The words are honest, but they still sting. He’s not being especially cold to me, and I don’t get the idea that he thinks I’m some horrible person, but…
Well, I’m still embarrassed.
I still hate the idea that I hurt him, and I’m totally humiliated about the fact that I came here and basically threw myself at him.
“I know,” I say.
“Felicity, why did you come here?”
“I told you,” I say.
“Yeah, you said you were scared. I get that. Why me, though? Felicity,” he shakes his head. “You were the one who walked away.” He sighs, and then he stares at me like he really has no idea why we broke up all of those years ago. He looks at me like he’s really confused as to what happened between us, and I can’t…I just can’t take it anymore.
“It was for your own good!” I yell out the words, and the room falls silent. I’ve never told Brendan why we broke up. I never gave him a real reason. I just…ditched him. I told him I couldn’t do it and I lied to him. I said I didn’t want to be with him.
That wasn’t true.
That wasn’t true at all.
What I wanted more than anything else in the damn world was to be with him, but I walked away and I never looked back.
“What did you just say?” He looks at me carefully, calculating, like he’s trying to figure out exactly what the message is here. He knows that something wasn’t quite right about the way our relationship ended, and I can see the wheels turning as he’s trying to sort out the problem.
“I left for your own good,” I whisper. “You were going to go to grad school. You couldn’t be tied down.” It was what had to happen. Being trapped with a girl from your hometown isn’t a good way to live your life. It would have caused him too much stress. It would have bothered him far too much.
“What the fuck are you talking about?” He asks. “I didn’t go to grad school.”
“What?” I whisper. Suddenly, my heart feels heavy, and it’s like there’s some sort of weight on my chest. The whole room seems to spin as his words start to sink in. “But you…you left, and you were gone for a year.”
It wasn’t supposed to happen. We didn’t talk about it before he left. He never brought up the fact that he’d applied to school or that he’d been accepted. If I hadn’t accidentally seen an enrollment packet on his mom’s kitchen counter, then I probably never would have found out the truth. She’d been the one who noticed me staring at it.
“Pretty fantastic, isn’t it?” She asked, jerking her head toward the thick white envelope.
“What is?” I stared at it, not wanting to know if it meant what I suspected that it meant. Brendan and I had been together forever, and we had big dreams, but none of them involved going to school out-of-state. We’d done our undergrad programs together at a local college in a nearby town. We hadn’t even had to leave our own town to move. We’d just driven over every day.
“That Brendan got into grad school. He’s going to be so good!” His mother smiled, wiping her hands on a towel. “I’m so happy for him. You know, ever since he was a little kid, he always dreamed about pursuing higher education.”
“He did?” Everything seemed to blurry as I silently urged myself not to cry about what she was telling me.
“He didn’t tell you?” She asked, raising an eyebrow.
I shook my head, not wanting her to know that he hadn’t filled me in on his big plans.
“Oh well,” she shrugged. “I’m sure you’ll have a few more months together before he leaves. He’ll let you know when he’s ready.”
“Who told you I was going to graduate school?” He asks. This time, his voice has taken on a deeper edge. His hands ball into fists, and before I can stop myself, I blurt out the words.
“Your mom. She said…”
Somehow, I manage to stop myself from speaking any more. I shouldn’t tell him. He doesn’t need to know that his mom broke his trust by sharing his graduate school secret with me. Then again, what could it hurt now?
“She said you were leaving, and that me being with you was going to hold you back.” The words sit in the air after I say them. The conversation that followed me discovering the grad school
packet is seared into my mind for all eternity. It was the day that every changed for me. It was the day that I realized I was going to have to grow up and give up on Brendan because he…
Well, he was giving up on me.
“Is that all?” He asks dryly. He’s staring at me darkly, and something has changed in his appearance. He doesn’t look worried anymore. Now he just looks pissed.