“No, but you meant it. What was it you said?” She was fuming. “Oh yeah. ‘You are so hungry for attention, Sophie, you would go with the first guy that showed you even a little bit of affection.’ Did I get it right, Noah? Or would you like me to repeat it?”
Fuck, fuck, fuck. I wanted to rip my own hair out, because she was right. I hadn’t been thinking. I had felt desperate, jealous, fucking angry because she wouldn’t even spare me a glance since that guy had introduced himself to her.
He was Eric’s cousin, only visiting during the winter, but none of it mattered to me. The only thing I saw was that I was losing her.
“Soph—”
“I’m right, am I not, Noah? So no, you don’t get to barge back into my life just because you realized that you still wanted to be friends with me.”
“I don’t—”
“You know what’s the worst of all, Noah?” Her eyes filled with tears, playing with my sanity. “I loved you so much. I would’ve gone up to the sky and back again if you’d asked me to. I would’ve done anything for you, because you were one of the most important people to me.”
“Sophie,” I choked out, unable to say anything else.
Tears fell freely down her cheeks, her pale skin luminescent from where they passed.
“But you didn’t want me or my love. You obviously felt differently than I did, because our friendship was important to me. You were important to me.”
“And now?” I managed to utter, asking the dreaded question.
“Now… Now you’re just a boy wearing the face of a person I used to know. Now you’re just a painful reminder that people we love, more often than not, don’t love us in the same way. And that’s okay, you know?” She sniffed. “Not everybody you meet will be worthy of your love, but I know better now. I know that I shouldn’t be wasting my time on friends who want nothing to do with me, and on boys who could bring nothing but a broken heart and years filled with pain.”
If she shot me, it would’ve hurt less than her words.
“So what you’re saying is—”
“What I’m saying is that you can keep your words, and you can keep your apologies, because I don’t want them. I don’t want to be there at that place again where I wondered where I went wrong. I don’t want to spend another sleepless night, trying to understand what was so wrong with me talking to that guy, what made you say those things. And the worst part, Noah… The worst part is that you humiliated me. All our friends heard what you said. All your groupies snickered while I cried. I waited for you to talk to me. I waited for you to tell me what happened, but you never did. I spent an entire month waiting for you, and you never came. You forgot about me. You don’t get to just waltz back into my life as if what you said didn’t rip my heart out.”
“Please, Sophie. I’m begging you. I would—”
“No. You do know what that word means, Noah? Or did some other things change as well since we stopped talking? After all, you are the star athlete of our school, and I’m just an annoying little girl who isn’t worth it.”
Fuck. Me.
She saw that message. She saw that fucking message I sent in the moment when I missed her more than anything else, when the guys were talking about asking her out.
“I’m late for practice, Noah, but I truly hope you have a nice life.”
She didn’t wait for me to say anything else. She didn’t look back. She just walked away, leaving me behind like I always feared she would.
5
SOPHIE
I wasas familiar with physical pain as a kid was with their favorite toy. I knew how much a sprained ankle would hurt. I knew that the bruises on my thighs, my arms, and my stomach would slowly fade from that ugly purple color to the slightly red, until they finally blended with the color of my skin, leaving behind just a slightly darker patch until they completely disappeared.
I knew pain because I couldn’t even remember how many times I fell and got up during my practices, and even my competitions. I could tell you that breaking my tibia a couple of years ago felt like I was dying, but even that pain was nothing compared to the one taking over my entire body.
Most of the days, the pain of missing Noah was more of a hum deep in my stomach, just a reminder. Today that pain felt like a hurricane set on a path of destruction throughout my body, and I wasn’t sure if the urge to puke came from the pills I took earlier to suppress my headache, or because Noah managed to rip my heart apart all over again.
No matter how many times I promised myself I wouldn’t go there, he still managed to make me feel so little, so irrelevant. All these feelings I’d been trying to push down and lock in a tiny box, suddenly escaped, coming up to the surface, reminding me every second of every hour how much it hurt losing your soulmate.
Hearts were fragile things. Easily lovable, but easily breakable as well. To make matters worse, they were trusting, forgiving, keen to open their doors again for the person that hurt them, that made them bleed.
I believed I stitched the wounds on my own heart when he stopped responding, when I decided to continue living my life as if he never existed, but in just one day, in just a couple of words, he managed to rip those stitches, and I was bleeding all over again.
I saw how sincere he was. I saw how much he wanted to talk to me, but how could I go back to what we used to be when I wanted so much more? A lot more than he was willing to give. I would rather live without him, than have just one-half of him, while some other girl, that maybe didn’t even know him the way I did, got all of him.
