I carried Aly into the living room. “Peyton left.”
“Oh dear…back to New York?”
“Yes.”
“And you two?”
“Over.”
“Isaac…I’m sorry.”
Everyone was sorry. So sorry. But that didn’t make her any less gone.24Peyton“Do you want to talk about it?” Piper asked as she drove me to the airport.
“Not really,” I whispered.
I stared out the window, brushing the tears off of my cheeks and watching the bare cotton fields pass by.
“I wish that you were staying.”
I sucked in a deep breath. My lungs hurt. My body felt brittle. What was I even supposed to say to that after what I’d done?
“Me too,” I managed to force out.
But I didn’t want to give up ballet. I couldn’t. It was ingrained in me. And I didn’t see another option.
Piper sighed and merged onto the highway. “I’m sorry about Isaac.”
“Yeah.”
“Peyton—”
“Just…don’t, Pipes, please,” I muttered, diving into my own sorrow. “It was hard enough the first time.”
Piper nodded, reaching out and taking my hand. “Everyone else understands, you know? We’ll be sad not to have you here for Christmas, but we get it.”
“Thanks.”
“I didn’t really expect you to stay anyway.”
I swallowed and choked back another sob. No one had expected me to stay. Only Isaac had hoped for it. Only I’d let him think it was possible. Even though it was never possible. Now…we were over, and I was walking away from Lubbock with another broken heart.
Piper drove her Jeep up to Departures and hopped out to pull my suitcase out of the trunk. I hoisted my dance bag over my shoulder. It hurt, knowing that I wouldn’t get to perform for the last show in Lubbock. Kathy had been completely understanding. They had an understudy in place, who was anxious to play the role. But I’d wanted to perform that final show.
“Don’t be a stranger,” Piper said, yanking me into a hug.
“Of course not. I’ll text you when I land.”
“Good. Maybe I can come up this spring when you’re in between shows. We can eat those amazing dumplings at that place we went to in Chinatown. And oh! Cuban from that place near Times Square. Also, what about that Ethiopian place?”
I held up a hand, managing a small smile. “I get it. You’re coming to see me so that you can eat.”
“What else is there to do?”
I snorted. “I’ll miss you.”
“Me too. You’re always welcome back. I have a spare room for a reason. It’s yours if you want it.”
“Thanks, Pipes,” I said, hugging her one more time before taking the suitcase out of her hand and heading into the small Lubbock airport.
I reluctantly handed the bag over and then breezed through security. My plane was already boarding. I put in earbuds to block out the world and let a T-Swift breakup song wash over me.
What was I going to do? This…this wasn’t supposed to happen. I wasn’t supposed to have fallen in love again. Not with Isaac, who was wonderful and had an amazing kid and…it just couldn’t work out. Now, my heart felt like it had been put through a shredder. And I had to go home and dance and act and pretend like everything was fine. When it wasn’t fine.
But I knew it would hurt us even more if we ripped the Band-Aid off slowly. If we tried long distance, it would never work. The flights between New York and Lubbock were outrageously expensive. Plus, there were no direct flights. It wasn’t fair to make either of us live our lives in the air. To live our lives separate but desperate to be together. We’d break down just from the impossibility of it. I’d rather leave us on a moment of pure happiness than risk destroying something across two thousand miles.
True to Annabelle’s word, I had a first-class seat that I could sleep in and took advantage of that the best that I could.
When I finally landed back at JFK, it was a freezing nineteen degrees, and I was ill-prepared for the sharp drop in temperature. Lubbock was cold but not biting.
I wrapped my peacoat tight around myself, glad that my luggage was the first out, and then hailed a cab to the city. Thankfully, at three forty-five in the morning, there was miraculously little traffic, and we made it back to my apartment in record time. I paid the driver and stepped out onto the sidewalk. My gaze lingered over the dirty street and flickering lamppost and the barred gate that led up to the apartments overhead.
This was home. And it had never felt less like it.
I let myself inside and checked my mail, which still had a bunch of junk in it despite diverting it for the month to Piper’s place. Then I lugged my suitcase up the six flights of stairs since no one had bothered to install an elevator.
My apartment was thankfully untouched. The building was completely safe, but there was always that fear in the pit of my stomach that it would be ransacked when I left. It had happened to a friend or two too many when I first moved here, and I’d never been able to shake the feeling.