What You Leave Behind Read Online Free PDF Page A

always been a little rough, but the words are soft, burdened with a heavy ache and full of repentance, and Harper finds herself disarmed. She turns to face him and finally sees that hollow glint in his eyes that matches her own—two halves of nothing. She slides her beer over and nudges it against his knuckles until he looks down at it and cracks a tiny, mournful smile. “I think you need that more than I do,” he tells her.
    The song winds to a close and Austin can’t fathom how three minutes could ever feel so endless. Playing it was a stupid decision, one he didn’t fully think through. He just wanted someone else to say all of the things he couldn’t bring himself to admit. A new song queues up over the sound system, the precise opposite of a heartbreaking ballad, and Austin can see Harper’s relief in the way her whole body seems to release at the sound.
    She sips slowly from her bottle and Dylan brings Austin another without a word. It sits untouched and unnoticed before him, as he can’t seem to look away from the severe slant of Harper’s jaw, the jut of her collarbones. All of her angles appear sharp and wrong, and the skin that barely blunts their edges lacks the luminescence he used to marvel at. There was a dewy glow to her pale skin even in the dead of winter, like it absorbed the luster of the moon in the same way other girls’ had soaked up sun in the summertime. If he didn’t already hate Liam for leaving, he would hate him for this, for decimating such a thing of beauty.
    After a while, Harper reaches the end of her beer and glances over at Austin. When their eyes meet, he quickly looks away, his long lashes concealing his solemn green eyes as they cast downward. She meekly asks, “Has he—Liam—has he called you?” It’s so quiet that, to Austin, it almost sounds like a secret, one she’s attempting to keep from herself. He shakes his head and fights himself to meet her gaze, trying his best to appear stronger than he feels he is, than either of them could possibly be in the wake of such a thing. Harper nods curtly and her stare shifts away from him to the line of tap handles behind the bar, the liquor bottles beyond them. “He hasn’t called me, either,” she says with a blunt, solemn laugh. “Not that I really expected him to.”
    “Look, I don’t know if you thought he did, but I just want to go on record and say that Liam—he didn’t—I didn’t know he was leaving,” Austin admits. “I mean, he didn’t even say goodbye. Not to me. Not to anyone.” He can’t look at her then, can barely get the words out of his mouth as he picks at the edge of the bar top with a ragged fingernail. “Two decades of friendship and I—I had to find out from your mom.” Austin reaches for the otherwise untouched beer in front of him and takes a swig of the lukewarm liquid. He downs half the bottle in one go, and when he’s done, he thinks he feels the crush of loneliness subside just a little. But then he talks of that night, and the pain pulses again. “That night, when he—I was coming in here, as Hilary was leaving—totally fucking frantic and all red-faced, like she gets—and she spat at me in passing something about how my—and I quote— asshole best friend left you on the side of the road somewhere near Medford. I didn’t know he left me, too. Left all of us.”
    Austin clears his throat as the details of the night come back to him, and he struggles to keep himself composed. It brings back so much that he doesn’t want to remember. He was six the last time he saw his mother, and he can still remember the way her platinum hair shimmered beneath the Arizona sun as she loaded suitcases into her station wagon and drove away. He lost his father that day, as well. He lost the man that taught him to play guitar and watched Sylvester Stallone films with him on Sunday afternoons, and gained a drunk who blamed him for the divorce and liked to break his spirit and his bones, in kind.