“You won’t. You’ve gone the slow route. Plus, I see how she looks at you, too.”
I turn to him. “How?”
“Like you’re the best thing since sliced bread.”
“You’re comin’ out with the weirdest shit today, bro.”
He chuckles. “You need any advice, just ask.”
“I’m like eight years older than you. What could you possibly know that I don’t?”
“Well, I know that the love of a good woman can change everything.”
Those words hit me like a ton of bricks. He isn’t wrong. I feel it in my heart.
“That’s true.”
“And you fell into my trap. So, it is love?”
I run a hand over my face. “You’re so fuckin’ annoying, did anyone ever tell you that?”
“Yeah.” He shrugs. “You did, repeatedly. Answer the question.”
I take a second to ponder what saying it aloud to anyone other than Nova means, but it’s Pipes. He’s my little brother. My best friend. I can tell him anything. “Yes, it’s love. The real deep kind, though, not just a flash in the pan. It worries me.”
“Why?”
“Because she has the power to ruin me, bro.”
The silence settles once more, then he says, “That very well may be true, but you know Nova. She’s in this for the long haul, right? You know she’s not gonna up and run and leave you broken-hearted.”
“Yeah, but nobody knows that for sure,” I say, biting my lip. “Do they?”
“It’s about trust. You either have it or you don’t. But don’t let your past try to ruin what you have goin’ with Nova. She’s into you, and I’m pretty sure she feels exactly the same way, so you should just go for it. Life isn’t without some risk, especially in the love department.”
“Spoken like a true philosopher.” I smirk.
“I’m just a regular guy, but I’ve got the love of a good woman behind me,” he says simply. “Not even bein’ smug about it. The problem I had was that Ididn’tcommunicate in the beginning. I let her slip away because I was a chump. I could’ve fought harder, but I was too worried about myself and bein’ rejected again.”
“It all worked out in the end, didn’t it?”
“Yeah, but that’s my whole point. If you wait too long, she’ll find someone else, and do you really wanna sit around and watch that?”
The thought inherently disgusts me. No. No, I do not want that at all.
“Of course not,” I say. “That’s the last thing I want. We’ve navigated things as best we can, considering that I am who I am.”
He side-eyes me. “You’re too hard on yourself.”
Pipes is one of the few who knows the real details, not even my mom does. I couldn’t let her live with those images in her head. She already blames herself and she did nothing wrong.
“I can’t help it. While I was dealing, I knew what I was doing was wrong. I knew it wasn’t good.”
“Yeah, and you were a kid, and you made mistakes. That doesn’t mean you had the right to be trafficked, Sawyer. Nobody deserves that, you were thirteen when you started doing that.”
I know he’s right, but it’s taken me a shit ton of therapy and ongoing insomnia to get over that fact. It’s not like I want to be like this, I don’t. But some traumas you just don’t move on fromfully. If I could take a memory pill and erase it, I would, but I can’t.
“I know, but if I’d have listened to Mom and my dad, then I wouldn’t have been in the situation I was in.”