Chapter Four
Wesley
(Five years later)
I can barely remember the last time I saw Poppy Kiplinger, but I haven’t forgotten about her. Her face has been forever etched in my memory since that kiss after prom, the one that lingers and festers in my thoughts like it’ll never go away.
They suspended me for the rest of the school year over the Tony prom incident, disqualifying me from graduation, and leaving me to fend for myself when it came to finishing high school.
As much as I hated it, I ended up grabbing my GED through Sierra Nevada Job Corps instead.
There, I learned how to really wrench on cars through one of their training programs, snagged a few certificates in auto repair and maintenance, and scored myself a job at Eddie’s Uncle’s shop until he got incarcerated.
Now the shop belongs to Eddie’s dad, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.
“You doing okay?” I question Eddie, watching as he angrily wrenches on a car that’s giving him shit.
“Not really.”
“Why?”
“Amber and I kinda got into it last night.”
“What happened?”
Eddie sighs, dropping the wrench so he can look at me. “She’s going to Vegas this weekend with Poppy and Pippa.”
Just hearing Poppy’s name has me suddenly interested.
“What’s wrong with that?”
“I just have a bad feeling, that’s all.”
Amber and Eddie have been in an unusual amount of fights lately, and both Rich and I are taking bets on how long it will be before they break up.
By the looks of it, I’m gonna lose this one.
“Maybe her going will be good for you? I mean, you guys have been at each other’s throats a lot lately. Ever since…”
“Don’t you dare say it.”
Smirking, I hold up my hands and say, “Wouldn’t dare.”
He goes back to wrenching on the car, refusing to acknowledge the elephant in the room.
But it’s hard to ignore what’s already causing so many problems between them.
Despite the fact that he and Amber are supposed to be getting married in a few months, which already has put a lot of pressure on his relationship.
About a year back, he got stupidly drunk at a party and ended up sleeping with this hoe named Jinafer.
He just recently came clean about it, and even though Amber forgave him, shit’s been real tense.
“How is Poppy and Pippa?”
For a second, he glances at me. “Why don’t you say what you really mean, Wes, and ask how Poppy’s doing?”
I slide up against one of the walls and shrug. “How is she doing?”
“As far as I know, fine. She’s getting ready to transfer to some Ivy league school in the fall.”
“Is she single?”
Eddie shrugs. “If you’re asking if she’s still a virgin, she’s not.”
Just the thought of her losing it to someone else, makes me regret not following through with that kiss. It’s not like I haven’t moved on myself. After the whole prom debacle, I ended up losing my V-card to some girl in Job Corps, after a little too much peer pressure.
It wasn’t awful.
It wasn’t good either.
Since then, there’s been a sling of girls I’ve added to my list, but none of them have ever meant anything to me, not like Poppy.
“Oh.”
He smirks. “Still regretting not taking her virginity on prom night?”
“First of all, she never officially asked me to take it. Second, I was tired of fighting a fight I couldn’t win. No matter what I did, she could never see me as anything more than some hoodlum felon, not fit to lick her shoes.”
“You are a hoodlum felon, Wes, just a bit more redeemed now. Job Corps was good for you. Made you the man you are today.”
I nod, still unsure.
“So, who’d she lose it to?”
Rich walks into the room and laughs. “If we’re talking about Poppy, she lost her virginity to some dude she was dating in college. His name started with a V… Victor… Vincent… no wait it was something preppier, I think. Vance. That’s it. Vance Ellington.”
“You’ve got to be shitting me?”
“I shit you not, my friend. She lost it to some preppy dude.”
“How do you know this?” I question, crossing my arms in front of me.
“Poppy and I talk. Unlike you, she doesn’t hate my guts,” Rich explains.
He motions for a wrench, and I hand it to him. “She has no reason to hate my guts, Rich.”
He laughs. “You confused the girl, Wes. Then you go and confess your feelings for her, kiss the hell out of her, and then left without a word. By the time she realized what she wanted, you were gone.”
Eddie nods in agreement. “If she hated you before prom, she sure as shit hated you more after it.”
“You guys act like I’m in the wrong here. She’s the one who made it blatantly clear I will never be good enough for her. If I had taken her virginity that night, it would’ve been a mistake. Her words, not mine. She made this happen. Not me.”
They both share a look before wrenching again. I hate when they do that.
“Don’t pull that silent bullshit on me,” I snap. “What are you guys telepathically communicating?”
Rich straightens, slowly wiping the grease off his hands with a rag. Eddie doesn’t look at me at all, he’s too focused on his own issues to give a fuck about mine.
“You want the truth?” Rich asks.
“No,” I say immediately. “But you’re gonna give it anyway.”
Rich exhales. “That girl’s not as put together as you think, Wes. She’s got major confidence issues. She’s spent years living in her sister’s shadow, never feeling good enough, always trying to excel and never getting the validation for everything she does.”
“She was valedictorian, accepted to all the Ivy league schools, and has always been more put together than her crazy as fuck twin. How is that not put together?”
Rich shakes his head. “You aren’t getting it, Wes.
You were the only thing in her life that didn’t make sense to her.
You created chaos when she needed it. Started fires she thought she could put out but couldn’t contain.
You made her fight for herself to be heard when everyone else told her to be quiet.
And then you just gave up on her. Like everyone else in her life.
“That’s not true—”
“You vanished,” he cuts in.
None of this was making any sense to me. She didn’t want me. Not like I wanted her. I left because it was better for her in the long run.
“That’s what she wanted, Rich! She only has ever seen me as a fucking felon. Nothing more.”
He laughs again, this time in disbelief. “The sad part is, had you kept pushing, she probably would’ve given in.”
“She told me no…”
“Her lips maybe. But what did her eyes say?”
Eddie finally looks up, waiting for my answer.
“They said keep going,” I respond in defeat, just as something cold and depressing twists in my gut—a memory I tried to suppress until now.
The real last time I saw her.
It was almost two years after prom.
I hadn’t planned on seeing her, but there she was, sitting inside a coffee shop, my Poppy Kiplinger, smiling and chatting away with some guy at a table just beyond the window.
She smiled at him. Not the polite smile she used on people she tolerated.
The real one.
One she never gave me unless she thought I wasn’t watching.
I stopped dead on the sidewalk, heart slamming so hard I felt sick and dizzy.
He was everything I could never be, sitting there in a tailored suit with a matching tie, a white button-up shirt with blinged out cufflinks, and a smile that could be fit for a toothpaste billboard.
His hair wasn’t messy and overworked like mine and his hands looked so clean they probably never held a wrench or saw a speck of grease in their life.
He was put together. Proper. The kind of man you read about in romance novels and always cheer for, despite knowing there’s some underlying douchebag underneath.
He wasn’t right for her.
Not in the slightest.
But she stared at him like he was everything.
And who was I to take that away from her?
So, I talked myself out of going in, even though I wanted to tell her how much I missed her and needed her in my life.
I wish I could’ve shown her how much I’ve grown since getting kicked out of school and how I built myself a world that meant something after everything else knocked the wind out of me.
But she deserved something better than me. Something not as risky.
He reached across the table and brushed his thumb over her knuckles, telling her something that made her smile.
She didn’t pull away or slap him across the face like she would’ve me.
She accepted his touch. Embraced it even.
And that’s when I realized she never would’ve given me a fair chance. She would’ve let me take her virginity and kept on going.
She wouldn’t have waited or tried to make things work.
Poppy let go.
And in turn, so did I.
“And for some foolish reason, you stopped.” Eddie laughs. It’s not a question.
“Yeah,” I admit.
Rich’s head shakes in disbelief. “That’s where you fucked up.”
I lean back against the wall, staring at the ceiling. “I thought loving her meant letting her go.”
Eddie snorts. “That’s the dumbest romantic bullshit I’ve ever heard.”
“Maybe,” I say. “But it felt right at the time.”
“And now?” Rich asks, neither of them knowing how I let her go again, handing her over to the other guy in defeat.
“Now it just feels late,” I say.
The bay door rattles as a car pulls in, work calling us back to reality. Eddie grabs his wrench as Rich heads toward the office.
Before he disappears, Rich glances over his shoulder.
“For what it’s worth,” he says, “she still asks about you.”
My chest tightens. “Why?”
He shrugs. “Some people don’t stop wondering about the what-ifs even if it’s painful for them.”