Into the Tomorrows (Bleeding Hearts Book 1) by Whitney Barbetti Read Free Book Online Page A

to me, pulling me against him immediately, arms around my waist, in my hair, lips against lips and a “You’re here” spoken into my mouth.
    “You always say that like you’re surprised,” I returned, pulling my head back because I was suffocating.
    “Because I keep waiting for you to slip between my fingers,” he said, eyes earnest. He touched my hair. “You bleached it.”
    “A few months ago.” We’d last seen each other at Christmas, five months earlier.
    We were both silent for a moment before he led me to the table he was occupying.
    “I still can’t believe you’re here,” he said as he slid back into his seat. This was wrong. He shouldn’t be surprised his girlfriend of almost six years was actually here. And his girlfriend of almost six years should feel elation.
    There was a mirror of who we should be, but our reflections didn’t match.
    I smiled back at him. I loved Colin in a way, but not in a way that put me at risk. It was safer that way, kissing his lips but keeping my heart miles from his grasp.
    I wasn’t a good person. I never claimed to be. But spreading my lips in a lie that didn’t sit comfortably into my cheeks was the only way I knew to make him happy.
    “How was the drive?”
    This didn’t just feel wrong; it was wrong. These were questions you asked an acquaintance as you established a dialogue. But I didn’t want to change us. I liked the ice that had formed in the cracks between us.
    “It was fine.”
    “What do you want?” Colin asked, hurriedly standing and pulling out his wallet.
    I wanted to stop lying, I told myself. Ultimately, I knew it was selfish to stay with Colin and not feel the love for him that I should. I was constantly at war with myself, to stay in the shallow end of my love for him or to stop lying and let him go.
    But I suspected he kept me too, at arm’s-length, and so I didn’t let the guilt swallow me whole.
    “Green tea,” I said, watching him walk away like he couldn’t wait to escape our new-but-old dynamic.
    Ellie hadn’t died yesterday. She’d died three years ago. But I still remembered the feel of her hand in mine like it was yesterday. And I still remembered the way he’d been gone when I’d needed him. I felt his absence stronger than his presence.
    I’d spent the first week after she died in bed with the covers over my head. The next week, after my mother had booted my ass out of her home, I’d wrapped my lips around the top of a bottle of cheap bourbon and smoked through four packs of cigarettes in a stale motel room off of the highway. One night, I wandered on the roof.
    My therapist had said, “Trista, I cannot help you fight the enemy if you don’t tell me who they are.”
    In the end, I’d pressed the tip of my cigarette to my skin, daring myself to handle that pain before seeing what happened if I just … tripped over the side of the building … and I couldn’t. I’d told my therapist this and she’d told me that it was because the parts of me that hurt needed healing, not killing. It was my last session with her.
    When my money had run out for booze, cigarettes, and the motel, I’d found myself on Grandpa’s doorstep. After the first month, the resentment I held for Colin was as real and tangible as a permanent compression on my chest.
    And yet, I hadn’t yelled or kicked or sobbed like I’d wanted to. I hadn’t broken things off with Colin either. It wasn’t rational, but I reminded myself that Ellie had loved Colin, loved him for me. So much had changed in my life that the only constant had been Colin, even if we were about as emotionally connected as a fish to a bird.
    And over time, I began to realize that my disconnect was a gift in a way. Colin couldn’t hurt me. I was already hurting.
    I watched as he started up a conversation with the barista and felt a strange kind of comfort from seeing him so animated with her. Colin had said a couple very basic sentences to me and now he was fully engaged in a