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Because the sad truth is, I don't feel any better now she knows what really happened.
“What happens now?” she asks on a whisper.
Maybe she thinks I'm going to tell her to get her ass on a plane and come back to me, or even that I'll get on one myself and stay with her wherever she is—LA, I assume.
But neither of those things is going to happen.
Because she might now know that I had nothing to do with the leak, but it doesn't change the fact that this situation has broken me beyond repair.
There's never been a moment in my life that I have regretted loving you, even when the hurt of it felt like it was going to tear me apart. But now…now I think I do.
It's the haunting memory of those words screaming through my mind that propels me forward. “I think you need to take some time to work some shit out, Thea,” I say calmly and as sympathetically as I'm able, but with shatterproof conviction.
“What?” she chokes in shock. “What do you mean?”
Tears sting my eyes for the first time since she broke my heart six years ago. I can't believe what I'm about to do. Can't believe I'm really going to cut things off with the only woman who has ever felt like home to me.
Worst thing is, I'm not even angry about it. Maybe it would make things easier if I was, but I'm simply not.
Because I get it. She's only ever been hurt by men. Of course she thinks I'm going to hurt her too. But there's no possibility of a future for us if she can't learn to put her faith in me.
“We can't be together if you don't trust me, Thea.”
“I do trust you,” she interrupts, panicked. “I do. I—“
“But you don't. If you did, you'd have known I would never do something so awful to you, no matter how damning the evidence may seem. If you trusted me, you would never have thought I was capable of betraying you like that.”
“I don't understand.” She sniffles as she begins to cry again. “What are you saying?”
Swallowing down a sob of my own, I hold my head in my hands as I force out my next words though my heart begs me not to go through with them. “We can't be together anymore,” I repeat.
“You don't love me?” she asks and her question only adds to my pain.
“Of course I fucking love you. That's why I have to do this.” I sniff, my voice steady despite my tears. “But you've left me twice now and both times, I've been so fucking destroyed that I've barely managed to survive it. I can't go through this again. And I will. I know I will. If we go on like this and you don't find a way to deal with the demons of your past and learn to trust me, shit like this will just keep happening.”
She sobs and it's such a sad and wounded sound that I almost take it all back.
But I don't.
This has to happen.
A relationship has no hope without trust.
“I can't believe this is happening.”
“I know,” I say. “Me too.”
“I'm sorry, Cole. I'm so sorry.”
“I'm sorry too.”
Fat tears roll down my face in rivers. My head falls down to my pillow, too heavy with sadness to hold itself up anymore.
“I love you,” she whispers, shaky and broken.
“I love you too, princess,” I tell her. “Always have, always will.”
Then, we fall into a grief-filled silence, neither of us wanting to hang up the phone. Because hanging up means goodbye. And even though it was me who decided that this is where we end for now, it doesn't mean that I'm ready yet to live the reality of it.
