Chapter 7 #2
“Ha! I like her Jakey. I really do.” He holds his hands over his heart before he spins out the door.
I exhale in relief, which makes me notice how long I was holding my breath.
I take the few steps from the kitchen into the living area, my hands in the pockets of my sweats, a strange, queasy feeling beginning to settle.
“So…” I start. Alana looks up, flipping through the pages of her notebook.
“So,” she echoes.
We stand in awkward silence for a moment as my brain struggles to find a topic of conversation. That Macey thing threw me off more than I expected. I scratch the back of my head, hoping the action will spark a thought like flint in a lighter. Alana raises a questioning brow, waiting.
“The projections?”
“Oh, yeah,” I snap to attention, remembering how I got her here in the first place. “Turns out I was wrong. Melody in Motion is great.”
“You were wrong?” She closes the book, tucking it under her arm as they both cross over her chest.
“Yeah,” I shrug. “I was using the wrong factor.”
“Factor for what?”
Dammit. Her head tilts, and my heart starts to beat at a nervous pace. I wasn’t expecting a cross-examination.
“Uh…” I stall, scratching my chest, then under my chin, begging my brain to manifest a response in the next second. “The growth one?”
Her eyes narrow, and a surge of worry passes through me for a second as I wonder if I’m actually in trouble this time. But then she tongues her cheek to hide her smile.
I know I’ve been caught coercing her into coming over, but surprisingly, I don’t mind. So what if she knows I like to hang out with her? Friends like to hang out. That’s a normal platonic thing to like.
“Fine,” she says with a drop of her arms. She plops onto the couch, dropping her notebook on the coffee table and grabbing the remote. “But you know what this means, right?”
“No,” I sigh, accepting defeat without ever putting up a fight. Why bother? I owe her, after all.
I fall onto the couch beside her with just enough space between us. “But I can tell I’m not gonna like it.”
“Oh, you’re gonna love it, baby.” Her playful devious grin lights up my chest, placing a smile on my lips without even trying.
“Oh, so it’s okay when you say it?”
“Ew, shut up!” she says with a punch to my shoulder. I chuckle and rub my arm in response.
She searches through the streaming networks before she finds her selection. When her eyes illuminate, my heart warms. I realize I’ve been watching her the entire time, so I force my eyes to the TV, my smile falling.
“No.”
“Yes!” she nearly squeals.
“Allie, no. Please—”
“Yup. Consider it payback for making me trek all this way for nothing.”
“It’s like six blocks!” I defend. I wasn’t going to complain, but this hardly seems fair.
“And it’s raining, which makes it worse. I believe someone you know personally considered rain highly inconvenient, no?”
“It’s barely even drizzling.” My hand motions to the window as I give her a pleading look, begging for another option. The shimmer in her eyes tells me she’s already won. I wouldn’t stand a chance if I wanted to. “Ugh,” I grunt, my head falling backward. “This one time!”
She giggles victoriously, and then she hits play.
I take a deep breath, letting the consequence of my actions completely roll over me as the opening credits of The Notebook begin to mark the screen.
ALANA
“Was that not the greatest love story of all time?” I ask through the knot in my throat. It doesn’t matter how many times I see it, I can never not cry.
“Jake?” He’s been silent for the last twenty minutes. His lips puckered as he bites the inside of his cheek. “Hello?”
“Tell me why that’s a great story.”
His tone is flat and almost…heavy. It takes me by surprise.
“Well, I mean…they loved each other. They were meant to be. He waited for her—”
“And then she gets Alzheimer’s and dies,” he counters.
“Well, they die together, but after living a whole lifetime with one another.”
He releases a breath. “That’s horrible.”
“Aww, Jakey,” I tease as I nudge his shoulder, trying my best to lighten the mood. “Are you sad?”
“Yes, I’m sad. That was a sad story!”
I hold back a laugh, tucking my lips between my teeth.
“That was worse than Titanic, and that movie kills me.”
“You…” I trail off, trying my hardest not to giggle. “You cry at Titanic?”
“Don’t start.” He points a finger at me, but his eyes remain forward. I nod slowly, half of my smile giving way. I can’t help it. It’s cute seeing him so wound up over the genre he claims to hate the most, even if he is a little upset at the moment.
“It’s not a good love story if someone dies or ends up sick and then dies. If someone dies, then it’s a tragedy,” he explains.
“Maybe that’s what makes it meaningful, though. The fragility of it all. Like how heartbreak makes a good love song, you know? The bad makes the good even more valuable.”
He shakes his head. “Again, that sounds horrible.”
“It’s beautiful,” I defend.
“Not for the people who end up heartbroken.”
My shoulders hike, my hand flying out to the TV. “Who is heartbroken? They lived happily ever after for the rest of their lives. They died because they were old! Old people die, Jake.”
“That’s not…” He shakes his head.
My eyebrows knit and I pause. “I’m confused. What are we talking about?” I ask, my tone more serious.
“I’m saying—what about Lon, huh? He was a nice guy. He doesn’t get a happy ending?” He pauses before his hand gestures to the screen. “He fell in love with a girl who was in love with someone else. And then everyone’s happy she gets the guy she’s meant for, but what happens to him?”
His eyes pan over to me, and the hurt that’s pouring out of them squeezes my heart in its grip.
Suddenly, I get it. I get all the pain he’s been walking around with like a looming storm. I get where it stemmed from, and how it ruined him completely.
His words echo in my mind.
“Like I said… Things didn’t work out.”
My belly twists with dread as he drags a hand over his mouth and chin, averting his gaze out the tall windows that show only a gray sky.
I’m hit with a rush of guilt and remorse. Guilt for pushing him to endure something he’s already expressed a strong disinterest toward. Remorse for making him relive whatever it is he just did. For forcing open a wound that clearly hasn’t healed.
The air between us thickens, and I try to swallow through it. His jaw tightens as he exhales, the sound rough and tired.
“Tell me what happened,” I say in a small voice.
He shakes his head with a sharp breath, his eyes everywhere but on me. My heart squeezes painfully, but the ache of needing to know and understand every inch of his pain is too much to ignore.
I shift onto my knees, inching closer to him. I take his chin in my hand and force his eyes to meet mine. “Tell me.”
His sad hazel eyes close tightly. He doesn’t want to see me, and I accept it.
I drop my hand, but I don’t leave his side, choosing to ignore the way my hand nearly burns from the most innocent of touches.
I wait patiently, allowing him the time to form the words I know he needs to say.
“It was… I don’t know. She was…” He takes another deep breath and runs a hand through his hair. Disgruntled. Lost. Completely heartbroken.
“She was just a girl I met one day. We started hanging out, and then a few days together turned into years, and then…” He sighs.
“I thought she was it for me,” he says with a hike in his shoulders.
“I thought we were on the same page. I mean, there were times when she was nervous or whatever, but I just figured she had some baggage she wanted to deal with on her own since she never opened up about anything. When she kept me at an arm’s length, I just thought she was scared because she had some trust issues over things she never talked about. ” He pauses, his eyes lost in thought.
“I worked so hard to be the guy she could trust. To be exactly who she needed when she needed it, no matter how I felt or what questions I had. I silenced everything about me so I could be there for her. But it turns out, it wasn’t enough. She was it for someone else, and I was just in the way.”
There’s a weighted heaviness dripping in the air. I can feel every beat of his pain in the space it fills, and it makes me want to cry out for him.
He exhales, as if he just cleansed the words off his tongue.
“It doesn’t really matter what happened.
Bottom line is, they got their happy ending, and I got the shit end of the stick.
Stuck picking up the broken pieces of myself that were left behind after being completely blindsided when the rug was swept out from under me.
Just swoosh. Gone. Like it never existed. ”
I silently allow it all to sink in. After a while, “I’m sorry,” is all I get out. He doesn’t acknowledge that I’ve spoken. I just watch him—my stomach twisting, and my heart in a vice.
I want to tell him that he was enough. That he is enough. That he’d be enough for me, if only I could let him. Instead, I don’t say anything.
“You know what the shittiest part is? It only took her a day to move out.” He looks at me for a reaction and is met with my bewildered expression.
“Yeah,” he breathes. “She spent over a year visiting me in that apartment and eventually moved into it. And it only took her one day to pack all her stuff and disappear.” He lets his head fall back onto the cushion, his eyes slowly closing, and my head tilts as I study him.
It may be a dark thing to think, but he looks absolutely beautiful in all his pain. My fingers inch to run their way through his dark hair, my lips nearly quivering with the need to touch his.
“Jake…” I start, but I don’t really know what to say.
He pinches the bridge of his nose, and my heart sinks deeper, heavy with hurt for him. For the loss he endured unexpectedly. For the way it fractured who he thought he was. From the way it redefined everything for him.