“I was making it perfect for you, ok?” he said, sounding pained and still not showing his face.
I put my hand over my heart and felt a laugh bubble up in my chest. I slapped a hand over my mouth to stop it. He did not look ready to laugh at this little misunderstanding yet. I just couldn’t get over how relieved and warm that admission made me feel.
“You remembered?” I asked.
He was very still then.
“I remember everything you say, Ellie.”
I crept closer to him and tried to move a hand away from his eyes to assess the damage.
“Are you crying?” I asked, completely shocked at the sight of his wet face.
“No!” he shouted again and moved away from me. “Maybe! Fuck. This hurts, ok? And you kicked me in the ballsagain, Ellie!”
I let him snivel for a minute and waited to see how this exchange would go. I hoped he’d forget everything that happened at the banquet, and we could just move on. But when he opened his mouth, it was clear he had other plans.
“You have some explaining to do,” he said.
I tried to walk out the door, willing myself not to cry, but his athletic reflexes kicked in and he grabbed hold of my arm. In a swift motion he put his phone in front of my face, and a screenshot of my old self stared back at me.
I felt like I’d been cornered. And when that happened, my fight defense kicked in hard.
“So, you stalked me too? Is that it?!” I snapped at him and pulled my arm away from his grasp.
“Stalked you?” he asked with hurt registering in his face… but I saw the wheels turning as he processed through what I had said.
“Too? Did you just say ‘too’?” he demanded.
I ignored him and started moving around him to walk down the hallway and find my keys.
“Chelsea!” he boomed.
It felt like a cold bucket or water had been dumped on me and tears stung the back of my eyes, threatening to come forward. It felt otherworldly to hear my real name come from his lips.
“I had a stalker, okay? Is that what you wanted to hear?” I hated how desperate my voice sounded.
He raked a hand through his hair and looked to theceiling.
“When?” he choked out, not making eyecontact.
He walked down the hallway to meet me in the kitchen.
“My freshman year of college,” I said. I slowly sat down at my kitchenette table.
He shut his eyes like what I was saying pained him, but I knew we were too far gone now. I couldn’t stop until it was out in the open and there were no more hidden truths between us. He wanted to know, and now he couldn’t get out of it. He stayed standing, not daring to look atme.
“I had a stalker at the end of high school who would text me things like, ‘I see you, you wore a new outfit today! You look nice’… and I thought it was innocent and just funny, honestly.” I shook my head in disgust of how someone had taken advantage of my youthful naïveté. “I thought someone was just being nice to me. With skating, I never had a regular childhood. I was always so focused and shy. I never talked to guys, so when I got those messages, I thought, wow, someone’s actually paying attention to me. But then it changed. The messages got aggressive… and I had no clue who it was or where theywere.”
“Did you go to the cops? I mean, did you report it?”
“I’m not stupid, TJ,” I bit back, then quickly regretted it. I had to remind myself that he was hearing this for the first time. It was a sensitive subject for me, and I’d already lived through it and had gone back over it a million times. He was gripping my kitchen counter so hard his knuckles were white, and I forced myself to swallow before I could power through the rest of the memory.
“By the time I left for college, I figured, whatever. I hadn’t heard from him in a while, and I thought- I moved. No one would follow me to college, right? So, it was Welcome Weekend at school and I was all in for making memories and having new experiences. Like I said, I never really went out or spent much time with friends because of skating and how hard I was on myself to have perfect grades, and to just be… perfect. It was exhausting. I felt like, well, that hard work didn’t really get me anywhere, did it? So I needed to work in a new direction in college. I needed to prioritize having fun and being social with new people. I needed a new goal- not something as impossible as figure skating. I needed something simple… A simple boy.” I shrugged, realizing how lame that sounded.
When I looked up, I could see him silently shaking his head, his eyes glued to the floor, and I wondered what was going through his head.
“So, I went out with a couple girlfriends thinking it would be a great time.” I felt a sick laugh come out of me at that. “For the longest time I blamed myself because I chose to go out, I chose to drink, I chose…to not be more careful.” My voice broke at that, and I could see through my teary vision that TJ was still shaking his head no. “Because that night, he did find the guts to come up to me…and I didn’t even know it was him until he told me.”
