“I think I’m gonna go,” he said abruptly. He looked up, but not at me.
“Jake,” I sobbed as I closed the distance between us. He pushed himself off the counter to face me, but he didn’t meet my eyes. My voice trembled, my eyes swollen and red. I looked anything but beautiful, but I wanted him to see me.To see that I loved him. To see that I was sorry and that it would never be enough.
“Look at me,” I begged, but he wouldn’t. “Please?”
The moment he did will live like a scar on my heart forever. The pain in his welling eyes, his furrowed brow knitted together in complete anguish and distrust—it was a bullet through my chest. And I deserved it.
“I love you,” I said. I cried. I pleaded. Because it was true. I did love him. The part of my heart that he had would always be his.
He wrapped his arms around me tightly and held me as I cried into his chest. I wanted to keep him. I wanted to hold him there forever. I wanted to go back to before I ruined everything—before I traveled home, before I shared that first kiss, before I opened my heart to anyone other than the wholesome man before me.
But I couldn’t keep him there.
Because he let me go.
He sniffed and cleared his throat before he held me by the shoulders. He wouldn’t meet my eyes.
“I’m gonna go.”
“Please stay,” I whispered.
He kissed my forehead.
“I think…” he said, taking a deep breath. “I think you have a lot to sort out. And I shouldn’t be here while you do.”
He cradled the back of my head and closed his eyes tightly as he kissed my forehead again. My heart was a pool of sorrow and loss. I hated how much I had hurt someone I loved. The man who loved me. Who cared for me, even through his pain. Even when I didn’t deserve it. I called out after him.
“How can you be worried about what I need right now?”
He turned to me from the door and, with the slightest, quickest ghost of a pained grin, he said, “Because I love you.” And I knew it was true.
My soul cracked, shattered there on the floor between us. He looked at me once more, and then he walked out the door. And I had no idea when I’d see him again.
I fell to my knees, completely submitting to the weight of my sunken world.
I had lost Jake. I had lost E. I had ruined everything and everyone. And I deserved every bit of pain I felt.
For once, I didn’t try to escape it. I didn’t try to hide. I let it wash over me in soul-crushing waves as I sobbed and cried there on the kitchen floor. I wailed for my pain, my treachery, and my deceit. I spent hours there, lying on the floor, in my broken mess of a life. The mess I alone had made. I swam in grief until I could no longer breathe, no longer move, until the earth beneath me would stop. And when it never did—when it was finally time to lift myself up, I grabbed E’s gift and braced myself for more.
I slipped off the twine and peeled back the brown paper carefully, as if one wrong move would detonate the bomb before its time. I held the CD case in my hands and endured the next wave of agony I so deeply deserved.
Taped to the inside cover of the CD case was a Polaroid picture of us. Kat had taken it during her random photography phase one summer. I never knew what happened to it, and my heart squeezed at the sight of it.
We were seventeen. Young and free and smiling widely in the front seat of E’s Cadillac Eldorado. She had run pastand snapped it just as we were driving off. Our teeth were gritted, our noses scrunched, our eyes barely open.
I remember that day—it was the summer he got his car. The sun was blazing, but the air had lost its humidity for the day, relieving us of its stickiness. Wispy white clouds skated across the bright blue sky as if they were painted in place. E put the top of his convertible down, letting the wind blow our hair in every direction as we drove through the winding roads of the Pine Barrens, listening to music and singing out loud. His crooked grin and soft brown eyes full of warmth and light kept finding mine. My chest would swell, and my belly would flutter with each tickling glance. My broken heart nearly smiled at the memory—at the boy who always saw me. At the girl I used to be. At the love that was there, even in a photograph.
I opened the case to a silver disc, with only two words written on it in perfect handwriting:
To You—
My throat clenched tightly, and my heart sank as I walked to the old-school stereo and inserted the disc.
It spun and spun, until finally the keys of the piano filled the room around me. And then—
“Of all the loves I’d had in my life, I’d rather have you. Whatever they were, no matter how nice, they can’t compare… Cause I know that I’ll love you forever, you’re mine…”
There it was. Every word we didn’t say. Every song we hid behind. Track after track, lyric after lyric, it was all there. The soundtrack to my heart.
