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“Looks like we’re stuck. You didn’t plan on going anywhere today anyway, did you?”
She shook her head but looked disappointed. “I have a book I can read.”
“Or...” I paused, waiting for her to connect those brown beauties on my eyes, “we can watch a movie? Like old times?” It was my peace offering, to try and get past that intense moment, and find ourselves again.
“Ryan. I can’t...” She sighed heavily and looking at her face, I realized she was tired. Not physically, but mentally. Or, more so, emotionally spent. “After what was just said, there is no, ‘like old times’.” She held her hands out in front of her like two giant stop signs. “I don’t know what to think with you, and I don’t know what parts of my memories are true or false. I need space.” I could hear the anxiety starting to grow in her words, and she capitalized it with her final jab, “And now I’m stuck here with you.” She quickly turned away from me, and I knew without a doubt she was on the verge of crying.
And, while it made me a shit friend, I wanted to push.
Even though she was clearly hurting, I wanted to get past this wall that she kept creating between us.
Because I was hurting too; I just wasn’t as visible about it.
“You have the best memory of anyone that I know, Savannah. Whatever you remember, the actual events and words, is likely true. The falseness would be whatever bullshit your mind chooses to filter in.” Harsh, but I couldn’t keep handling her with kid gloves.
Savannah was a grown woman who, thirty minutes ago, seemed to own her feelings but now, whiplash central, and she was pulling away.
A-fucking-gain.
She swung back toward me, her arm shooting out to point a finger at me, no doubt pissed at me and my choice of words. “Any bullshit is from years of rejection.”
She did not just clump me in with her mother.
I couldn’t stop the anger from my voice if I tried. “I have never rejected you!”
“Didn’t you?” She stepped closer and poked me in the chest. “Didn’t you let me walk away?”
“Savannah, what the hell was I supposed to do? I couldn’t get a word in edgewise! You were on a mission to leave my apartment and refused to let me talk.”
“You had a moment. When you told me I was your ‘number one. Always will be.’” She spat the words back to me, and the disdain was thick in her voice.
“It was the only way I knew how to tell you I loved you. Because I knew damn well the words themselves wouldn’t be taken well.”
“You don’t let someone you love walk away.”
“You sure as fuck do when you realize your feelings are one sided. When everything your mind and heart had been building up came crashing down because you said it was a mistake. Savannah, I’ve made a lot of mistakes in my life, but making love to you is not, and could not ever be, one of them.”
Apparently, those words were too real for her, because she shook her head again. Her go-to move when things weren’t going the way she needed them to go for her sanity. Well, what about mine?
“I don’t want to do this right now,” she announced.
“Too fucking bad. We’re doing it now. You have nowhere to go. You can’t see a foot in front of you outside. We’re stuck here. And if anything, this conversation is three years too late. Now is the perfect time.”
She screwed up her lips and shook her head, before turning away from me, trying to shut me out in the only way she knew how.
“Your mother may let you close up and shut her out, but that’s because she’s a piece of shit.”
I half expected her to call me a piece of shit because that was basically what I did when she walked away from me three years ago—let her close up and shut me out. But I knew better than to expect her to say anything.
Savannah was in shut down mode.
I’d be lucky if she spoke to me at all the rest of the day.
Hell, I’d be lucky if she spoke to me by the end of the weekend.
This was what she was best at.
It was her version of protecting herself, to hell with whoever she hurt along the way.
