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I agreed, but I said that I was always normal, I was just trying to fight it. It was true too. I wanted to be someone great, so that I would never blend in. I wanted to stand out and not doing so was hard to deal with. I wanted to be great, and finding out that I wasn’t, was a lot.
“You could never be normal.” Nicholas assured me. He shook his head in earnest like it was funny to even think so. I liked the idea of it, that Nicholas saw me as something special, even if others didn’t. At least I had one fan.
I didn’t say anything one way or another. I knew that he said it as a compliment, but I was afraid that he was wrong. I was afraid of normality for some reason, even if it could be great. I thought for a moment how a normal life with Nicholas would be. I liked the thoughts that came to mind. Nicholas was the kind of guy that I could see myself with. He’d always been the one I thought of, when I thought of having a relationship with anyone. Problem was that no other guy was like him, so dating was not the greatest. Was it all because I was waiting for Nicholas this whole time?
4
Lara
The rest of dinner felt a bit more at ease. I didn’t know why, but Nicholas always had a way of calming me down or heating me up, depending on what he wanted to do. At the moment, it felt like he wasn’t going to be able to do what he wanted with me. I laughed at his jokes, shyly looked his way when his attention was elsewhere. I was setting myself up for failure and I knew it. That was the worst part, that I knew it and couldn’t stop it.
I listened intently to some of his heroic stories. I admitted that I’d read about him when I was wondering how he was.
“It is good to know that you still thought about me,” Nicholas said with a grin.
“Of course, I thought about you, Nicholas. There was supposed to be some fun to go down between us. I thought you would be the one…” I paused when I realized what I was saying. Had I lost my mind?
Nicholas waited for me to say more, he had leaned in to hear it, but I didn’t give him the satisfaction of hearing it. He didn’t need to know that I’d loved him so much and been devastated when he left me. It was all the truth, even if it was sad. To me, the whole thing screamed failure.
“It doesn’t have to be a bad thing…”
I scoffed; it certainly did have to be a bad thing. There was no way that I would ever be able to say out loud how I really felt. I’d missed him for years. That would just blow his head up.
“Trust me, Nicholas, it’s a bad thing to fall for you or anyone like you. All I did was get kicked to the curb and not even know what was happening to me. I don’t regret meeting you, but falling for you was a mistake.”
He tried to look hurt, but it didn’t go very far. I didn’t think Nicholas would ever get what he did to me. He would first have to know how head over heels in love I was with him. He left and it broke me inside.
“You really regret what happened between us?”
I agreed and he frowned. “That’s not what I wanted to hear.”
I nodded. “It’s the truth though.”
“It can be, but there is another truth that you don’t want to talk about.”
“Yeah?”
He grinned. “You still feel for me.”
I sighed. I wasn’t even going to try and explain it to him. He was right, I did feel something for him. When he suggested that we go watch a movie too, I agreed, because I figured that at least we wouldn’t have to talk while we were there. Conversations, him calling me out, were hard enough to deal with.
That was the wrong assumption though. Nicholas had no problem asking me questions in a whisper. I saw several people turn around and give us a dirty look, but Nicholas wasn’t fazed by it at all. He just shrugged off the looks and waited for my answer.
“Aren’t you even trying to watch the movie?”
Nicholas agreed that he was, but I doubt that he had any idea what was actually going on. Instead, he had all of his attention on me and it was a lot to take on, considering how much I was trying to tell him that I didn’t feel anything for him the way he claimed. He was right, of course. I did feel some kind of way for him. That was hard to admit, it wasn’t something that I wanted, but it wasn’t like there was anything that I could do about it.
“Do you really hate me?” Nicholas asked me.
I looked over and saw that he was trying to be all sad and pathetic and it made me laugh. Since I wasn’t as good at holding my voice down like he was, it was seconds later I was getting a dirty look from someone in front of us. I was sure that we were ruining the movie for several, but that didn’t make me want to change anything.
“Why do you say that I hate you?”
“Because I messed up and left.”
Then it was real, and I stopped smiling and it was no longer just a light conversation we were having. Now it was serious, and I wanted to know what he meant by that.
“You know what I mean. I left to get out of Bogalusa. We’d had that little tiff and you weren’t talking to me. I should have waited out your mood, but I took off instead.”
