Track 13 Change Your Mind #2
“You’re moving to Texas?” His tongue grazed over his bottom lip before he pulled it in.
My heart sank, and I looked down beside him, finding my phone on the table, his fingers just at the edge of it.
He followed my eyes and motioned toward my phone.
“Jake texted you. Said he got the place… that Texas is ready for you.”
I swallowed, wiping my hands on my hips. He shrugged, his shoulders tensing, and I could see the pain in his eyes as his brows creased. It was a hopeless look, and I knew it well—the one that comes after you think you’ve gotten them back but realize they’re already gone.
“When were you gonna tell me?”
“Today.”
“Is that why you finally texted me after a year? So you could say goodbye?”
“Yes.” My voice was small and shallow and did nothing to compete with the dread in his.
“Why?” he paused, and my heart raced frantically. “You were already gone.” His words dripped with anguish, like it had broken his heart that I never reached out for him. Like he had been waiting for me all this time.
“Say it,” he said, but my throat had closed up. “Say goodbye.”
My stomach was in knots. My lungs, tight, as if they would collapse within me. “I can’t,” I said, but it was barely a sound.
He moved closer to me, the pain in his eyes still there but changing. Becoming more defined. More… deliberate. Like he was choosing to feel it now, not just carry it. Like he wanted me to see it. Wanted me to feel it with him—the ache, the guilt, the truth I’d buried with silence and time.
“Why not?” he breathed.
“I don’t know.”
He continued toward me in slow steps, his eyes strong on mine. “Say it, Sydney.” He closed the distance between us, and suddenly I felt the wall on my back. His voice was deep and powerful, and it burned a raw desire in my core. “Say why you can’t.”
I tried to breathe, but it was nearly impossible with the way his eyes consumed mine. My heart drummed wildly in my ears. My core quivered as my brain spun, trying to deny my tongue the words begging to escape my lips.
“Because…” I started. My eyes fell to his lips and bounced back quickly.
His hand cupped my cheek, and his eyes danced between mine, telling me, begging me to say what he already knew.
My lips parted, and with a shaky, trembling breath, the words my heart had ached to speak finally found their voice.
“Because I love you.”
His lips crashed onto mine in the next second, and my hands wrapped around him in the one that followed.
His tongue swept against my lips, and they parted, inviting him in.
We kissed with such passion, such force, it felt like the whole world stood still with us.
He swallowed a moan I didn’t mean to release, and he groaned as I pulled myself into him.
I felt him then, hard and ready, and my body electrified at the connection. Every nerve came alive with aching anticipation. He lifted me with a strength that felt both effortless and urgent, and I wrapped my legs around his waist, clinging to him desperately as he carried me to his bedroom.
His lips were fire on my skin, his one hand strong in my hair, the other cradling my ass. His tongue traced the line of my neck like he was learning every inch of me by heart. He laid me down beneath him, and the weight of him was exactly what I’d been missing, though I’d never felt it before.
My hands traveled through his hair, down his back, and up his shirt, tracing every crevasse of his defined body.
His mouth and tongue caressed my neck, my lips, my ear.
He pressed himself against the center of me, and I moaned with tingling pleasure.
I wanted him. I wanted everything he would give me—every breathless kiss, every whispered promise, every inch of him that was ready to take what was already his.
I wanted to lose myself in him and let all the lies dissolve, as if they’d never existed.
But my brain flipped on like a switch, extinguishing the fire with a slow and steady stream of reminders of why I couldn’t get lost with E: Because it was wrong. Because I wasn’t his. Because someone else was waiting for me in the wreckage I was creating.
“Stop,” I said, breathlessly, gasping for air, but he kissed me again, still lost in the moment, and I didn’t want to resist him.
“E…” I pleaded. “We have to stop.” He pulled away just enough, still panting above me.
“Why? What’s wrong?” he asked, his questioning eyes searching mine.
“Everything. We can’t do this.” I was filled with guilt and shame, and I hated myself for my lack of self-control. For creating a mess out of my own heart and everyone else’s.
“Why not?” He was genuinely asking. Like he had forgotten the rest of the world and only he and I existed, and I loved him even more for it.
“Because Jake,” I said, defeated. “And Emma.” He stared at me blankly for a moment before he let out a breath and rolled off me. I sat up beside him as he rubbed his face with his hands.
“Fuck. I’m sorry. I shouldn’t have—”
“It’s fine.”
“No. I put you in a bad spot—”
“E. It’s fine. We’re both in a bad spot. It was bound to happen one day.” I smiled a sad smile, and he mirrored it. I released a deep breath, and so did he.
“Yeah… I guess it was.”
We sat in silence for a few minutes as we collected ourselves.
I sat with my hands tucked under my thighs, shoulders hiked high, ankles crossed as I stared at my feet.
His head was dipped low, elbows on his knees, and his hands folded before him.
I forced myself not to spiral into the never-ending pit of guilt and grief that this would undoubtedly leave me in. Then he turned his head to me.
“I broke up with Emma,” he said, and my head snapped to him in shock.
“What? When?”
“A few weeks after I saw you. I couldn’t get you out of my head, and I just… I couldn’t be with her.” He looked down at his hands as his fingers interlocked.
I didn’t know what to say, so I didn’t say anything, too drunk with emotion to form a clear thought. He looked at me again, and my eyes met his.
“I love you, Sydney. I always have.”
My heart swelled too big for my chest, and it ached in a way I hadn’t expected. I shouldn’t have said it again, but I did.
“I love you, too.”
He let out a breathy laugh, and I saw the tears brim in his eyes, just as they did in mine. It was our hearts pouring out, celebrating the words they had waited too long to say and hear. But it was all too late.
“What are we gonna do?” he asked.
“About what?”
“About us,” he said, motioning between us.
I didn’t understand. This couldn’t be more than it just was.
My lapse in judgment couldn’t change anything.
I was moving away in just a few days. And I still belonged to someone else, even if he didn’t.
Yes, I loved E, and he loved me, but there was nothing more we could do about it. It was just… bad timing.
When I didn’t answer, he was taken aback.
“You can’t expect to just go back to normal after this,” he said, dumbfounded and wounded.
“E, we have to.” I pleaded. “I’m moving to Texas next week.”
“No, you’re not.” He was frustrated now.
“Yes, I am.” I tried to sound sure, but it didn’t land.
“No—”
“E…” He stood up.
“Just… change your mind. Tell him you changed your mind,” he said firmly, like it was as simple as the words leaving his lips. I sank into the place.
“I can’t.”
“Why not?!” He was frantic. Terrified of losing the only thing he ever wanted. I knew because I felt it too, but we weren’t in the same position.
“E, he’s counting on me. He’s waiting for me—”
“I’m counting on you!” he exclaimed, his hands pointing at his chest.
“That’s not fair. He and I made a plan. I can’t just bail—”
“But you can bail on me?”
That one set me off. I stood to face him. “Bail on you?! I didn’t even know you were an option until ten minutes ago! The last time we spoke, you told me to give ‘nice guy Jake’ a chance. Remember that?!”
“Yeah, well, I was wrong. Fuck Jake!”
“I can’t just say ‘fuck Jake,’ E. That’s not fair to him!”
“And this is?! Telling him you love him when you really love me? Lying in bed with him when you know you’re thinking of me, that’s fair?!” His voice was shaky, and it broke the well of tears I’d been trying to hold back.
We stared at each other, heated and stubborn, and then, I broke.
“This is all so messed up,” I cried, sobbing with my head in my hands.
“Yeah…” His fingers interlocked behind his neck and his head fell back with a breath. “You should’ve stayed in touch.” My eyes threw knives at him.
“I should’ve stayed—And how about you, huh?! You broke up with Emma, what, a year ago, and you never once thought to let me know? You wait until I’m too involved with someone else, until I’m moving away, to tell me you love me?”
His hands extended toward me as his shoulders tensed, hiking to his ears. “How was I supposed to reach you? You changed your number!”
“I still have the same house, E,” I deadpanned.
His entire body sighed, defeated. Like he knew he’d lost the battle before the war had even begun.
“Yeah, well… when I went there to surprise you, he was there to pick you up, and I lost all my courage at the sight of you… happy with someone else.” His hand wiped over his mouth, and I saw it—the crushing knowledge that it was already over.
I sobbed then, full of anger and grief and turmoil all at once: Angry at time and how it constantly toyed with us. Grieving for the loss of everything that could have been and never would be. Turmoil over the fact that I was going to walk away from the only real love I’d ever known.
He must have seen it, because he did a double-take and pulled me into his chest. He held me there, tight, close to his heart, and he let me cry, the back of his shirt wrapped in the balls of my fists. He cradled my head in his arms and kissed the top of it.
“I’m sorry, Syd,” he said over and over. “I’m so sorry.”
But I was the one who was sorry. Because I did this. I messed everything up. I let myself cave to a want I never should have had, and it made something beautiful turn ugly. It made me a bigger liar than I already was.
And I would punish myself for the rest of my days with that knowledge.