He laughs. “You confused the girl, Wes. Then you go and confess your feelings for her, kiss the hell out of her, and then left without a word. By the time she realized what she wanted, you were gone.”
Eddie nods in agreement. “If she hated you before prom, she sure as shit hated you more after it.”
“You guys act like I’m in the wrong here. She’s the one who made it blatantly clear I will never be good enough for her. If I had taken her virginity that night, it would’ve been a mistake. Her words, not mine. She made this happen. Not me.”
They both share a look before wrenching again. I hate when they do that.
“Don’t pull that silent bullshit on me,” I snap. “What are you guys telepathically communicating?”
Rich straightens, slowly wiping the grease off his hands with a rag. Eddie doesn’t look at me at all, he’s too focused on his own issues to give a fuck about mine.
“You want the truth?” Rich asks.
“No,” I say immediately. “But you’re gonna give it anyway.”
Rich exhales. “That girl’s not as put together as you think, Wes. She’s got major confidence issues. She’s spent years living in her sister’s shadow, never feeling good enough, always trying to excel and never getting the validation for everything she does.”
“She was valedictorian, accepted to all the Ivy league schools, and has always been more put together than her crazy as fuck twin. How is that not put together?”
Rich shakes his head. “You aren’t getting it, Wes. You were the only thing in her life that didn’t make sense to her. Youcreated chaos when she needed it. Started fires she thought she could put out but couldn’t contain. You made her fight for herself to be heard when everyone else told her to be quiet. And then you just gave up on her. Like everyone else in her life.
“That’s not true—”
“You vanished,” he cuts in.
None of this was making any sense to me. She didn’t want me. Not like I wanted her. I left because it was better for her in the long run.
“That’s what she wanted, Rich! She only has ever seen me as a fucking felon. Nothing more.”
He laughs again, this time in disbelief. “The sad part is, had you kept pushing, she probably would’ve given in.”
“She told me no…”
“Her lips maybe. But what did her eyes say?”
Eddie finally looks up, waiting for my answer.
“They said keep going,” I respond in defeat, just as something cold and depressing twists in my gut—a memory I tried to suppress until now.
The real last time I saw her.
It was almost two years after prom.
I hadn’t planned on seeing her, but there she was, sitting inside a coffee shop, my Poppy Kiplinger, smiling and chatting away with some guy at a table just beyond the window.
She smiled at him. Not the polite smile she used on people she tolerated.
The real one.
One she never gave me unless she thought I wasn’t watching.
I stopped dead on the sidewalk, heart slamming so hard I felt sick and dizzy.
He was everything I could never be, sitting there in a tailored suit with a matching tie, a white button-up shirt with blinged out cufflinks, and a smile that could be fit for a toothpaste billboard. His hair wasn’t messy and overworked like mine and his hands looked so clean they probably never held a wrench or saw a speck of grease in their life. He was put together. Proper. The kind of man you read about in romance novels and always cheer for, despite knowing there’s some underlying douchebag underneath.
He wasn’t right for her.
Not in the slightest.
