Today, I open it.
On top is a tangle of shirts I barely remember owning, a pair of jeans that don’t fit anymore, a cardigan with a hole in the sleeve.
And then I see it.
The dress.
Black, short, snug in all the right ways. At least, it was when Iwas twenty. Now it probably fits more like a sausage casing—these hips don’t lie.
I hold it up, and the memories crash over me before I can stop them.
That night. The party. Lexi zipping me up, telling me I looked hot. Armed with red lipstick, my game face, and a plan.
I walked into that baseball house knowing exactly what I was doing, knowing Chase would hear I was there and he’d come running back the second I cast the bait.
And he did. I played that boy better than the piano at a Christmas party—and I’d been taking lessons since age four.
I wore this dress the night I pulled him back for the last time. The night I decided I was done waiting for him to choose me and went out to force his hand.
I baited the hook with Aaron Taylor, and Chase bit like I knew he would. He always came back, because I was his home, his constant.
And also because Chase Martin can’t stand for someone else to play with his toys.
That’s what I’d always been—his. He knew it, I knew it. But that last time we broke up he took his sweet time coming back to me, so I changed the rules. He wasn’t allowed to leave anymore without consequences. If he walked away, I’d stop waiting.
So he stopped fucking around and then never had to find out.
I smooth the fabric over my lap, remembering how confident I felt slipping it on.
How determined. How… desperate?
Because looking back, I see that it wasn’t just Chase who kept coming back to our relationship as his foundation, his constant.
I did the same thing.
Every time we broke up, I felt unsteady.
What if he doesn’t want me anymore? What if he doesn’t need me?
Being Chase Martin’s girlfriend gave me a purpose—something more than just being the girl who was good at math or the sweet deacon’s daughter at church.
I didn’t play a sport, I wasn’t popular. I wasn’t the crazy and wild one in my friend group or the one with the super cool older sister.
I was always just… Tori.
And there’s nothing wrong with that. Nobody had ever made me feel like there’s anything wrong with that.
But I think somewhere, deep down, at the core of every person, is a desire to be something… more.
Not just ordinary, but extraordinary.
Like we’re born with this ingrained sense of not being enough, and we spend so much of our lives thinking we need to do or be something different, something more, to fix it. To exceed the unrealistic expectations we put on ourselves—or, in many cases, that others have put on us without ever asking if we wanted them.
I can’t say that my parents ever put those kinds of expectations on me. Mom has always been proud of me, in her own way, though her pride often came wrapped in platitudes and soft, church-approved smiles.
And my father… I guess I never considered his expectations unrealistic because, until now, I’d always met or exceeded them. Good grades, good behavior, a clean reputation polished enough to reflect well on him at every church gathering. I never tested the limits of his patience or his disappointment.
I was surprised, honestly, that he didn’t have an opinion or a comment when I never became pregnant during all those years with Chase. That probably had more to do with him being too self-involved to care about when or if Chase and I ever reproduced. He only would have cared if it disrupted his image—if it had forced him to step down from his role at church or explain away something that didn’t fit his picture of a tidy, respectable life.
