at the sound of my footsteps. My heart clenches as I watch more tears make their way down her face, one after another—steady, the way she’s always been.

“Are you trying to kill me, Hannah the Same Backward as Forward?” I say, and lest she mistake my meaning, I lift a hand to her face and use my thumb to swipe away a tear.

I cannot bear to see you cry.

“I take back what I said before,” I continue, “about you being an ugly crier.”

My vow still holds: Whatever she needs from me, she will have, and that includes distraction. “You’re ahideouscrier,” I say. “A blight on my tender eyes.”

“Nothing about you is tender,” she retorts.

“Liar,” I say, and my voice comes out a little hoarser and quieter than I meant for it to, because when it comes to her,everythingabout me is tender. “Ifthis”—I do away with another tear, brushing it from her cheekbone—“is about me…”

About us. About last night.

“It’s not,” Hannah tells me.

I search her eyes. “In that case, and assuming youdon’twant to talk about it—”

“Good assumption.”

She is sounding more like herself, and I know that if shewants to pretend that last night didn’t happen, I should let her, but I can’t shake the part of me that says that if I do that, she might mistakenly believe that last night didn’t matter to me. Thatshedoesn’t.

And that will never do.

Instead of confessing that she iseverythingto me, I arch a brow. “Care to tell me how horrible I am again?”

I don’t expect her to say yes. I expect her to shoot me down—and possibly enjoy it. “I would love to outline your flaws,” she says instead. “In detail.”

I would very much like for her tooutline my every flaw in detail.

“But,” Hannah continues mercilessly, “I have to go to work, and you have to make it back to the shack—without stumbling this time, even once.”

That doesn’t sound likenever again. It sounds likenot right now. I can’t afford to read too much into that.

“Always the taskmaster,” I say.

Hannah holds my gaze a little longer, and I see something in her eyes, like the flickering of a flame in wind.Not anger. Not annoyance. Not sorrow. Not mirth.

Something.

Hannah breathes in and out and in, and when her lips part again, she offers me two words—and only two words. “No regrets.”

Chapter 23

Hannah does not regret me. She does not regret the moment when there was anus. That is more than I could have ever hoped for. More than I deserve.

After I make it back to Jackson’s and Hannah leaves me, I sit for a moment, just outside the shack in the sun. When the door opens behind me, I expect Jackson to grunt at me to come inside where I won’t be seen, but there’s seemingly no one around for miles, and all Jackson does is lower himself to the ground beside me and hand me a plate of beans.

“No eggs?” I quip. I wonder how long he’s been home, wonder if he realizes that Hannah and I were out all night.

“Eat your beans,” Jackson says, and for once, I do exactly what I’m told. After a few seconds, he goes back inside to get his own plate, and then he settles back down beside me to eat.

He definitely knows.There’s nothing for me to do about that except keep eating beans and think that at least his shotgun is nowhere in sight.