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Tears fell without warning, blurring my vision until my surroundings turned into a watercolor painting where things mixed together with no distinction, everything all blurred. His words were like knives. I wanted to scream into the phone, What are you doing? but I refrained, although that sentence repeated itself over and over again inside my mind.
He was planning on marrying Carla.
Nick planned to marry someone who wasn’t me.
I never realized until that moment how much hope I’d still held out for us. Apparently I’d buried the sliver of hope somewhere deep inside me, but here it was, making itself known, feeling less like a sliver and more like a redwood tree.
He cleared his throat, and I realized I’d been sitting silently on the line with no clue how long it had been.
“Is it your dad? Is he making you do this?” I had to know, because none of this made any kind of sense.
“No. It has nothing to do with him. I got to know her and we have a lot in common,” he said, his tone unconvincing.
“You’re joking, right? You have nothing in common with that horrible person.”
“Jess,” he growled, telling me I’d crossed a line. “It just seems right, you know?”
I shook my head. No, I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything anymore. “Bullshit. That’s total bullshit. You can lie to everyone else, but you don’t get to lie to me. This has your dad written all over it. How is he possibly getting you to do this, of all things, for him?”
His silence told me everything I needed to know, so I continued. “Remember when we talked that one day about the things he asked of you?” I waited for his confirmation, but he still stayed quiet. “I told you that one day he’d ask you to do something that would be a turning point. That if you did it, there would be no going back. This is it, Nick. This is so it.”
He sighed, sounding utterly exasperated. “You don’t understand, Jess.”
“Then enlighten me!” I yelled, my emotions overwhelming me.
“I can’t,” he said, sounding so broken, and I got pissed.
“Of course you can’t. Have a nice life, Nick. You’re a fucking idiot.”
I ended the call, expecting to cry hysterically, but the tears had stopped falling. I was too angry, too disappointed, too pissed off to cry.
There would be no coming back from this for us. There would never be an us again if he went through with this.
It was supposed to be me—it was always supposed to be me. Nick and I were supposed to be together.
I never planned to stay away forever. Once I graduated, I intended to move back home to Southern California. I’d stupidly assumed Nick and I would pick up where we left off, like I’d told Rachel that night. No matter what he said or how much time had passed, I always figured we’d find our way back to each other. I never once thought that I’d lose Nick forever.
How could he give up on us like this? It was like I truly didn’t know him at all.
And maybe I really never did.
Breaking Hearts
Nick
I could have never imagined how badly it would hurt telling Jess about Carla. And it did. It hurt something awful. Hearing the pain in her voice when I spilled my news slayed me. My heart bled out in my chest in response to her tone.
Jess was pissed, but mostly she was devastated. I heard every ounce of pain that she tried to hide behind her anger. I honestly figured that I was doing the right thing by being the one who told her about the wedding, but fuck, maybe I should have let Rachel tell her? Maybe I shouldn’t have told her at all, kept her in the dark.
No. See? That’s even more fucked up.
Jess deserved to know what I had done, and she deserved to hear it from me. But now I felt like a complete asshole, even more than I already did. If there was a way to feel lower than the dirt on the bottom of someone’s shoe, I achieved it. I was currently living it.
I still loved Jess. Goddamn, I still loved her more than anything, but I couldn’t tell her that.
She called it right away too. Jess knew my dad was responsible for this entire fiasco, but I couldn’t admit that to her without giving her the rest of the details. If I gave that girl a morsel of information, she’d hammer at me until I gave it all up. And if she knew the whole story, she’d come unglued, take the first flight back here, and try to talk me out of it.
I knew at least that much, and I couldn’t let her do that. I’d protect Jess’s future the only way I knew how—by marrying Carla.
