Chapter Fifty-One Julia
CHAPTER FIFTY-ONE
“Never let your past socialize with your present. The two don’t play well together.”
—Remington
Julia
I was pulling a load of laundry out of the dryer when I heard the doorbell.
Wonderful, I thought. In the time I’d been back, I hadn’t really connected with anyone, aside from Teanna and Lauren, and I was good with that. I wasn’t a big “social scene” kind of girl, and even if I had been, I felt far too closed off right now to want to open up anything new.
I sighed and walked over to the front door, seeing through the bay windows that it was still windy and raining, and the cottonwoods were nearly bare, the grass littered with their dropped yellow leaves.
But when I opened the door, instead of some Springfield resident, it was Bernard.
“Oh my God,” I said, shocked. “Bernie, what are you doing here?”
“May I come in, Miss Julia?” he asked, removing his hat.
“Of course, of course,” I said, gesturing for him to come inside.
He glanced over at the piles of laundry on the couch and looked like he wanted to laugh. “Someone has been putting this off,” he said, calmly removing his loafers and propping his umbrella in the corner of the entryway in that Bernard way of his.
“Yeah, that someone is me,” I said, my heart kind of hurting with how much I’d missed him. “I’ve kind of been living out of my suitcase, and today I realized it’s probably time to unpack.”
“I see,” he said, nodding.
“Why are you here?” I asked, curious. “I mean, did my parents send you to check in on me or something?”
My parents had been pretty okay with the idea of me coming back to Springfield, staying at our house with Lauren, and doing the online school thing.
We had a family FaceTime at dinner every night, and it didn’t hurt that my Uncle Dave stopped by in his patrol car every day, and our next-door neighbors—Milt and Edna Whittle—were always popping in (whether we wanted them to or not).
“No,” he said. “I was actually gathering some things from Remi’s cabin, and I wanted to stop by and have a conversation.”
“Oh,” I said as Bernard sat down. I sat across from him, strangely nervous in front of this kind yet intimidating man.
“I disappointed you,” he began.
“Bernard, I—”
“Allow me to finish, Miss Julia.” Even in his sternness, the man had a way of making it impossible to stay mad at him.
“I don’t expect to be forgiven, but I need you to know that Remi and I had been friends since we were children, if you can picture it.” He smiled, a warmth that radiated from his core. “I knew him better than anyone, and what I know for certain is that Remington thought of Damion as his son.”
I thought of Lou, with his funny old-man grin, and tried picturing him with Damion.
For some reason it made sense, even though it also didn’t.
Because Lou seemed too… sweet for Damion, yet they seemed remarkably similar when I thought of the “good version,” aka the lie, of Damion.
“But Damion has always had a… complicated relationship with his parents,” he continued.
“What do you mean?” I asked, wanting to know the backstory even though I wasn’t sure what it would change. Everything still hurt so much. But maybe if I could understand Damion, I might be able to feel less awful about everything that’d gone down.
Maybe I could move on.
“I mean that his parents aren’t like yours,” he said, leaning forward to grab two socks and fold them into a ball. “They love him, sure, but they don’t always put him first.”
It wasn’t surprising, this information. Even though I’d only seen snippets, the way Damion interacted with his parents wasn’t anything close to the warm relationship I had with mine.
But still, that didn’t excuse his lies.
“I’m not going to get into all of it,” Bernard said, reaching for another pair of socks.
“But Mr. and Mrs. Rutledge have always treated Damion more like an accessory to their life than their child. When he makes them look good, they’re happy, but they don’t have a lot of use for anything that doesn’t align with their… goals.”
I pictured his parents and the harsh way his father had spoken to me, a stranger.
The way his mother had spoken to my mom at the ball.
I couldn’t imagine what it would be like to have them as my parents.
It made me sad.
In spite of everything, I hated that for him.
“Remi was great with him, though, filling in as a stand-in parent while Damion was growing up. And those two—they were like-minded souls. The books they read, the movies they loved, the birds they watched; they were two peas in a pod.”
“They were?” I asked, my heart hurting for what Damion didn’t have with his family, for what he’d lost when he lost Remi. In my anger and hurt, I hadn’t really allowed myself to think of Damion’s loss.
Even though Damion had lied to me, it wasn’t fair that I hadn’t given him that grace.
“They could finish each other’s sentences, I swear to God,” he said with a smile, his eyes warm with the recollection.
“So when I discovered Damion was your tutor and it was clear he didn’t want you to know, I wasn’t sure how to proceed.
I trusted he’d do the right thing, and I didn’t want to hurt him, but Miss Julia, I also trusted that he wouldn’t hurt you. ”
“Well, he did,” I said quietly, but I felt the hurt a little less at that moment than I had, probably because I was imagining his hurts.
“I know,” Bernard said with a nod. “Sometimes we make the wrong decisions with the right heart.”
I looked at him and wasn’t sure if he was referring to himself not revealing the truth, or if he was talking about Damion.
After he left, I took a long walk, trying to process everything he’d told me. I walked laps around Buffalo Park, cranking the Favors on repeat, thinking about the kid version of Damion, trying to imagine him with Lou, trying to imagine him with Lou and Bernard.
While tiny montages of Riverside Park played along like the music.
Watched the sun descend on the Hudson…
If I let myself think about the good version of Damion, or the version where he’d pretended to be good, I could sort of see it.
You touched my hair and kissed my neck
And I felt so bad for him, for what he didn’t get from his parents.
What he deserved from his parents.
Still, it didn’t excuse his behavior. I’d trusted him and he’d let me down.
He let me down.
I was lost in my thoughts, so lost and far away that when I got back home, I literally gasped when I saw who was on my porch.
“Holy shit,” I said out loud, because sitting on the stoop like he was waiting for me was Will.
Oh, great—just what I need.
“Hey,” he said, looking up at me.
I swallowed as familiar blue eyes met mine, as his smile made me remember the time he’d chipped a tooth while ice-skating up the road.
“Hey,” I said, knowing I was scowling but not caring, because why the heck would he be on my porch? “What are you doing here?”
“Sit?” he said, patting the spot on the step next to him.
“Um, I don’t think I want to,” I said, sounding punchy. “Why, um…”
I just shrugged and trailed off because what the hell?
“Come on,” he said calmly. “Just for a minute.”
“Um.” I awkwardly sat beside him, plopping down onto the step, too shocked and confused to do anything but obey.
I kept my eyes on my shoes because I couldn’t look at him. I didn’t know his face anymore and had no idea how to talk to him. I’d had enough of boys hurting me in a year to last a lifetime.
“Remember when we used to sit here and watch the lightning bugs at night?” he said, a hint of a smile in his voice.
“Stop, Will,” I snapped, hating how pouty I sounded, but I didn’t need whatever this was. “I don’t want to remember.”
A pause.
“But of course I do,” I added, because it was impossible, pretending I didn’t remember our childhood. We’d spent so many hours on this porch, in this yard, running around this neighborhood.
Hide-and-seek, riding bikes, playing on the playground.
Then… older things.
Holding hands and kissing in the moonlight.
God, I realized as I looked at him that I had trusted Will since I was seven years old.
“Right,” he said, his hair falling into his eyes.
Is it weird that part of me still feels like I should brush it away?
“I know I was a jerk,” he said.
“Yeah, well, you’re a guy. It’s what you do,” I muttered with a shrug, because this wasn’t going to help anything.
“Is it too late?” he asked.
That made my head snap in his direction. “For what?”
“To apologize?” he asked, and the smell of Downy from his sweatshirt hit my nose, sending me straight into the past.
“For being a jerk?” I asked.
“Yeah, kind of.”
“Apologize?” All the feelings I’d been burying rose to the surface, but I realized I meant it when I said, “It doesn’t matter anymore.”
“The point is that you didn’t deserve it, and that matters. I was wrong and you need to know that. I am truly so sorry for hurting you, but, like…”
He trailed off, rubbing the back of his neck like he was searching for the perfect words to explain it all away.
But how could there be any?
“But like what?” I said, surprised at how calm I sounded.
Equally surprised that I didn’t feel any anger.
Not anymore. I looked at his face, at the face I’d known since before I could ride a bike without training wheels, and suddenly I just genuinely wanted to know how it’d all fallen apart so quickly.
How two people who used to do everything together had let it all go.
“What follows the apology?” I asked. “An explanation of what happened?”
“I don’t know if I have that, Jules. I mean… what did happen?” he said profoundly. “Sometimes I think I just got scared, I don’t know.”
“Scared of what?” I asked, annoyed by that response because we’d been far too easy together to ever be scary.
“Maybe… I don’t know, the way everything felt so decided for us.
It was like our whole life had been planned out for us since we were ten years old.
You and me, college together, picket fences, dogs, even kids.
I feel like it was what we were ‘destined’ for, regardless of what either of us intentionally thought through or wanted.
I think I felt a little backed into a corner, but it was a stupid way to act on it. You didn’t deserve that.”
“I didn’t deserve you cheating on me?” I said with a scoff, because his version was far too sanitized.
“I swear to you on my life, Jules, that she and I were never together like that when you and I were together.”
I looked into blue eyes I’d known as well as my own and I believed him, not that it made much of a difference.
“But you were texting her all the time,” I snapped as it came back to me. “You talked to her more than you talked to me. And then you made me feel like I was insane for being paranoid.”
“I know,” he said, nodding. “I may not have been doing anything with her physically, but I leaned on her a lot, and that was wrong. And to be honest, I think it’s why I knew we had to break up.
At some point, I realized maybe you and I were together because we didn’t know anything else, right?
Like, we were comfortable with each other, but I don’t know if we were in love with each other. ”
Huh? I couldn’t believe he’d said that. “Maybe you weren’t, but I know what I felt.”
“Do you?” He looked skeptical, his eyebrows cocked together in that nuh-uh expression of his when he said, “Because I know for damn sure you never looked at me the way you looked at the rich New York kid the night of the party.”
“What?” I said, shocked and slightly flustered by Will bringing up Damion.
“And not to sound like a creep, but your PDA in the back of your dad’s pickup…,” he said, his jaw clenched. “I think you know that we never kissed like that.”
Oh God. He was right. The universe had shifted when Damion and I kissed, and I’d felt wholly changed afterward.
No matter how hard I tried to forget it, I had every second of that kiss memorized.
From the way his big hands had felt on my cheeks to the sound of his breathing to the smell of his cologne, that kiss had felt… right. Natural.
“We didn’t ever kiss like that, did we?” I said in disbelief, looking up at one of the nearly bare cottonwood trees.
“Don’t say it like that, like I’m not good at kissing,” he said with a little smile, breaking the tension between us. “All the time we were together, part of me wondered if we gave up ourselves in the name of ‘us,’ you know?”
“What do you mean?”
Will sighed, searching for the words. “I just mean that in hindsight, we became each other’s shadows.
I liked watching football, so you liked watching football even though I knew you hated it.
I liked horror movies, so you watched them all with me, even though you had to cover your eyes and peek through your fingers.
I wanted to go to the University of Nebraska and suddenly so did you. ”
“Fair, but…,” I said, trailing off.
“But did you ever think about what you wanted, Jules?” he asked.
I wanted to respond with something snarky, but his face was too… genuine. He gave me an authentically kind smile as his words started to sink in.
Was he right? Had we become too much of an us that I didn’t know what I wanted anymore?
His smile lingered—all kindness and the Will I remembered.
It made me miss my former best friend.
“I truly am so sorry, Jules, for everything.”
I nodded, unable to say anything because my eyes were slightly itchy.
As the reality of what he was saying really hit me.
“Do you know what I’m the sorriest about, though?” he asked.
“Your terrible mullet?” I suggested.
“No,” he laughed before looking seriously toward me. “I’m sorriest for ruining the friendship,” he said. “You were my best friend for so much of my life, and then you weren’t, and I regret that part of it more than anything.”
“That was the worst part of it,” I agreed, watching as the wind made the leaves circle wildly in the air, sadness hitting me hard in the chest.
He left not long after that, but I stayed outside, just sitting there on the porch, staring out at the yard as I processed everything he’d said.
Everything Bernard had said earlier.
They were two wildly different people with two entirely different reasons for visiting me, yet the things they’d left me with felt… similar.
Related to each other.
Tied together with an invisible string.
A string I wondered if I was brave enough to pull on.