Chapter Twenty-Four #2
“She’s not going to give up on you. She loves you.”
Her words startle me. When I look over, she’s watching me with a careful gaze, not at all unsimilar to the look my brother used to give me when we would talk about Jules. But the love she’s talking about isn’t the kind of love I’m aching for.
“Not the way I want her to,” I admit. If she and Mason talked as much as she’s hinting at, there’s no point in lying.
She sighs and props her head on her hand. “Aren’t you tired of running?”
“I don’t know what else to do.” I stare at my hands in my lap and shake my head. “I don’t know how to be around her anymore. Not when I feel like this.”
“So you’re just going to, what? Keep hiding and hope it magically disappears?”
I don’t answer. Mainly because, yeah, that’s exactly what I plan on doing.
“I know it’s stupid to be in love with your best friend.
It’s just, I can’t stop the way I feel, and I sure as hell don’t want to stop being friends.
But I don’t know how to separate the two without, you know, separating myself entirely.
I guess Sophia was right. You can’t maintain a friendship and be in love with the same person. It only leads to heartache.”
Chloe’s face scrunches. “I’m sorry, what? Who the fuck is Sophia?”
“The girl I met in Greece.”
“She told you that you can’t be friends and in love with the same person,” Chloe repeats slowly. “At the same time.”
“Yeah. She was…” I take a beat to try and figure out what I want to say and how to say it.
“When I told her I thought I was falling for her, she immediately shut me down.” I think back to the look on her face.
It was like we were in a horror movie, and she realized I was the killer.
I shake my head, finding it amusing now, but at the time, her rejection hurt.
“She said the only way we could keep sleeping together was if I didn’t have those kind of feelings for her.
That we were friends having fun, and that’s all it was.
If love was involved, it would just lead to a broken heart. ”
I remember the way it stung when she didn’t see me off at the airport.
How I texted that I was going to miss her and how it took her three days to respond.
It was a good summer, she wrote and offered nothing else.
Eventually, I stopped trying because it turned out that she was right.
When I left Greece, when I left her, I was sad, but I wasn’t heartbroken.
It was nothing compared to the pain I’m still feeling trying to move on from Jules.
“I tried to do that for Jules. Draw those same lines. I didn’t think one night together would lead to all this.” I motion to myself, to the absolute disaster I’ve become. “I don’t know what I was thinking or how I managed to fuck it up so bad.”
“I mean, I do,” Chloe says with so much confidence that it startles me.
“You and Sophia didn’t work because neither of you wanted it to.
Not because she drew some unnecessary boundaries.
You didn’t care for each other. You were in it for the sex.
Makes it easy to walk away. But you and Jules?
There’s a lot of love there, and, yeah, in that case, sex can blur those lines.
” I groan because, boy, is that an understatement.
“But you know that relationships built on friendship are usually the ones that last,” she says through a small smile. “Have you told her how you feel?”
I sigh, exhaustion seeping in. “She’s getting married, Chloe.
” Just like I told my brother when Jules was first engaged, even if I didn’t think it was a crappy thing to do, it wouldn’t matter anyway.
Jules already told me Brian was her chance at moving on and starting over.
I refuse to come between that or lay my heart on the line to someone who isn’t available to take it. “I can’t do that to her.”
“No, I guess not.” She takes a deep breath. “Jesus, this conversation is like déjà vu after New York,” she mumbles.
“What?” I don’t remember having this conversation with her when I was at NYU. Or any other time, come to think of it.
She waves my question away like it doesn’t matter.
“All I’m saying is, don’t you think she at least deserves to know why you keep pushing her away?
She thinks all this is her fault. Do you really want to keep putting her through that?
” I shake my head. “She misses you, and she’s hurting. So what are you going to do about it?”
I stay silent.
She pats my leg twice and clears our plates, leaving me alone on the couch.
For as long as I can remember I’ve either ignored problems or thought the worst of every scenario. I’ve played the what-ifs in my head for so long that it’s made me fear the future. I’ve made it impossible to accept what actually is and move on and heal.
Chloe’s right. I need to be honest, not only with myself but with Jules. I should tell her how I feel. At the very least so she knows none of this is her fault. Once I stop running, maybe then we can start to fix what’s broken between us.
Chloe leaves three days later, but her words stay with me. It makes me think about all the conversations I’ll never have with my brother. How I’ll never get another chance to tell him I love him. The thought of that happening with Jules, well, it crushes something inside me.
Unable to sleep, I grab a blanket and head out to the fire escape.
I sit with my knees drawn to my chest and release a deep breath, watching as it swirls like smoke into the night sky.
The edge of the city is quiet, and I pull up one of my playlists with Jules, the one we named brUCE! !!! and press play.
A soft melody comes through. Quiet, sad, and fitting.
Images of Jules in a white dress with a beautiful bouquet invade my thoughts. My chest aches at the thought of watching her walk down the aisle toward someone who isn’t me.
“I don’t think I can watch her marry him, Mase,” I whisper to the stars. “Why is it so hard to tell her how I feel?” The pain becomes almost unbearable when there’s no response.