“Are you willing to take responsibility for your part in how things ended? I know I screwed up, but we both had our faults.”
No matter what LeCharles said, I felt like an enormous weight had just been hoisted off my shoulders. By speaking those words, I had transitioned from being someone who blamed herself for everything to someone who could see all sides. The transition was only in my head, and I knew there would be plenty more times I’d have to prove it, but for right now, it seemed real.
“I mean, did I do some things wrong? Sure, I guess. I’m not perfect.”
He stewed for a few seconds. This wasn’t what I was hoping to hear him say.
“I guess if you went back through and looked at the relationship we had, you could point to some things I did poorly, some things I could do better, yeah.”
He’s beating around the bush.
“But what does it matter?”
Disappointing. There was no other way to describe it.
“Look, I suppose at one time, the two of us could have been something, but life just didn’t allow it to go down. Shit happens.”
For the briefest of moments, his expression had softened so much that I swore I saw sorrow on it. I swore that I saw regret on it. I really felt like I was seeing someone who, having gotten what he thought he’d never get, now began to wonder if there might be something more to it.
That moment, however fleeting it was, was something I immediately knew would be embedded in my mind as long as LeCharles remained a part of my life. Even if we didn’t date, I knew I’d remember that face as the true face of LeCharles. Not the face of anger, the face of judgment, or the face of disgust. The face of empathy.
But it was fleeting precisely because a moment later, he went back to being a rude guy trying to push me away.
“Besides, I’m having too much fun right now. I get around too much.”
In a weird way, I suppose the statement didn’t hurt as much as it could have, mostly because I knew what he was saying came not from a place of honesty or sincerity, but from a place of self-protection and fear.
But that didn’t mean it hurt like hell.
“Did you have to tell me that?” I said.
“I’m just telling you the truth, I’m sorry if it hurts.”
I glared at him. I could see on his face that even if it was true, it wasn’t what he really wanted. I knew LeCharles too well. I knew that he really wanted company and the one.
He probably slept with all those girls because it gave him the physical presence of a woman without taking on the risk of heartache and pain. I knew he hadn’t had the greatest upbringing with his parents, and I knew that a lot of times, I almost was like a surrogate mother to him. It wasn’t lost on me that if he was sleeping around, it wasn’t to have “too much fun.” It was to avoid too much pain.
“I don’t think it’s as fun for you as you say it is.”
Admittedly, I’d let my temper get to me a little bit. I hadn’t meant to be so bold and blunt with him.
But as soon as the words reached his ears, whatever softening up of him I had accomplished vanished. He became harder than even when we had started the... date, meeting, whatever you wanted to call it, and his glare looked like it wanted to cut my soul in half.
“You don’t know me nearly as well as you think you do, Rose,” he said. “You think I’m the same guy I was ten years ago? Then you’re far dumber than I thought. Small wonder you wound up being a fucking nurse instead of a doctor.”
You don’t know me as well as you think you do, either.
“People can find fun in different things, you know. I’m sorry that you’re as desperate as you are for us to get back together again, but let me make it one hundred percent clear. Whatever underhanded games you thought you were going to pull off, whatever bullshit you thought you could sneak by me by seeing me tonight, it’s not going to work. You asked for a meeting, and you got one. I hope you’re satisfied with it. Because you’re not getting anything else.”
He stood up with his last words. I didn’t dare utter his name and drive him away any further. I’d said what I had to.
I watched him walk out to his bike, presuming that I would never see him again.
What more could I do? What more was worth trying to do? What could I say?
It wasn’t worth it anymore. I knew it would take time for that realization to sink in, and I knew it would take time for that to fully take hold, but for right now, yeah. This was it.
But then something strange happened.
