Chapter 61
“So…did you have fun?” Nolan asks as he pulls up to my apartment, his hands prescriptively at ten and two.
“Yeah, I did,” I say, then I catch his disappointment. “And sorry…I didn’t mean to disappear on you.”
I can’t look at him, but I can feel him looking at me.
“Well you did,” he says. “I was worried about you.”
I hate that phrase. “I was worried about you.” Frannie uses it all the time.
It skirts around the truth. Rather than own their own feelings, the sense of rejection or disappointment or whatever they experienced in reaction to something I did, they find a way of making themselves bigger and me smaller.
I’m the one they have to worry about because they’re the adult and I’m the child.
“I was fine,” I say, unbuckling my seatbelt and pushing my door open, eager to get out of this conversation. “You don’t need to worry about me.”
“Hey,” Nolan says, stopping me. “I think we need to stop seeing each other.”
It’s not that I don’t agree with his decision to break up with me. It’s just that I’m surprised. I thought he liked me so much. I thought he was the chaser. And I thought the chaser always keeps chasing. But maybe they don’t. Maybe only chasers with low self-esteem keep chasing.
“Huh. Okay then,” I say, and the sting in my eyes takes me off guard. I’m not sure why it’s there. If it’s just that rejection hurts no matter who it’s coming from, or if it’s specific to Nolan. I really did think he was kind and good. I really did want to want him.
“Look, I really like you, you know?” he says.
“And at first I thought you were shy. Or hurt from somebody else. Closed off. I figured you’d take some time to get to know.
To drop your walls. But then I realized it’s just not happening.
Because you don’t want your walls to drop for me.
And I don’t know why. And I tried guessing for a while.
But I don’t want to anymore. I realized I don’t need to know why.
I’m a good guy, you know? And I don’t wanna waste my time and energy on someone who doesn’t care about me the same way I care about them. Simple as that.”
“That…makes a lotta sense.”
I ask if he wants to stay friends, a question I’ve never asked someone during a breakup, and he says he doesn’t think that would be a good idea for him. He doesn’t think it would be healthy. So I say okay and as I leave, the car door scrapes the curb. I apologize, and he says it’s just a door.
I cut across the lawn even though the sprinklers are going, heels slung over my shoulder as I twist the straps between my fingers. I hear Nolan’s car pull away and I turn back to wave him goodbye, but he’s already halfway down the street.