“I said that I would never cry over a man and you made me cry.”
“I promise that I’ll never make you cry again.”
“You can’t promise that.”
“I swear it, Adrienne.”
Of course he can’t promise me that. That’s why I shouldn’t stand out here any longer listening to him. The problem is that I want him to say something… anything that will make the last few weeks ago away. I wish more than anything that we could start all over that day in the Wild Boar, but we can’t, and I’m not even sure if we did that anything would have happened differently.
I’m torturing myself for even daring to dream that something could happen between me and Jason. He hid himself from me for a reason. His life differs completely from mine and certainly bigger than mine. I don’t want to date a celebrity; I don’t want to be photographed; I don’t want my entire life documented, and I definitely don’t want to watch him get his brains bashed out every Sunday.
No, I made the right decision.
The two of us just can’t work.
“I’ve got to go, Jason. It’s getting cold out here.”
“We can sit in the car and talk for a little while longer.”
I look up at Owen’s living room window and look over at Jason’s car. Something is pulling me toward the car, toward Jason, toward hearing him out for a little longer — but I know I’d just be setting myself up. Once I got in that car, I’d never leave. If I’m ever going to stop repeating the mistakes of my past, then it starts here.
The relationship I thought I was starting was all in my head with a fictitious starving artist, not the man standing before me right now.
He pulls my icy hand into his large, warm one.
“Just five minutes.”
He pulls me closer, and I let him. I haven’t been this close to him in what feels like forever, but has only been a few weeks.
He leans his forehead into mine and closes his eyes. There’s a quiet between us that’s filled with beeping horns, voices of passerby’s, and other noises of the city.
“Five minutes,” he says again, and the warmth of his breath warms my skin.
Suddenly my lips part as if they have a mind and need of their own, but just before he seals my mouth with his own, Paige and Keisha approach us. They’ve arrived from the subway exit at Owen’s corner.
“Adrienne?”
When they see who I’m standing with, they both suddenly make gobsmacked apologies.
“Oh, we’re so sorry.”
“Damn, it’s Jett Caraway.”
“We shouldn’t have interrupted.”
“Go back to what you were doing. So sorry.”
Once they scamper away and enter Owen’s vestibule, I start to slowly back away from Jason.
“Baby-” he pleads.
“I gotta go.”
I run away from Jason and up Owen’s steps at breakneck speed.
This has been the hardest goodbye to date.
I hope it’s the last.
