a / n :

this took a while. i'm so sorry. college got in the way. also, i needed to sort my personal life out to finally come up with an ending i know i can be satisfied with for this story. trust me when i say i constantly thought about it. now i know i said it's going to be the last chapter, but it actually turns out that there'll be another chapter after this (due to the small adjustments i had to make). sorry!!

once again, sorry for the late update, and i hope you enjoy this still! :)

love,
sam xo

* * * * *

E I G H T E EN

WHEN DEXTER WAS barely nine years old, he climbed up a Sycamore tree down the block to prove himself worthy of Declan Sawyer's friendship. Everybody wanted to be Declan Sawyer's friend back then, for reasons Dexter can't even remember or even bother to remember now.

All Dexter can remember is that Declan would often thrust his nose up the air, looking regal, the way kids who grew up in big houses were supposed to look, and every kid in their block would follow him around like a puppy waiting for him to spare them a glance, tail wagging energetically when he does.

So when Declan asked Dexter to climb the tallest Sycamore tree they could find, Dexter did so without question.

It was a plump summer day. Dexter remembers the crisp, dry air and the pretty glint of the sun as it shone bright and high on the whole neighborhood, making the leaves seem magical in their own right. His heart swelled with a sense of weightlessness as he climbed higher – and higher still – watching his friends shrink below him, cheering him on as his gangly arms reached for the next branch, and the one after, and the one after.

Dexter no longer remembers how, exactly, it had happened, but he does remember feeling weightless one second, and falling down, down, down the next. He ended back where he started, the ground solid and unforgiving, and knew something was wrong before he knew what it was, just from looking at his friends' faces, frozen and terrified, staring at him like they were waiting to see if he was dead.

He wasn't, he wanted to tell them, making a move to stand up just to prove it so, but pain shot up his right arm, white and blinding hot, and when he checked to see what was wrong, he realized it was bent in an angle that was never meant to be worn by his gangly, freckly arms.
For days after that, he had to learn to do things with his left hand, his right rendered useless by the solid white cast that Declan Sawyer would later draw on.

His days without Hadley felt a little like that – like some part of him had suddenly become useless, a part no longer working in time with the sum of the others, and everything just seems off balance somehow, sloppy and clumsy.

Saying goodbye to her felt a lot like climbing up that tree too. One second, he was feeling weightless – his anger and pain bubbling to the surface, bleeding into his words, sharp and stinging – and he watched as he burned the bridge that connected him to her, the flames licking at his feet, threatening to take him too, and it felt good. Like he was a kite, and Hadley was tying him down, and when he'd cut himself off her hold, he finally caught enough wind to take flight unperturbed.

One second, he was weightless.
And the next, he's sprawled on the ground, and something isn't right. Unnatural. Bent where it isn't supposed to be.

It's this that finally makes Dexter grab his phone.

He dials a number that has ingrained itself in his memory and she picks up in three rings.

"Hello?"

Her voice makes Dexter deflate, but he tries not to show this. "Andy."

"What's up?"

"Are you busy?"

There's a rustle, then a muffled thump. "Just packing," she replies, voice somehow less diluted than before.

The guilt sits in Dexter's gut. He doesn't know what to feel apart from it. He hears her voice and tries to find a semblance of the giddiness that it never failed to make him feel before.
He doesn't.

He can't tell if it's because his sadness about Hadley's absence is too much for a simple phone call to fix or if it's because he has finally admitted what he has been denying all along: he isn't over Hadley.

And Andy doesn't deserve that.

"I was wondering if we could talk," he tells her and waits.

The silence that follows is punctuated, and Dexter wonders if Andy somehow knows already, even though he put extra care into sounding a little less wrong than he felt.

"I don't have a lot of stuff to pack," she finally replies. Something in her tone tells him she knows. How, exactly, he has no idea, but it doesn't matter, not really. "I'll be free around five. I'll call to let you know."

"Okay."

His own voice sounds distant to him, and it feels so off somehow.

When the call ends, he feels his heart constrict. He never means for it to happen, but he recognizes now that he has made this mistake, time and time and time again, and Andy's just another casualty in the tragedy he and Hadley have been writing these past two years, when he always chose Hadley over all the other girls who have come and gone, sometimes explicitly, like with Tara.
Tara was always jealous of his closeness with Hadley. They fought so much that it tired Dexter out and when she finally asked for him to choose between her and Hadley, it hadn't been a difficult decision.

Or maybe it wouldn't have been a difficult decision either way. Dexter always chose Hadley, even in the subtlest of ways. It's in the way he thinks of her, even when he's out with the other girls. Not in an I-wish-she-was-Hadley-instead way, of course not, but in a Hadley-would-definitely-love-this-cake-so-should-I-buy-her-a-slice? way. And it wasn't just cake. It was everything.

I should definitely rewatch this movie with Hadley.

Or

Hey, do you mind stopping by that book shop later? I think I saw a title my friend Hadley had been looking for in ages.

Or Oh, god, what's this song called? Hadley would absolutely just adore it.

It's like the image of her smile is always just lingering at the back of his head and her happiness always exists alongside his.

Some of the girls he went out with didn't mind. Or at least they claimed they didn't. Henry always told him they're just saying so, to spare themselves from having Dexter choose between their relationship and his friendship with Hadley.

"Hadley puts a strain on all your relationships, Dex," Henry told him once, but he just waved him off, insisting that if any of those girls really loved him, then his friendship with Hadley shouldn't even be an issue.

And Dexter really believed this.
Maybe it was true, to an extent, but there's no denying it now. Dexter is in love with Hadley.

He doesn't know if he ever actually stopped loving her, or if he really did get over her at some point, and just ended up falling in love with her again now.

That's where the line gets blurry.

And Andy deserves more than that blurry line.

* * *

Hadley hasn't seen much of the town ever since her fallout with Dexter. She'd stayed cooped up in her room, or somewhere over Sunset Road with Josh for the past number of days, and only when she's forced to go outside – told to run errands by her father – does she realize how much of it she's missing.

In the early morning haze of the town, everything seems subdued. But Hadley has lived here long enough to know that beneath the faded backdrop hums a life that's just waiting to be woken up.

Hadley's going to miss this.

She tries to soak it all in, driving slowly, but the problem is that everything in this town is so clearly tangled into the mess she made out of her life, and everywhere she goes, she's reminded of Dexter.

Hadley's going to miss him.

She already does. And for today, she allows herself to wallow up in her feelings. She idles around her neighborhood, pausing at the park where she and Taylor used to play when they were kids, and where she and Dexter would later break up.
Her chest constricts at the sight of the swing set, where she once sat, expecting him to walk away. He had not. Not then.

She pushed him away thinking she could handle watching him walk away.

How foolish she was to think she could.

She fumbles for her phone now, gripping it tight, on the brink of giving in to the ever present urge to call him.

She almost does. She almost always does, driven over by the memory of his profile, his eyelashes light brown in the sun's beaming rays, or the imprints of his star-lit dreams, spoken aloud in the quiet space between her heart and his, cutting sharply into the reality of their story, a reminder that he's so much more.

So.

Much.

More.

Dexter  was a comet, fiery and bright but fleeting nonetheless, and now that he has passed her by, she's grasping at nothing but the comet's burning tail, neither tangible nor reachable.

She was stupid to let him go.

This thought is tinged with the heartbreak of her never being enough for him, and her selfish hands itch to take him back. Even if he deserves better. Even if he deserves to orbit around something less lackluster, something more alive than she could ever be.

She wants him back. She always does.

And now her phone sits in her hand, and his number's displayed on the screen, peering up at her like a teasing smile, tempting her with the fading memory of his half-laugh, a breath taken too quickly over the static of the phone.

She wants to call him.

But her phone rings before she can.
For a breathless second, she thinks it's him, and her vision blurs.

But it can't be him.

And it's not.

It's Josh.

And she realizes if there's a phone call she needed to make, it was this. Her heart has been stretched thin for trying to love for the wrong reasons, and Josh deserves more than her too-thin paper heart.

Josh deserves a girl with daisies blooming in her smile, a girl whose eyes catch light and pockets it for later, because you never know when you might need it. He deserves someone he could converse with until the night blurs into daylight; to live in a story where he isn't entangled in the mess that is Hadley's feelings.

She is guilty of binding him to her for the wrong reasons. For holding on, and for letting him hold on, when he could just as easily free himself from her miserable grip and make his way back to his daisy girl.

Hadley has been unfair to him.

It's time, she thinks, to stop being so.

"Hello?" she says into the phone, pressing it close to her ear.

"Hey," Josh replies brightly.
"Remember that whole dinner thing I was supposed to attend to make my dad look good? It's cancelled. Cancelled. Where are you? I'll come pick you up. There's this new gelato place in –"

"Josh?" she cuts him of, and before she could lose her nerve, she says, "We need to talk."

There's silence. Then, abruptly, "Oh."

Her grip on the phone tightens. "I'll be there in thirty minutes."

* * *

Talking to Andy leaves a hollow feeling in Dexter's gut, but it does lift a load off his shoulders, and he figures he must have made the right decision.

Andy had been surprisingly pleasant about it. In fact, all she'd ever really given him was a wry smile. "I always knew something was up between you and Hadley," she said, not unkindly.

She even thanked him. "For this summer." And when they parted, she gave him a kiss on his right cheek.

The whole thing had left him feeling somewhat off. He watched her walk away, hair bouncing and skirt fluttering, and Dexter almost wanted to call her back. He was attracted to her – there was no doubt about it – but attraction was just attraction, and maybe in an alternate reality, he really could have fallen for her.

But the reality he lives in is one where Hadley's presence makes that impossible.

The sad thing is that Hadley isn't even present in his life anymore. At least, not physically. She hasn't been for days now, ever since he walked away from her.

Their days have gone and passed, and whatever's left of their summer is just as quickly dwindling down.

And honestly, Dexter should have known that Hadley would never call, right from the moment he walked away. It's the way it has always been, and Dexter can't for the life of him figure out why he expected otherwise.

Hadley is Hadley. There's no changing that. It's a realization that comes to him to paint a bitter smile on his face, and though it stings – quite a lot – he's beginning to understand that the only thing he can do is accept Hadley's silence and everything else that it implies.

And if there's one thing he should have known all this time, it's that in the end, he would be the one retracing his steps back to her, undoing the goodbye he so self-righteously woven into the unfinished narrative of their story.

Wait. No. Not undo.

More like – rewrite.

He will rewrite their goodbye, dilute the acid of it with the truth. Make it so that it stings less – and weighs less. Because the hushed up truth sits heavy in his heart.

And only now does Dexter finally realize that it does not exist there so he could fix them.

His resolve solidifies, and soon he finds himself walking a path his feet knew by heart, and heart knew through moments. Snapshots of a story told in reverse, of lovers blurring into best friends, when it should have been best friends falling for each other, taking the leap together hand in hand.

These roads have watched their story inhale – the many possibilities of something more put together side by side – and exhale – only to be disassembled, picked apart by the reality that some bits just don't fit together quite the right way, and the only thing keeping them from falling apart is this town holding them together.

But Hadley is leaving in three days, and Dexter is leaving in five.

And so Dexter walks, down these familiar streets, a silhouette against the twilight sky of a sunlit town he's soon to leave behind, once again on his way back to her.

* * *

But when Dexter arrives at Hadley's house, she is nowhere to be found.
He tries the shop.

Taylor sees him first. Judging from the way his right brow rises at the sight of Dexter, it's evident he knows what happened between him and Hadley. Or at least knew that something had, indeed, happened.

"Been a while," Taylor says as Dexter approaches the counter. "Are you looking for Hadley?"

"Yeah," he says, his eyes flickering to the closed kitchen door. "Is she here?"

"That," Taylor says, "is a wonderful question."

Dexter brows furrow.

"Well, my friend, we" the older boy says, "are also wondering where she is."

"What do you mean?"

"Dad asked her to run errands earlier this morning. She was supposed to be here by lunch, but she never showed, and we can't reach her cell either."

Worry immediately tugs at Dexter. "Have you asked Sadie? Aanya?"

"Yes," Taylor replies. "Sadie told me she got to talk to her around eleven this morning. Said that Hadley called to tell her something."

Dexter doesn't miss the way Taylor's gaze changes when he says this, and Dexter can only ask, "Did she say what it was?"

Taylor pauses for a moment, as if he was thinking whether or not he should tell Dexter. He takes a breath, and then, "Said she was on her to break up with Josh."

The words don't register at first, and when they do, Dexter staggers back. He feels dizzy. Disoriented. It's like the world suddenly heaved beneath his feet without warning.

Before he could recover, his phone rings. Dexter fishes it out of his pocket, and checks to see who it is.

It's Adrian.

He excuses himself from Taylor before turning back, out the shop, accepting the call. He presses it against his ear and says hello just as the door swings shut behind him.

"Where are you?" Adrian asks him.

"In town. I'm – uh – I'm at the candy shop. Hadley's, I mean."

"Well, you better come home fast," Adrian tells him, and before Dexter can ask why, he says, "Hadley's here looking for you."