“What is up with you? You’re acting like you don’t want to see me.”
“Maybe I don’t want to see you right now,” I tell him.
It’s a simple enough phrase, but it’s one that always seems to require an explanation.
“Why not?” he asks.
“Because I’m getting sick of explaining everything,” I tell him. The ironic thing is that if he asks me to explain what I just said, I don’t think I’d have a clear response for him.
“If you want me to go, I’ll go,” he says, “but I’m here because I care for you. I wanted to tell you that whatever happens at my hearing, I’m going to play this off as if you had nothing to do with it.”
“I hardly did,” I tell him. “Once you had it in your head you were going to try to get me into the clinical trial, it was going to happen whether I did anything to help it or not.”
“What the hell is with you?”
“I’m tired, Jace,” I tell him. “I am tired and I feel like my body is being pumped full of battery acid, and that doesn’t feel so good. I’m tired of having to drag you along like some kind of errant child. I’m tired of waiting to die. I’m just tired, Jace.”
“I’ll leave you alone then,” he says.
I want to tell him I’m sorry, that I’m just lashing out. I want to tell him to come back.
I don’t.
He turns and leaves the room just as swiftly as he entered it, and despite everything else, I feel a tinge of guilt as he walks away, but that’s something I don’t tell him, either.
Chapter Eighteen
Saline
Jace
“What are you doing here?” I ask as Melissa walks through my front door, almost bowling me over in the process.
“Men are fucking terrible, do you know that?” she asks.
“Trouble in Shangri-La?”
“Seriously, what is it with you people? You’d think Ty would have been thrilled that I was finally free and clear, but once I ask him when he’s going to leave his wife, he starts stuttering.”
“Melissa,” I say, “I’m sorry you’re having a bad day, but I really don’t-”
“Anyway,” she interrupts, “it got me to thinking. You and me, we weren’t such a bad thing, were we?”
“I really don’t know how to answer that in a nice way.”
“Yeah, I get that you’re pissed and everything, but I mean, come on, the way we ended things? You can’t tell me that there’s not something there,” she says.
“Melissa, you spent what I can only surmise to be a good portion of our relationship cheating on me with your boss. What makes you think that I’m eager to jump right back into that?”
“Jace,” she says, “I love you. I know you love me. Yeah, things weren’t perfect, but can you honestly tell me that you didn’t make any mistakes?”
“I made plenty of mistakes,” I tell her. “That doesn’t mean that I’m just going to forget about everything that happened.”
“Just think, though, we could go right back to where we were and just forget it ever happened. You forgive me, I forgive you. It’s really that simple. We built a pretty good life here, didn’t we?”
“Melissa, what’s this really about?” I ask. “I know you’re having a bad day because of what’s going on with you and Ty, but you said yourself that you were miserable in our relationship.”
“That’s just because I wasn’t trying. I don’t think you were, either.”