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Whatever is going on in his head finally breaks to the surface. His jaw clenches, the vein pops out in the middle of his forehead. He’s about to blow.
“Why?”
His gaze shifts back to mine with a silent plea to let it go. I can’t do that. It’s taken me too many years to get here and I’m not about to miss my chance––he knows that about me. He shakes his head, his eyes closing briefly.
“Why, Noah. Tell me!”
“You wouldn’t leave!” It’s a half-shout, his voice hoarse. The look on his face floors me. He looks like a cornered animal, desperate to escape. “I heard you speaking to your coach. You were gonna stay here for me and I couldn’t let you do that. I couldn’t let you throw it all away for me.”
It takes me a few minutes to process his words, to rewind back to that time in my life. It was my sophomore year at University of Oklahoma. Top-ranked UCLA lost one of their best players to injury and a spot on the team opened up. They wanted me, and although my OU team was doing well, UCLA was unequivocally the better program at the time. Coach wanted me to transfer. I wouldn’t hear of it. We argued about it on multiple occasions. Then Noah blew out his knee and there was absolutely no question that I was staying.
“You did it for me?” I say out loud, testing out the truth of those words. My heart hurts, my hands shake. “You broke my heart, my trust. You ruined our friendship because you thought you were doing what was best for me? Am I getting that right?”
Shame and regret make a brief appearance before he shuts them down. His gaze darts away, his face going flat.
“This is worse than I thought.” I stumble toward the front door.
“Maren. Maren, stop.” His powerful arms wrap around me from behind, pull me back into the curve of his body. He presses his lips to my neck, near my ear.
“You’re impossible when you set your mind on something and I was in a real bad way back then. I had nothing to offer you and I was gettin’ worse each and every day.”
“Get off of me.”
“No.”
“All I wanted was you, you jerk. That’s all I’ve ever wanted.” And then it dawns on me that maybe I was fooling myself all those years ago. Maybe I misread everything. “Did you not love me anymore? Was that it? Just tell me. I can take it.”
He spins me around by the shoulders to face him, his harsh expression made harsher by the lightning flashing through the window, tracing his face in silver. He shakes me once with a grip close to painful.
“I was so in love with you I was suffocating under the weight of it! It was killin’ me! Knowing I was bad for you and still wanting you all to myself.”
“You were not bad for me, jackass!”
He lets me go abruptly and scrubs his face. “I was a fucking mess, Maren! Drinking…doing drugs. If it wasn’t for Rowdy, I don’t know if I would’ve survived it!”
The confession startles me. I knew it was bad. I just didn’t realize how bad.
“I would’ve destroyed what was left of us,” he continues in a hollow voice, the fight gone. He turns away and walks further into the living room to sit on the couch, planting his elbows on his knees. “I knew it then and I know it now.”
“So you decided to deal the death blow.”
With his head bent low, he rakes his fingers through his hair. “Yes. You would’ve sacrificed your career for me––I couldn’t let that happen. I wasn’t gonna take you down with me.”
“That’s why you fucked Crystal.”
He flinches, clearly uncomfortable with my choice of words. I’m not trying to intentionally hurt him but he needs to own it. I won’t rewrite the past to smooth things over in the present. I won’t mince words to make him feel better.
“Tell me what I could’ve said that would’ve changed your mind…go ahead.”
I turn it over and over in my head and come up with the same answer. There isn’t a word in the English language that would’ve driven me away. Nothing he could’ve said would’ve made me leave him. My anger, my sense of injustice, it all fades. My victory feels hollow. I came for answers and all I have to show for it is the same hole in my heart that was there before.
I kneel before him and take his face in my hands. My fingers shape every plane, reading all the changes that have happened in my absence––that I missed. Eyes closed, he presses a kiss to the palm of my good hand.
“Noah…”
He shakes his head. Contrition in his weary exhale. Defeat in the slope of his shoulders.
