Page 55 of Fake it for Keeps

I bought a ring that summer. A small one. I didn’t have much money of my own yet, just my allowance and what I’d saved from summer jobs. But it was real. A promise.

I was going to propose before we went to college. We would graduate, get married, and build a life together. I had it all planned out.

The night I was going to do it, we were at my house. My parents were away. We had the place to ourselves. We spent hours in my room, kissing until our lips were swollen, touching each other with the desperate intensity of two young people in love.

She had to get up early and didn’t want to stay the night. I offered to walk her home, but she laughed at me. Her house was next door. And I was naked in bed. It wasn’t the first time. It wasn’t even the hundredth time. We had been walking back and forth for most of our lives.

It was safe.

“I love you,” she’d whispered.

“I love you too,” I’d said. “See you tomorrow?”

“Always.”

I was downstairs getting a glass of water when I heard it.

The squeal of tires. The sickening crunch of metal hitting something—someone. The scream that cut off too quickly.

I ran. God, I ran faster than I’d ever run in my life, my heart in my throat, knowing even before I saw. Lauren was in the street. Her body twisted at wrong angles, blood pooling beneath her, her blonde hair matted and dark.

A car was speeding away, taillights disappearing into the night. Hit and run.

I dropped to my knees beside her, my hands hovering over her body, not knowing what to do, where to touch, how to help.

“Lauren,” I choked out. “Lauren, no, please⁠—”

But her eyes were already empty.

Then her parents were there, her mother’s screams splitting the night open. Her father trying to pull me away, trying to check for a pulse that wasn’t there, calling 911 with shaking hands.

I’d thrown up in their bushes. Collapsed on their lawn. Let her father hold me while we both fell apart.

The police came. The ambulance. They covered her with a sheet.

They never found the driver. Drunk, they assumed. Probably didn’t even realize what they’d hit until they sobered up the next morning.

If they realized at all.

I sat on that bench now, all these years later, and felt the nausea rising just like it had that night. Clutched my stomach and tried to breathe through it.

Lauren had been my whole world. My future. My everything.

And in one moment, she was gone.

I’d fallen apart after that. Completely and utterly shattered. Spent weeks in a fog, unable to eat, unable to sleep without seeing her broken body every time I closed my eyes.

My parents had tried to help. Frankie had tried. Friends had tried.

But nothing worked. Nothing made it better.

Eventually, I learned to bury it. To lock it away in a box deep inside myself and pretend it didn’t exist. I threw myself into school, into work, into anything that would keep me from thinking about her.

And into women. So many women.

Because if I never let myself care about anyone, if I never let anyone get close enough to matter, then I’d never have to feel that kind of pain again.

It had worked. For years, it had worked. Until the dreams started coming back.