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I mean, was anybody really winning in this situation? “You realize she’s standing right there, right?” I said.
“That’s your fault!” Robby said. And then he said something that hit me in just the right way at the right time: “You wouldn’t let me in!”
At those words, I paused. Every now and then, something really, genuinely true cuts through all the chaos of life and just gets your full attention. “I wouldn’t let you in?” I echoed, more to myself than to him. It was like somebody had flipped the lights on in a shadowy room. “Oh my God, Bobby. You’re right.”
“Stop calling me Bobby,” Robby said.
“You’re right, though. You really are.”
Robby frowned. “I am?”
It was like I was seeing him for the first time. “I wouldn’t let you in. When I was working and missed your birthday party? And when I had to drop out of our getaway weekend at the last minute? And when I lost the bracelet you gave me? When I ‘worked all the time’? When I was ‘no fun’? That was me not letting you in.”
Possibly also when I was a “bad kisser.” But I wasn’t going to dignify those words by speaking them out loud.
Robby glanced at Taylor, like What’s going on?
She ignored him.
I went on. “I thought you were blaming me, but you were just telling the truth. I thought if we were sleeping together, that was love. But you were so right. I didn’t know what love was.”
I thought about Jack. I thought about the piggyback ride he gave me back from the river. I thought about what it felt like to make him laugh. I thought about how I rooted for him every time he tried to shoot something into the kitchen trash and missed. I thought about the buzz of fear that went through my body when he somersaulted off Clipper, as if Jack breaking his neck might break mine, too. I thought about the full-body bliss of waking up in his bed, tangled under his weight. I thought of the crackling agony in my body as I’d looked for him in vain that last night to say goodbye. I thought of the roiling, dark-green jealousy just now at watching Kennedy Monroe slathering her undeserving self all over him.
Now I knew.
I nodded at Robby. “You were right. I didn’t let you in.”
Robby just stared. How often in life do you accuse an ex-girlfriend of something and just… watch her agree with you?
“I mean,” I said, looking him up and down, “you didn’t deserve to be let in. So it’s a good thing in the end. But thank you.”
Robby was so befuddled, his mouth hung open. “For what?”
“For showing me what love isn’t,” I said.
And I shoved my door closed and flipped the dead bolt.
