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“No, I just thought that you would still care.” I stand and gather my things. I’m done here, and I’m done with Will. He has made it perfectly clear that he doesn’t want me, that he never wanted me. To him, I was just a summer fling.
“I do care.” I pause at his words, but something rings hollow to me and I walk towards the door. “Hannah, please wait. I want to say goodbye. I don’t want it to end like this.” He follows after me and I resist the urge to look back at him.
“Then how do you want it to end? Do you want me to pretend that you aren’t wrecking me just so you can feel good about forgetting about me tomorrow?” I push through the door to the stairs. I don’t stop to hear his reply.
“Hannah, I just want to say goodbye.” Will pleads, but I’m too far gone already.
“Goodbye tonight shouldn’t matter if the fact that I’m leaving tomorrow won’t mean anything to you. You won’t care when I come for Thanksgiving, and I don’t see how you could have ever possibly cared about me the way I care about you.” I’m sobbing, and Will is just looking at me, horror-struck. His eyes are wide, and he seems to struggle for words. Feelings as strong as mine obviously terrify someone as unfeeling as him.
“Hannah, please. Let’s talk this out. I don’t want it to end like this.” He almost sounds as anguished as I feel.
“There is nothing to talk about, Will. Like you said, there is no other ending. I care for you, and you want me to accept nothing from you in return. I need to know you care enough to at least treat me as a friend when I’m gone.” The tears race down my cheeks and my sentences are punctuated by sobs.
“How can I show you?” Will looks completely helpless as he stands staring at me, and I think it is finally dawning on him that this is a lost cause. He can’t have a happy goodbye and his detachment. I can’t love him and not be heart broken.
“Come to the airport tomorrow morning, but I only want to see you if you actually care enough about me to let me be a part of your life past this summer.” I wipe away my tears and manage to swallow my sobs.
“Hannah, I can’t do long distance.” His words are raw, hinting at the pain and fear of betrayal.
“I’m not asking for long distance. I just want to know that you aren’t going to cut me out. I just need to know that you care.”
“Okay.” Will says, and I’m too far gone to read into whether that was a ‘I will be there’ okay or a ‘I guess this is how it will be’ okay.
This time when I keep walking, Will doesn’t call out again. I manage not to cry on the walk back to the hotel, though tears sting my eyes, but I’m sure any person with eyes can see I’ve just been destroyed. As soon as I close the door to my hotel room, the tears fall, and they fall like they haven’t since Mama died, but Mama had loved me, and Will doesn’t. I hate that someone who cares nothing for me can cause me so much pain.
Chapter 34
I fall asleep, but I feel as if I have barely blinked when my alarm goes off. I haphazardly throw my belongings back into my suitcase, my feelings far off as I go through the motions of packing. I look like a zombie, but I’m past caring about anything other than the pain in my chest.
Dad doesn’t say anything when I meet him in the hall, but I can tell that he can tell that things didn’t go well with Will last night. He just takes my suitcase and wraps an arm around my shoulder as he walks me to the lobby to checkout. He doesn’t say anything until we are in the cab.
“Did you tell Will you are going to Columbia?”
“No.” I don’t look at Dad, too ashamed of everything. After all that screaming and fighting, I still couldn’t tell him. I’m not sure it would have changed anything, and I don’t think my heart could take that.
“It might have changed things.” I hold back the angry thoughts inside my head that yell that I know that.
“Yeah, it might have, but he said he always saw us ending and I don’t want him to choose me just because it’s convenient. I want what you and Mama had, someone that chooses me and does what must be done to stay together.” I don’t want someone who doesn’t care for me the way I care for him.
“Do you feel that way about Will?”
“Yes.” I can’t manage any explanation more than that as tears well in my eyes, but I know in my heart that if I wasn’t going to be living in New York City, I would still want a relationship with Will. I would want him if he was thousands of miles away and only got to see him once a year. I would want him if I only ever got to hear his voice on the phone.
Dad doesn’t say anything more and after checking our bags, he doesn’t resist my request to wait to go through security. I don’t tell him who I’m waiting for, but I’m sure he is able to piece it together.
Ten minutes pass and then twenty. Boarding for our flight will start in 10 minutes. Doors will close 20 minutes after that. People swirl all around us, but none of them are Will.
Doubt nibbles on the edges of my heart. I felt an echo of what Susan must have felt those years ago. Will isn’t coming. I know it, Dad knows it, hell, the TSA officer watching us knows it, but I can’t walk away yet, not until it is boarding time for our flight. It doesn’t matter that I know he isn’t going to show. I won’t give up even one second where there is still a possibility he can choose me.
My phone vibrates with a boarding notification for our flight, and I close my eyes and drop my head as all the possibilities fade away. Dad wraps his arm around my shoulder as he leads me to the security line. Giving me a kiss on the head, he says the words Mom would have said had she been here.
“You are worth it, Hannah. No boy showing up or not showing up at an airport changes that.”
“It just hurts so much, Dad. It’s like Mama again.” It is, but it is also a completely different heartbreak. Mama’s love had never been tainted by her death, but with this heartbreak, all my memories with Will are cast into shadow. Any care I thought he had felt for me dissolved into empty words and gestures.
I think back to my feelings about breaking up with Wesley. I had thought that Mama’s death had been like being struck by a cannon ball and Wesley’s break up just a bullet passing through that giant hole left by Mama. If that was true, then Will is a bomb, and I am completely obliterated.
“Come on, sweetheart, let’s go home.” Dad says and with grief weighing on every part of me, nothing sounds better than home. Home where everything is simple and there is no amazingly frustrating man that makes me cry because there is no way I will ever be enough for him. Home where this heartbreak will be far away, at least for the next couple of weeks.
