Chapter 7 #2
I don’t bother to argue the point that it’s the only thing I care about. I won’t win that fight.
“Nobody said we had to make small talk,” I mutter.
“Touché.”
“This road trip was your idea,” I point out.
“Because I know how important it is to you to get home for Christmas.”
Something about the way he says that takes my breath away, makes me all hot and furious inside. “So magnanimous!”
“Come on, Roar, you didn’t have another option, and I was right there.”
“I could’ve rented a car.”
He snorts. “You think there are any rental cars left? Tomorrow is Christmas Eve.”
Deep down, I know that.
But I still bristle. “Why did you come to check on me?”
“You really want to pick a fight about me trying to be a good friend?”
“Maybe. Yes.” I sigh. “No.”
He nods. Then he groans. “I don’t know how to turn off the part of my brain that thinks about you.
You, uh, still have your location shared with me.
I was checking to see where you were on the road, and when I saw that you hadn’t left yet, I knew there was a problem.
And when there’s a problem for you, Rory, there’s a problem for me. ”
Hot tears press against the inside of my eyelids. I wish his desire to fix my problems didn’t extend to a need to fix me, too.
“I don’t even know why we fight anymore,” I say, after a long stretch of silence. “Half the time I’m not sure what we’re even fighting about sometimes.”
Garrett shoots me a surprised look. “Yeah,” he says slowly. “Like we just keep picking up an old fight that we never finished?”
That feels surprisingly accurate. We never got closure on our breakup.
We went from raw emotion to a cold agreement that we needed a break so fast, there was no processing time.
And then it was painfully polite, like a Cold War, followed by heated clashes that turned sexy every time instead of actually resolving anything.
“It’s not as if we had a lot of practice arguing,” I muse out loud. “We didn’t fight this much when we were together. I mean, before those last couple months.”
His jaw flexes. “Is that how you remember it?”
I blink. “Do you remember it differently? When did we fight?”
His body tenses, his shoulders hunching up around his ears. His hands grip the steering wheel so tight, his forearms flex.
“Only like… every four years.” He says flatly. “Or five, in this case.”
I frown. “What do you mean, once every four or five years?”
“Every time you finished another chunk of your school, Roar, you moved the goalposts. And when it happened again and again, I started to feel like everything we had agreed upon to that point was a lie.”
“A lie?” Oh, this, this feels real. This feels raw, but we’re getting somewhere now. Yes, we do need closure on this, apparently, because I never lied to him, ever.
I swallow hard, staring out at the frozen highway unfolding ahead of us.
My throat tightens, but I don’t cry. Not yet.
But God, we are long overdue for this fight.
And maybe, finally, for what comes after it.
My voice is barely above a whisper. “I never lied to you. You knew. You knew, from before we started dating. You knew when I was seventeen that I wanted to be a doctor.”
“And you knew I wanted to get married.”
I’m struck speechless.
His voice drops low. “How many times did I ask you when I could propose? When I could ask you to marry me, and you would say yes?”
“You asked me that when we were kids.”
“And you said, when you finished university. And I took that to mean your undergraduate program. So you get your degree, you have graduation, and it’s a big fucking moment.
And I know better. I know not to make that moment about us, because that moment is entirely about you.
I know that, and I am so fucking proud of you, but there was a small part of me that, deep down, was like, yes, fucking finally, now we can talk about the future.
Except when I tried, you said, ahhh, maybe after medical school.
Do you remember? And then we had the same conversation again when you were looking at residencies.
There was never any space in our relationship to talk about how fucking earth shattering it felt for me when every conversation about marriage was pushing it off into the future—”
“But I didn’t say,” I interrupt him, because this isn’t fair. “I didn’t say, you couldn’t ask me to—I never said I didn’t want to get engaged. It was just a wedding that I thought we should wait on. And I don’t remember fighting about any of that.”
“We didn’t.” He growls low under his breath. “We fought about other stuff, and then you would get into the groove of a new program, a new rotation, a new placement, and it would all be forgotten.”
“By me, but apparently not by you.” My chest hurts. “Is that why we never got engaged?”
The question catches at something inside me.
Because, yeah—maybe we weren’t officially engaged, but we felt engaged.
We were us. All the way through med school.
And when I got my residency in the same city, it felt like the universe was finally giving us a clear path to a home and a future for our little family of two.
“Garrett… I didn’t know.”
“Yeah. That’s on me. I never told you. Because the time was never right and the goalposts kept moving. But most of the time, I was happy and so it was fine.”
My heart lodges in my throat. “So what changed?”
“At some point this past year… I realized you weren’t happy. And that was unbearable.”