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“Not always, no,” I said, shrugging.
“But for a while, right? You knew that you were going to help me study for school, help me apply for colleges and grants, help me figure out all the paperwork, pack up the apartment, get me a rental, and load up the car, and you knew all the while that you were never going to see or speak to me again.”
“Yes,” I said, exhaling hard. “And no.”
“What do you mean, no?” she asked, her lower lip quivering she was so pissed. Or hurt. Or a combination of the two. And, honestly, she’d earned that. And it was my punishment to have to see it.
“I did see you again,” I told her.
“When?”
“A couple months after you went away to school. I drove up. I was worried about you,” I admitted. “You were never good with new shit and new people. And you would have been pushing yourself too hard. So I wanted to make sure you were okay.”
“I wasn’t,” she insisted.
“You were,” I countered. “You were living and going to class and moving on.”
“I was fucking miserable, Seeley!” she yelled, making me jerk back. “I cried nonstop for months. Months. My eyes were swollen every morning when I went to class. My roommate was fucking sick of me. All I wanted was for you to come back and say you were sorry.”
“I was sorry,” I told her. “It was never… we were never…”
“Well, we did,” she said, reaching up to swipe fresh tears off her cheek. “We did. And you should have known how big a deal that was for me.”
“It was a big deal for me too,” I told her, shaking my head.
“Wait,” she said, brows furrowing as she caught something in my voice. “Wait. You were always joking about girls with Cato and Levee.”
“Because I was a fucking idiot kid and their acceptance mattered to me,” I said, shrugging. “But it was only ever you, Ama. No one else could have fucking come close. Being with anyone else would have felt like betrayal or some shit like that.”
“But you… you left me,” she said, trying to hold onto the anger because it was easier than the pain.
I got that.
I cradled anger to my chest a lot in my life.
It was a different kind of hurt, but no less destructive.
“Yeah,” I agreed. “And that shit almost fucking killed me. Would have. If Cato and Levee hadn’t been there to pull me back. And look,” I said, wanting to stop talking about me, not sure how it could help the situation at all. “It turned out how it was supposed to. You became a doctor. You took over the clinic. You followed your dreams.”
“And, what? I couldn’t have been a doctor if you hadn’t tossed me aside? I couldn’t have worked at the clinic? I couldn’t have followed my dreams and still got to have my best friend?”
“I don’t think so,” I said, shaking my head. “Fucking believe me, if I thought there was any other way, I would have done that.”
“How…” she started, looking away out the darkened window for a moment, trying to find the right words. “How… fucking insulting,” she said, turning back to glare at me.
“I always wanted to do what was best for you, Ama.”
“Yeah, fine, but who the hell were you to decide what was best for me?”
“The guy who would never be fucking good enough for you, Ama,” I said, losing my cool. “The guy who would always be a criminal. The guy you could never be with because you looked down on me, whether you were aware of it or not. That’s who the hell I was,” I said. “So I did what I had to do. For the fucking both of us.”
One look at the horror on her face made me want to suck every last one of those words back in, even if there was truth in them.
It wasn’t herfaultthat I felt that way.
It wasn’t herfaultthat she deserved better.
But it was the truth. And we both felt the pain of that reality.
