Chapter 25 Bennett #2
“Was that how it was for you after Lily …” She looked up at me and met my gaze.
“Said no to my proposal.” No one wanted to ever finish that sentence, and I couldn’t blame them.
I’d proposed to her privately, just the two of us, but the rejection felt as public as if I’d knelt in front of the Jumbotron at a Peaks hockey game.
“I may have wallowed much longer than advisable, but it really did get better.”
“Do you regret proposing?”
I continued to let her hair slip through my fingers, the act of it calming.
I didn’t like talking about this, but I was the one who’d brought it up.
And maybe it was finally time. “Yes. I wish I could say no and be all wise about experience and who I’ve become because of it.
But honestly, if I knew how it was going to turn out, I never would have proposed.
” In fact, I would have run in the other direction instead of asking her out all those years ago.
On the day Lily and I had our first real conversation, I’d gone to their house to pick Charlie up for a softball game, and Lily had been there instead.
We started talking—she’d even convinced me to skip the softball game that night—and that was it for me.
By the time Charlie got home from class, where she’d been held up by a TA who wanted her to redo an entire lab, Lily and I were holding hands on the couch, and I was counting down the minutes until I could see her again.
“Lily and I weren’t a good fit, but I thought she was everything I wanted. She has this way of taking charge and being bold, and I liked that. It was easy to be in a relationship with her.”
Lily was Charlie’s cousin, and I knew she adored her, for good reason.
Lily was the kind of person who would come to her cousin’s last-minute wedding, even though it was to her ex, and not try to talk us out of it.
She was willing to stand in as maid of honor with Rosie, even though the two fought like rabid raccoons.
But Lily had a tricky side to her too. She had a very specific way she liked things to be done, and she wasn’t always good at communicating those expectations.
I’d spent a lot of time mollifying her, especially after she felt I’d chosen someone else above her.
If we were together and I held the door open for someone else (even though I’d held it open for her too), she was upset.
If I answered one of Rosie’s calls when we were together and I had to step out to walk her through how to restart her modem or convince her she couldn’t write off a manicure on her taxes, Lily would give me the silent treatment until I could coax a smile from her again.
But it hadn’t bothered me, though my siblings insisted it should.
After Jules went to therapy as an adult, he’d decided to give me some unsolicited advice, in the way that people who had a tiny bit of newly acquired knowledge in a specific subject did.
You feel like you need to make yourself essential, so you’re not abandoned.
I’d pushed him off the boat when he’d said it. How was that for essential? There was nothing worse than know-it-all little brothers.
“Lily loved you,” Charlie said, heatedly. “I don’t get why she said no.”
“She didn’t tell you?”
“She didn’t tell anyone. Just shut herself up in her room for a week and then emerged and pretended like nothing had happened.”
Oh. I’d assumed she’d tell everyone why, and that’s when I’d taken off for as many excursions I could and cut off everyone who wasn’t my family. “I prioritized everyone else’s needs above hers.” I cut the last strand of Charlie’s hair and then backed away from touching her anymore.
“What? I don’t believe that for a second!” She turned her blazing eyes on me.
I shrugged. “If I was helping other people, I was neglecting her.” Making yourself essential to everyone at her expense … If I could push Jules off a boat again, I would. I made a mental note to do it next time we were out at the island.
But his accusation sat uncomfortably close to where I filed away true things in my mind.
“No. Nope.” She shook her head, then shook it a few more times, as though feeling the novelty of short strands of hair brushing against her cheeks.
“I know what neglect feels like, and it’s not watching your partner be kind to other people.
It’s when they treat you like an obligation or like an asset.
Or worse, it’s when they walk away to talk to someone and completely forget you’re there. You always come back.”
“Maybe I shouldn’t walk away in the first place,” I said quietly.
If I hadn’t, I wouldn’t have driven her off.
I may not have up and abandoned her, but what I’d done was in the leaving flowchart.
When I fixed Mrs. Mabel’s car, or took on an extra fishing excursion because a family was going out with their grandma for the last time, or ran to my siblings at the drop of a hat when they needed me, that meant I was walking away from something—someone—else.
Did it matter that I was walking away to help someone? Or did what really matter was that I was walking away? Even if only for a short amount of time.
And if I couldn’t be everything for everyone, how long before they left too?
Charlie took my hands in hers. “We all have to ‘leave’ at some point. We have work. And our families depend on us. We live in a remote community that relies on each other to survive, but people have to be able to stand on their own, without you.”
Her earnestness made me almost believe her.
I tucked her hair behind her ears, where it flipped forward to curl around them like a shell. Something about being out here made it too easy to delve into these deep topics. “I like the short look.”
Charlie clamped her lips together, looked like she was going to say something else, and then must have decided to let it go, because she shook her head again and let her hair fly like a skirt caught in the wind. “I love it so much. Thank you!”
Charlie threw her arms around my neck, and I nearly fell back in surprise before wrapping my arms around her too. I gave in to the temptation to breathe her in, a scent even better than everything nature had to offer.