Elliot
When there’s a knock at my bedroom door, I’m surprised. I figure it has to be Shaun, and even though we cleared some of the air with our little talk last night, I’m not exactly expecting to see him.
But when I open it, to my surprise, it’s not my roommate, but Lena.
“Lena, hey,” I hope I don’t sound as pathetically relieved as I feel.
“Hey,” she flashes me a tentative smile, “Shaun, uh, loaned me his key,” she holds up the little silver key, “He came by and talked to me.”
I’m a little surprised. I know Shaun said he was going to have a talk with Lena, but I wasn’t expecting it to be this fast. “Yeah, he and I had a bit of a talk ourselves last night,” I tell her.
“So, I take it he kind of filled you in?”
I nod. “Yeah, but I’d still like to hear your perspective,” I tell her, “If you’re willing to share it.”
She nods, and I gesture for her to come into the room and I sit down on one end of the bed. There’s a desk chair beside me she could opt for, but I’m pleased when she chooses instead to sit across from me on the bed.
“I assume he told you about Owen and the accident, so I hope you’ll forgive me if I don’t re-tell that part,” she says, and I nod.
“But whatever Shaun told you, I think I should emphasize that it was just an accident and I never blamed him,” she adds, and while part of me is surprised, a larger part of me isn’t.
The way Shaun had painted it, he was some unforgivable murderer and surely Lena must have thought of him as a monster all these years, but that was his own built-up anxiety and unprocessed trauma.
Admittedly, I can’t blame him for thinking there’d be resentment. There are a lot of people who wouldn’t be able to look past their grief to see the situation clearly, who would blame him for what had happened. And it’s hard to fathom a couple of eighteen-year-old kids being able to overcome something that traumatic and still come out of it together.
“Honestly, losing him crushed me. I was mourning and alone and all I wanted was to be able to turn to my other half, but it was like he was dead, too,” she says, “I never blamed him for what happened to Owen, I know he loved my brother almost as much as I did. What I blamed him for was abandoning me to face all of that pain by myself when we could have helped each other through it.”
It’s a bitter catch-22. Shaun’s attempt to spare Lena’s pain had amplified her hurts a thousandfold.
She looks down at her hands in her lap and when she speaks again, there’s a tremor in her voice. “He didn’t say a word to me before he left. Not one, I only found out he’d left when I went to confront him and his mom had to tell me he was gone. So I spent years wondering what I’d done to deserve it, why I wasn’t even worth a goodbye,” her voice cracks and tears roll down her cheeks.
I slip my hand into one of hers and squeeze. “You didn’t-”
She shakes her head. “I know, I know, I get it now, he was grieving, too, and it made him do some stupid shit, it wasn’t me, but that wasn’t so easy to see at the time, you know?”
I nod.
“I just wish he’d talked to me,” she says, “One conversation and maybe all of this pain could have been avoided.”
“And you two might still be together,” I add.
She looks at me, and slowly she nods. “Maybe,” she admits quietly.
“You still love him.”
It’s a statement, not a question. I don’t need to ask, I can see the answer written on her face. I recognize that love because I feel the same fucking way for the idiot.
“I don’t know. It’s been six years, and we’re not the same people we were back then,” she says, shaking her head, “Part of me may never have gotten over him completely, and maybe there’s still something there, but…he made his choice, and I’ve moved on with my life.”
She squeezes my hand lightly with the last bit and takes a deep breath. “And I don’t want my past to keep getting in the way of a future, because whatever feelings I think I have for Shaun, Iknowthat I love you, Elliot.”
It takes me a second to process the words. But once they sink in, my heart swells. Throughout this whole discussion, I’ve been waiting for the other shoe to drop, for her to say that all of this was just too complicated and that she was done.
But dropping her first “I love you” doesn’t exactly sound like the precursor to a breakup.
Before I realize what I’m doing, I’m kissing her, hoping that I can pour all of the feelings I can’t put together the words for into the gesture.
She snakes her arms around my neck, tugging me closer, and the tiny moan she makes hits me like a white-hot tsunami. My blood runs through my veins like fire, my dick growing rock-hard in an instant.