He stares at me, eyes trailing over every inch of my face, the pain visible in the storm. “You know I would have…I would have been there for you. If you wanted to keep it.”
I give him a sharp look. “That doesn’t help, Anders. What’s done is done.”
“No, I mean,” he says, grappling for the words, “I just want you to know that I wasn’t entirely awful. I know you don’t believe it, but I would have stepped up. I would have tried. I wouldn’t have left you, I would have stayed in New York, we could have made it work. Maybe I could have gotten a job somewhere, my own place…”
He trails off, looking strangely hopeful, as if this is something he can go back in time and fix. But there is no fixing this. There never was.
“You say that now, because you know who you are now. You were a teenager, Anders, and as you’ve said many times before, you were fucked up. We both were. You can’t predict now what you would have done then. It’s not fair to either version of you.”
“Shay,” he whispers, voice shaking slightly as he breathes in deeply. “This is breaking my heart. That you had to go through all of that on your own. All because of me.” He exhales loudly. “I’m so sorry.”
“Yeah, well, so am I. I’m sorry it had to come to that. And as angry as I was, it was my fault too. It takes two in this situation. I should have known better.”
“I wish…I wish I had known.” He looks down at his hands, wringing them together. “I know why you didn’t tell me, but even so…”
“Well, now you do know.”
“No wonder you hated me so much,” he says quietly. There’s so much simmering pain in his voice that it’s a little punch to my heart. “I was awful. I was so fucking awful to you.”
The steel walls I tried to put up inside me bend, just a little.
I sit down next to him and put my hand on top of his. The feel of his skin against mine both calms me and makes me sad, because I’m worried that we won’t have any of these moments left anymore. “As I said, what’s done is done. Those people that we were? They’re done too. They’ve moved on. They’ve moved on and they’ve become us. This us.” I gesture at us with my other hand.
“And then what does this mean for this us?”
“It means the same as you said,” I say, tears starting to burn hot behind my eyes. “It means that soon I’ll get on a ferry heading south, and you’ll go back to the farm, and we can both say that we were able to make amends. That we finally got the closure we both needed.”
“If this is closure, then how come it feels like we’re leaving a door wide open?”
I give him an incredulous look. He’s the one who already said that he wasn’t going to be enough for me, that I was only going to get scraps, that I didn’t deserve a life with him, regardless of what I actually want. He’s already started the process of closing that opened door.
So maybe this proves it, I think. Maybe this proves he doesn’t know what the hell he wants.
“Maybe this is for the best,” I tell him with a sigh, my heart breaking in my chest. “Maybe we were just kidding ourselves. Maybe every first love is meant to stay there, as a first love. We should have left it where it was. In the past. In the garbage.”
His face pales slightly, like I just slapped him across the face, like he’s remembering the time I did. Okay, so my words had bite. So that might have hurt, but that doesn’t mean it’s not true. We should have just left this new relationship at what it was, a few rolls in the hay to dissipate the sexual tension between us, plus some sightseeing thrown in. Why the hell did we have to go and bring all our feelings into it? Why did we have to make this into such a fucking mess?
Because your feelings were there, from the very start, and so was the mess.
I ignore that.
I get to my feet. “I’m going to take a shower. I need some time alone.”
I grab my bag and head to the washroom.
I make the mistake of looking at Anders before I close the door.
If I thought my heart was slowly cracking open inside my chest, I feel like I’m watching it happen to him in real time.
His eyes tell me everything hurts.
The next morning, I wake up to rain hitting the window pane.
Anders is snoring lightly beside me, a sound that annoyed me before in a playful way, but now the sound cuts like a knife.