“Don’t start.” He points a finger at me, but his eyes remain forward. I nod slowly, half of my smile giving way. I can’t help it. It’s cute seeing him so wound up over the genre he claims to hate the most, even if he is a little upset at the moment.
“It’s not a good love story if someone dies or ends up sick andthendies. If someone dies, then it’s a tragedy,” he explains.
“Maybe that’s what makes it meaningful, though. The fragility of it all. Like how heartbreak makes a good love song, you know? The bad makes the good even more valuable.”
He shakes his head. “Again, that sounds horrible.”
“It’sbeautiful,” I defend.
“Not for the people who end up heartbroken.”
My shoulders hike, my hand flying out to the TV. “Whois heartbroken? They lived happily ever after for the rest of their lives. They died because they were old! Old people die, Jake.”
“That’s not…” He shakes his head.
My eyebrows knit and I pause. “I’m confused. What are we talking about?” I ask, my tone more serious.
“I’m saying—what about Lon, huh? He was a nice guy. He doesn’t get a happy ending?” He pauses before his hand gestures to the screen. “He fell in love with a girl who was in love with someone else. And then everyone’s happy she gets the guyshe’smeant for, but what happens to him?”
His eyes pan over to me, and the hurt that’s pouring out of them squeezes my heart in its grip.
Suddenly, I get it. I get all the pain he’s been walking around with like a looming storm. I get where it stemmed from, and how it ruined him completely.
His words echo in my mind.
“Like I said… Things didn’t work out.”
My belly twists with dread as he drags a hand over his mouth and chin, averting his gaze out the tall windows that show only a gray sky.
I’m hit with a rush of guilt and remorse. Guilt for pushing him to endure something he’s already expressed a strong disinterest toward. Remorse for making him relive whatever it is he just did. For forcing open a wound that clearly hasn’t healed.
The air between us thickens, and I try to swallow through it. His jaw tightens as he exhales, the sound rough and tired.
“Tell me what happened,” I say in a small voice.
He shakes his head with a sharp breath, his eyes everywhere but on me. My heart squeezes painfully, but the ache of needing to know and understand every inch of his pain is too much to ignore.
I shift onto my knees, inching closer to him. I take his chin in my hand and force his eyes to meet mine. “Tell me.”
His sad hazel eyes close tightly. He doesn’t want to see me, and I accept it.
I drop my hand, but I don’t leave his side, choosing to ignore the way my hand nearly burns from the most innocent of touches.
I wait patiently, allowing him the time to form the words I know he needs to say.
“It was… I don’t know. She was…” He takes another deep breath and runs a hand through his hair. Disgruntled. Lost. Completely heartbroken.
“She was just a girl I met one day. We started hanging out, and then a few days together turned into years, and then…” He sighs. “I thought she was it for me,” he says with a hike in his shoulders. “I thought we were on the same page. I mean, there were times when she was nervous or whatever, but I just figured she had some baggage she wanted to deal with on her own since she never opened up about anything. When she kept me at an arm’s length, I just thought she was scared because she had some trust issues over things she never talked about.” He pauses, his eyes lost in thought.
“I worked so hard to be the guy she could trust. To be exactly who she needed when she needed it, no matter how I felt or what questions I had. I silenced everything aboutmeso I could be there forher. But it turns out, it wasn’t enough. She was it for someone else, and I was just in the way.”
There’s a weighted heaviness dripping in the air. I can feel every beat of his pain in the space it fills, and it makes me want to cry out for him.
He exhales, as if he just cleansed the words off his tongue. “It doesn’t really matter what happened. Bottom line is, they got their happy ending, and I got the shit end of the stick. Stuck picking up the broken pieces of myself that were left behind afterbeing completely blindsided when the rug was swept out from under me. Justswoosh. Gone. Like it never existed.”
I silently allow it all to sink in. After a while, “I’m sorry,” is all I get out. He doesn’t acknowledge that I’ve spoken. I just watch him—my stomach twisting, and my heart in a vice.
I want to tell him that hewasenough. That heisenough. That he’d be enough for me, if only I could let him. Instead, I don’t say anything.
