moved up her arms and rested against her cheeks. I brushed the bone under her eye with the pad of my thumb.
And then I lied to her.
“I can’t do this with you forever,” I said. “I want to be in love, to be loved back. I want to get married one day and maybe have a couple kids—call me old fashioned, but whatever.” She wanted to tear her eyes away from mine, but she couldn’t; she was still frozen in place, her body rigid. “I’ve imagined that person being you. It’s always been about you. But if you don’t want to at least try to be her, then maybe we should stop being friends. This… thing we have, this… relationship, it’s unhealthy.”
She stepped back and away from me, still holding her unblinking gaze.
“Is this what you want?” she asked, her soft features appeared vacant, but her eyes held a profound amount of suppressed pain.
“What I want is to be with you. That’s what I want. It’s all I’ve ever wanted.” My hands collapsed into half fists out in front of me. My whole body was consumed by emotion, a desperate need to make her understand how much I loved her without having to say the words. In the moment, they didn’t seem right to speak aloud. I was afraid she’d run the other way.
I thought this was going to be the end. The end of us, the end of everything that we stood for. The last thing in the world that I wanted was for her to turn and walk out that door so I would never see her again. But that was what I expected. The truth is, I would’ve waited forever for her. I couldn’t imagine myself in a serious relationship with any other girl. Sex? Sure. I’m a guy and I like sex. But to love someone other than Bray seemed eternally impossible. So yes, I lied when I told her that it couldn’t be the way it had been any longer. Because I would’ve waited for her forever. I would’ve stayed just like we were, unconventional best friends who shared a lot more than secrets and sleepovers. But with Bray, I knew I had to be harsh. I felt like I had to be the one to make her understand that our relationship might not be what she wanted. As much as it hurt me to do it, I had to let her know that it was OK to go our separate ways. I didn’t want her to cling to the thought of us for the rest of her life and continue pushing people away because of me.
I just wanted her to be happy.
With her back to me, Bray’s arms uncrossed and fell to her sides.
She turned around.
I waited, subconsciously holding my breath.
And just when I thought it was all going to be over, she said, “OK. I do want to be with you. I want to try with you.”
That night after the party, we had sex for the first time since we’d known each other. But it wasn’t what I had always hoped it would be. Bray changed. I noticed her change as I lay on top of her, peering down into her beautiful, blue eyes. It was as if she knew before it actually happened that if we had sex it would alter everything between us forever. And then as the days wore on, we grew further apart. We broke up after four months. Two months later, she moved away to South Carolina.
I was never the same.
Bray
I know what you must be thinking: What a bitch. And you’ll get no argument from me on that one. I was pretty messed up back then. I loved Elias with all my heart, and that scared the hell out of me.
But I should get something out of the way before I dive into the excuses of why I was the way I was. I’m sure Elias sugarcoated me with his bias and all, but if this story is going to be told, then it needs to be told in its truth and entirety, without Band-Aids and training wheels.
I was fucked up.
No, no one raped me or beat me or bullied me as a kid. My parents loved me. Maybe not as much as my sister, Rian, but I believed they loved me. They just showed it in different ways than Elias’s parents did, usually with the best toys for Christmas and birthdays, a steady allowance, and the occasional pat on the back for doing a good deed. Sometimes. But every pat on the back I ever did get felt like an obligation, like they were being forced. I had issues. There’s no doubt about that. And for much of my young life my parents did whatever they could to help me. They just gave up trying to fix me somewhere along the way. But I don’t blame anyone for the way I was. A psychologist appointed by the State to evaluate me when I had my little run-in with the police and a stint in juvy called it bipolar disorder. I, on the other hand, called it just one of those things. We’re all different. We all have our own quirks and flaws and dark secrets. All of us are fucked up on some level, whether or not we want to admit it to ourselves. And I like to believe that not every problem or issue that we deal with in our daily lives must be labeled with a fancy title.
I’ll say it again: I was fucked up. It was as simple as that.
Well, just so you know, I didn’t leave Elias and Georgia because I lost interest or fell out of love with him. Quite the opposite. I left because I fell even harder for him, which I didn’t even know was possible. I’ve never really been scared of anything, except of Elias. I think that in the back of my mind I figured if I left him first, if I was the one who put a stop to any kind of relationship that we had, it might not hurt as much as it would have if he had ended it. It gave me a sense of control. At least, I fooled myself into believing that all the way to South Carolina. But once I got there—I moved with my friend, Lissa, who wanted to be closer to her brother—it didn’t take long for me to see that I had made the biggest mistake of my life.
But instead of doing the right thing and following my heart by going back and hoping Elias would take me back, I did the opposite and pushed myself further away from him. Maybe it was my way of punishing myself for being the biggest idiot on the face of the Earth, I don’t know, but whatever it was, it landed me in a year-long relationship with a guy I didn’t love and never would.
I tried to go on with my life, but as time wore on I realized more every day that I really had no life without Elias. He was my life. He had been since that day we met by the pond.
I just wished I would’ve allowed myself to give in to that truth fully long before I finally did.
Because by then, it was too late.
Elias had a girlfriend, and according to our childhood friend Mitchell, Elias was serious about her and very much in love.
That was the time in my life when I didn’t care about anything anymore. I pretty much gave up on life without actually committing suicide. That’s the best way to describe it. I was completely dead inside. But no one else knew. Only Elias would ever have known that something was wrong with me deep down, that what I projected to the world was just a mask covering up the ugliness slowly eating away at my soul. But I never contacted him. I never tried to tell him how I felt, how much I was hurting, how much I missed and needed him. Because I wanted him to be happy. Even if it meant I wasn’t part of that happiness. I ruined my happiness for myself. I wasn’t about to waltz back into his life and ruin his, too.
Inevitably, I broke it off with my boyfriend and I told myself that I’d go back to being relationshipless, the way I had always been. Because relationships just weren’t my thing. But—and here’s some of where that “no Band-Aid” policy I was talking about comes into play—I went from a long-term relationship with one person to having sex with several different people. Call me a slut; say whatever you want. I never slept with anyone for the sheer pleasure of it—not in the beginning, anyway. I did it because I was trying to fill a void and I knew no other way. I was confused and I longed to feel loved the way I felt loved every moment I spent with Elias. I looked for that feeling in everything and everyone.
But I never found it.
And that’s when I… no, I’m not ready to talk about that yet.
For now, let’s just say when the dark secret I carried