Page 47 of Power Play

Until I left.

“So, I guess we’re doing this.” I shook my head. “I was eighteen, Taylor.”

“Me too.” Her eyes glistened. “We were both just kids, but things were real.”

Things. That’s how she summed everything up?

“I didn’t know what to do. I was on my own there.”

She frowned. “So, you just left.”

“I was scared, hurt, broken.” I rubbed my hand over my face. “You were shattered, and I didn’t know how to put you back together. I thought I already lost you.”

“So, you just left,” she repeated with a tiny nod.

“I didn’t know how to grieve. I didn’t know how to handle the pain when you were … I didn’t know how to process and be there for you. I didn’t know how to help you.”

She leaned against the door, facing me. “I just needed you there. All I ever wanted or needed was for you to be there.”

I closed my eyes.

I’d run away back then. I claimed I wanted to go home to graduate in Canada, but I couldn’t care less about that. I just needed to get away. I needed my parents. I needed to be a child for a few months. I couldn’t be the one in charge. I was too young. Too immature to be the one she needed.

It was the most selfish thing I’d ever done. It was my biggest regret. The unspeakable boulder that crushed me silently every single day for four years. I never healed from it, and seeing the pain in her face, she didn’t either.

“We lost so much and then I lost you.” Her voice cracked. “I needed you, Jason.”

I opened my eyes and nearly shattered at the tears streaking her cheeks. “I’m so sorry, Taylor. I will be sorry for the rest of my life.”

Her hand clutched her shirt over her heart. “How could you leave me?”

“I didn’t know what else to do,” I whispered the truth.

“I never wanted to see you again.” There was no anger or malice left in her words. She sounded exhausted. “I never wanted to have to think about it, but now I’m here. In your car.” She looked around like she was realizing it for the first time. “I shouldn’t be here.”

I stopped her before she could pull on the handle. “Please, don’t.”

She glared at me. “Why not?”

“Because I can’t live like this anymore.” I looked past the pain and saw her resistance crumbling. Maybe she couldn’t either.

“Alexander,” I said his name aloud for the first time since we said goodbye.

Her face twisted in grief, and she wrapped her arms around her stomach as sobs broke free.

“He was real and perfect and his death destroyed me. I didn’t know how to breathe after he was gone. I didn’t know how to be there for you, so I left.”

She shook her head.

“I don’t expect you to ever forgive me, I’ll never forgive myself. But you have to know that I never stopped thinking about you or him. It wasn’t an easy decision to leave, but like you said, we were kids. I wasn’t prepared to handle something like that. No one at that age is.”

She sniffed, her sobbing slowing. “I thought you forgot about us. I let myself think that you didn’t care. That you didn’t really love me. It was easier to think that than accept that you could just leave.”

“I never forgot.”

She scanned my face, and her shoulders dropped.

I leaned across the center console and took her into my arms. I did what I should have done back then. I held her and told her how much it hurt. How much I loved him. How much I loved her. I held her until she wrapped her arms around me and clung like I was her lifeline. We finally did what we should have that awful day. We cried, and grieved, and supported each other.