29. Maya
Maya
I don’t know that I’ve ever cried harder in my life than I did on New Year’s Eve.
I know what he was trying to accomplish. I know why he did it.
But I didn’t know how bad it would hurt.
When we got back to her apartment, I broke down and told Chloe everything—about Jamie’s dad, about our tumultuous relationship—and I let out every ounce of anger and frustration I’ve been holding in for the last three years in the form of loud sobs and heavy tears.
We hooked up once. We only kissed twice. He wasn’t my boyfriend. Yet this heartache feels worse than any breakup I’ve ever experienced because its him.
I torture myself by keeping him unblocked online. I force myself to look at the images and videos of him out with his friends, at the photos girls tag him in when he buys them drinks.
He’s playing harder into the rich-and-famous-daddy role than he ever has before, and it makes me sick.
Drew checks in on me, and I’m not entirely sure if its because Jamie wants him to or if its because Drew is a good person. I’ve been telling myself it’s the latter, because letting myself believe the former—believe that Jamie cares enough to keep tabs on me—hurts too badly.
When Drew tried to warn me not to open Jamie’s bedroom door, I never would have thought he’d have another girl in there. Telling me he was hosting a seance—or a book club—would’ve been more believable than the idea of him having his hands on another woman.
I understand that he wants to push me away, keep me away from Ross. But I don’t understand why that girl was in his room in the first place. Jamie didn’t know I was coming upstairs with Beau. He didn’t know I was going to walk in on him with her.
Which has to mean he was genuinely interested in doing something in his room with her. Privately. Away from the party.
And that’s the part that hurts the most.
“Hey, Bug, there’s someone here to see you,” Dad says, calling from downstairs. Quick footsteps echo up the staircase before my door is swings open, letting in a hurricane of red hair and denim.
Dani throws herself across the bed, nearly putting her arm in my tray of watercolors.
“Who paints sitting in their bed?” she asks, shimmying up beside me to see what I’m working on.
“Girls who are too sad to paint standing vertical,” I deadpan, setting aside my brush and moving my canvas to the floor.
“Oh, honey, I’m sorry. I’m only teasing.” She lets me rest my head on her shoulder, giving me a comforting squeeze around the shoulders.
I told her everything about me and Jamie the minute she arrived in Pennsylvania. Her and Chloe both have been amazing supporters while I’ve been having my spiral, but Dani understands more than Chloe, I think, because of her history with Beau Warren.
I had known last year about her drama in Denver with a boy named Beau, and how this year, he’d come back and was acting like he had no interest in her at all.
I didn’t realize it was this Beau until she told me he went to school here: a detail she left out when she told me about him last year.
“I don’t know how much longer I can pretend like I’m okay, Dee,” I whisper, letting the tears fall.
“I know. But you really are going to be alright. It’ll all work out.”
“I mean…what about my dad? I haven’t told him…I can’t tell him about Jamie. It would crush him to know I had him and then he…It would crush him, Dee.”
Hiding my heartbreak from my father has been the hardest thing I’ve ever done.
If he asks one more time whether or not I’m alright or what’s wrong, I’m going to cave.
I’m going to tell him about how I was so close to having Jamie back.
I’m going to tell him about Ross’s beatings, drugging, blackmail.
I’m going to tell him about how I’m in love with the boy who hates his guts.
I’m going to tell him how his team captain ripped my heart out of my chest and stomped all over it.
And I cannot be the reason my dad breaks his sobriety again.
“We could…we could get an apartment together,” Dani suggests hesitantly.
I push to sit up, meeting her eyes. “You don’t want to stay at your parents place? You just moved in,” I question.
“I mean, I don’t have anything against staying with my parents. But if it would help you to have a change of scenery—some separation—I would be okay with that, too. Besides, we’re twenty-two, it’s probably past time to move out from our parents’ houses,” she jokes.
“It’s…it’s not a terrible idea. You’d really do that for me?” I ask, getting teary-eyed all over again.
She nods, reaching over to the bench at the foot of my bed, pulling my laptop out of my backpack. “Absolutely. We can start looking and pricing places right now.”
February
A knock on my bedroom door pulls me from the spiral of thoughts I’d let myself drift down into for the last hour. I look up to see Dani’s bright smile in the doorway.
“I came to see if you needed help finishing up packing.”
I’m laying on the floor of my childhood room, the last of the stuff from my closet packed up in cardboard boxes, ready to be taken to the new apartment. In my arms, I’m clutching Jamie’s sweatshirt—the one he let me take from the locker room and I never gave back.
I had it hidden in the closet so that my dad wouldn’t see, but for a few weeks there, I would take it out every night and wear it to sleep, relishing being enveloped by his scent.
It doesn’t smell like him anymore, though; it doesn’t smell like anything. It’s been shoved in the back of my closest for the last month, and I don’t know what to do with it now.
Dani’s smile drops when she recognizes what I’m holding. “Is that his?” she asks quietly, and I nod. “Are you going to give it back to him?” she asks, once again pulling me from my thoughts.
“I should,” I say quietly. “I could give it to him after class Wednesday.”
Squatting down, Dani takes the sweatshirt from my arms and puts it in the box beside me.
“Well, there’s nothing we can do about it right this minute.
Come on,” she instructs, pulling me up. “Let’s take this stuff down to the car.
First night in the new place, and there’s a bottle of wine with your name on it. ”
I laugh softly, taking the box and heading out to the car.