Year Four/Week Twenty-Nine – Present
One last class until the year was over.
One last class that I had to pretend Jace didn’t exist.
Had to pretend he wasn’t inside me.
Had to pretend his touch didn’t linger on my skin for days after he’d held me.
Had to pretend he meant nothing –
When he meant everything.
There had been no contact in weeks.
It felt like months.
His presence was overwhelming.
As soon as Prof. Flowers announced that class was over, the twenty-some peers I’d never gotten to know cried out in joy.
It was a feeling I often envied, seeing as I never quite experienced it in the way I knew I should.
A young girl, who was now free of responsibilities with her deceased father’s inheritance fully loaded in her bank account – and yet, nothing.
I was finally going to Paris.
Nothing.
I didn’t need to worry about school.
Nothing.
Jace and I were never going to see each other again.
Everything.
I exited room one-sixteen, silently saying one last goodbye to the building I’d never step foot in again when someone grabbed my arm.
I knew it was him before I even turned around.
I’d sought out the pleasure of his grasp one too many times.
“This is getting a tad dramatic, don’t you think?” His words came out sharp and cold, but the undertones were vulnerable and desperate; a last resort to mend damaged goods.
I mustered up enough courage to say, “I told you we were done.”
“We’ve been done a million times and you never avoided me for weeks like this.”
His eyes flashed with sincerity, a silent plea for me to make a move. But I was tired of making moves. I was tired of doing everything, saying everything.
It was exhausting to chase after someone who never wanted you from the start.
It was even more exhausting to pretend that there was a chance in hell you could change their mind.
“Honestly Jace…” How real was I getting?
Screw it.
“You fucked me over,” I started, bleeding into the pain I felt for months. “You fucked me up. And yet, you come back every time. Why? Why do you insist on doing this to me?”
His response may have been the most honest thing he’s ever said, and that terrified me.
In one breath, he shattered my soul. “You let me.”
I don’t think he realized the impact of his words until I’d walked away, refusing to turn back, refusing to ever speak to him again.
You let me.
I was already crying when I reached the washroom, locking the door behind me just in case he decided my need for space wasn’t apparent enough.
The bathroom floor was covered in scraps of toilet paper, tampon holders and unidentifiable wet spots, but I sunk down anyway and sobbed.
He could’ve been standing outside the door or thirty hours away in the middle of a desolate forest and I wouldn’t have cared.
You let me.
I allowed him to hurt me.
I allowed him to think there was a chance.
You let me.
It was all my fault.
The way I’d been feeling this entire term was my fault.
We finished quicker than we started. We barely got time to explore what we could become.
You let me.
It was all because of me.
I should apologize.
My phone vibrated in my pocket: Jace Boland.
“No, no, no,” I whispered through sobs, throwing my phone against the stall. “No, fuck! No more of this.”
But I scrambled for my phone, a large crack denting the screen protector and answered anyway.
“Leave me alone,” I spat, crunching my hair into a ball. “I don’t want to talk to you.”
He sighed. “You dropped your bus pass.”
Of course I did.
Of fucking course.
I ended the call, pulling myself up off the ground and opened the door. Lo and behold, he was leaning against the side wall with my transit card in his hand.
His jaw clenched as he looped it between his fingers, staring at the ground.
I extended an open palm, patting away wet mascara fibers. “My bus pass, please.”
Languidly, he handed it over, his tall posture sagging low.
“I paid attention, you know,” he whispered, unable to meet my eyes.
“What?”
Now he looked up, a deep blue sea swimming within his irises. “I paid attention to everything.”
My heart pulsed, battling the bars I placed around it. “What do you mean?”
“You never ate a thing, and at first I didn’t think much of it. You kept your arms covered, I chalked it up to you maybe being anemic or something. But after a while, I caught on. I broke through your persona.”
I felt the need to hide myself from him once again, to build a wall between us but I knew – I knew he’d break the barrier.
He already had.
“I saw you,” he said, pointing to my chest. “The real you. The you that you don’t show anyone and I felt like I’d won something.”
He grimaced, as if he’d known his words were a burning knife.
I didn’t speak.
I couldn’t speak.
“Instead of trying to be your friend Blu, I tried to be something else, something more. I don’t know –” he shook his head, “I don’t know if loving you properly would’ve changed the trajectory of our friendship, but I’m sorry that I couldn’t have been better.”
“Loving me?” The words tumbled out of my lips before my brain could register what he was saying. All the other sentences were gibberish, inconsequential to that one word.
Love.
His cheeks flushed. His throat bobbed. I wanted to scream.
“I don’t know what to call it, I –”
“You don’t know a lot of things,” I licked my lips, my eyes wide with hope.
Hope.
The thing that killed me.
The thing that cost me everything.
He ran long fingers through his hair, eyeing me carefully, as if his gaze could cradle me through the rubble.
“I’m sure a part of me loves you or cares for you. I’ve known you long enough.”
“You think love is determined by a length of time?”
“No, fuck – Blu, I’m not good with this shit.”
“And what if,” I swallowed, taking a step forward. “What if I loved you back?”
“Blu –”
One more step towards hope. “What if we could work?”
He grabbed my shoulders, halting my motions. A cold hand caressed my cheek, his thumb brushing over the corner of my lip.
I knew then that he was about to reject me for the fiftieth time. And yet, I stayed in place because his touch melted the frost beneath my skin, replacing it with hot lava and molten sunlight.
My comfort and my pain.
“There are so many guys out there…”
Don’t say it.
“So many guys that will treat you right, who will deserve you.”
He spoke as if he were a hundred miles away, not rubbing my cheek and keeping me still.
I couldn’t hold back the tears. They came as easy as breathing.
“Why…” My fingers found his knuckles, then grasped at his wrist. “Why couldn’t it be you?”
In his eyes I saw sadness, regret, guilt. It was at that point that I knew, even if he stayed, if he tried to love me, he wouldn’t be able to.
Jace was incapable of it.
Jace only knew how to twist that burning knife he held onto so tightly.
That was his defense.
And he was okay with letting me go.
“I can’t be that person for you, Blu,” he let out, squeezing my fingers. “Try as I might, I can’t. I want to be your friend, I want to help you and –”
“Help me?” I stepped back. “You kissed me, you fucked me and you want to be my friend?”
His eyes went wide. He took a step forward, but this time I took two back. “I care about you –”
“Please, for the love of fuck get a grip Jace.” My heart was racing but I felt it. The fire. The anger. The hurt.
All my emotions banded together and pushed me to realize that in one week, I’d be graduated.
In one week, this torment would be over.
I no longer needed to subject myself to Jace or this pain I couldn’t seem to suppress.
By begging for a man who couldn’t be what I needed, I devalued my worth, my self-respect.
All my life, people had an easy time doing that for me.
Mom.
Zac.
Kyle.
Tyler.
Jace.
Jace. Jace. Jace.
And me.
I’d done it every minute of every day.
It had to end somewhere.
So the calm took over. The anger subsided just enough to steady the point I needed to make.
“You want to know what I think?”
He didn’t respond. I said it anyway.
“I think you lie to yourself about who you are, Jace.”
His eyes that were once avoidant now faced me with a longing I couldn’t gauge.
A piece of my heart broke with each word. But he’d been breaking mine for far too long.
“One day you’re the mysterious Jace Boland, the next you couldn’t care less who’s watching. One day you’re happy, one day you’re too prideful for your own good and another day you’re sharp and callous.
“Somewhere,” I wiped a tear from my waterline, “Somewhere between those days I fell for you. And I think you expected me to love you when you never, not once, showed me the parts of you I could love. You’ve never even shown yourself.”
His jaw twitched as he opened his mouth to speak, but no sound came out. He just stared at me, stuck in his position; stuck and unable to move forward. A metaphor of some sorts.
I willed my foot to move towards him, step by step, proving that I was able to make a jump – I could progress.
“You don’t understand how hard I fought for you to see me as someone other than any of the prospects who threw themselves in your direction. I wanted to be the one you fell for, but instead I fell for you.”
A tear broke out but I wore it proudly. Sometimes it was better to show someone the hurt they brought upon you.
Sometimes people were visual learners.
“I fell for you,” I repeated, though he seemed to look through me. “And I kept falling and you wouldn’t even lend a hand. You couldn’t handle it.”
We stared at each other for a few moments, though the quiet seemed to be more than enough sound. There were silent conversations going on between us, though I couldn’t yet decipher the words. Maybe there were none. Maybe that was enough.
I turned to walk away but he grabbed my hand. I was shocked to find that I wasn’t the only one who’d been crying.
“I promised to love you, Blu.”
His hand slipped to my fingers, but I couldn’t feel it. I realized then that I never really have.
“You promised to love me,” I stated, as if it was the most ridiculous thing I’d ever heard.
It was.
He seemed to believe it when he nodded, “When you told me about your father, your scars, everything – I promised to love you and protect you. I promised myself that I wouldn’t hurt you like this.”
In that moment, I pitied him. I pitied the sadness he concealed behind his eyes. He said he knew me, saw through me and maybe, maybe he did. It was never a competition, but to Jace, it always was.
He’d told me about his high school friends – Morris, Danny, Connor and them. When he spoke of their stories, I realized he wasn’t telling me them to reminisce, he was proving to himself that he belonged to the stories he told.
This was no different.
I saw you, Blu, he’d said. I felt like I won something.
My fingers entangled from his grasp as his words drilled a hole in my skull.
I was a prize to be won.
Carter said I thought of Jace the same way.
He was wrong.
For months I doubted if I was good enough for him. I let my infatuation, my intrigue and my ego fill up the insecurities that settled in my brain. It worked for a time, until I realized that every romantic moment, every kiss, every fuck had been a projection of what I wanted from Jace, not who he truly was.
But me?
I was no better than a giant teddy bear on the top shelf of a carnival game.
Each step towards the exit was the win I needed. One step away from him. One step towards my new life.
It stung unlike anything I’d ever experienced.
It burned me harder than most heartbreaks.
I couldn’t explain why, what it was about him.
I mourned the loss of losing him before he was even gone.
All the impulsive parts of me that’d ruled my brain for years and years begged me to turn around, to run into his arms and dissect his meaning of love.
But instead I wrapped my fingers around the cold handle and met his eyes one final time. “Promises never meant much to you, Jace.”
