“I followed my heart and it cost us Devin. I can’t stand here and watch Jordan blame himself or be someone else for him to blame.”
“Oh, honey, no.” Hadley wrapped her arm around me. “He’s dealing with a lot. Give him time to work it out.”
I was surprised that I didn’t cry. It was hard to with a heart-crushing ache lodged in my chest. “There isn’t any working it out. He said we were a mistake he should have never made and…my sister hates me.”
Hadley didn’t say anything for a long time, I was thankful for that. Instead, she held my hand as car after car roared past us. The power of the cars manifested in the rush of wind from each pass that carried the sound of screaming engines.
There was no thrill in any of it, not like I usually found in these moments.
My eyes were glued to the red Chevy truck that roared by us as Jordan made his pass, and still nothing. Nothing but emptiness. Coming here had been wrong. Jordan wasn’t at fault for this. I was. Breanna was right. “I don’t want to go back home,” I whispered to Hadley. “I’m a coward.”
“No, you aren’t.” She gave my hand a squeeze. “Come stay at my apartment for a few days. There’s a futon in the other bedroom that my roommate left behind when she moved.”
I nodded. I didn’t deserve a friend like Hadley.
On his way back down, Jordan didn’t slow for me, not even a hesitation in acceleration. If I could have crumbled to pieces, I might have. If it wasn’t for Hadley’s grip on my hand I might not have remained standing.
It occurred to me as Hunter lined up for his run, that nothing was keeping me there.
On his return trip, I pulled free of Hadley’s hand. “I’ll go home and get my stuff and meet you back at your place.”
“Where are you going?” She started after me, but I waved her off.
I stepped out into Hunter’s path, the motor of his truck giving a low growl as he geared it down to slow in front of me. “I need to get out of here,” I told him through the open passenger window.
“What’s up, Rae?” Hunter’s face was a mask of indifference.
“I—” I took a centering breath. “I can’t.”
He nodded as if he understood perfectly, the mask fading quietly away. There was a type of love there, born of understanding and friendship. “You know, this is going to piss him off, right?”
I stopped shy of climbing in and thought about it for a long moment. “We’re not together anymore. What I do isn’t any of his damn business.”
He spoke on a sigh, as if he didn’t believe me. “Get in.”
When we passed Jordan, he looked. I could feel his
eyes on me the entire way. There should have been some sort of vindication. Instead, the weight on my chest only got heavier.
****
After we’d loaded his truck into the trailer, neither Hunter nor I said much as he took me to collect some of my things, I’d asked him to draw a line in the sand between him and Jordan, and Hunter did it for me. It should have upset me that I purposely pitted him against Jordan.
It didn’t.
This was the second time Jordan had pushed me away, made me feel I wasn’t good enough for him.
Fool me once, I thought to myself as countryside flew by out the window of Hunter’s rig. Part of me wanted Jordan to be angry, to be jealous. The other part wanted him to see that there was another life out there for me.
I was doing exactly what I’d done when I’d left the first time. I’d tried to make myself something I wasn’t to show him what he’d been missing.
I didn’t need to be reminded of where this behavior had gotten me.
I gave Hunter a chaste hug and scrambled into the safety of Hadley’s apartment. There I spent days hiding in her spare room, wallowing in my own self-pity. Alone in my grief with only the occasional quiet word through the door from Hadley.
The days I stayed in Hadley’s apartment, I didn’t give another thought to Caleb. The parts of me that Jordan had fixed, stayed whole. The parts he’d touched, the parts he’d woken inside me, those were destroyed. My only thoughts were of all the “could have beens” and “almost weres.”
“Have you talked to anyone?”
Hadley, for everything I was putting her through with my silence, was a saint. I looked over at her before standing to go to my room. “I talked to my mom.”
“Working Monday?” She settled on the sofa and tucked her legs beneath her. The fading sunlight on her face gave her a fairy-like appearance.
“I wish I didn’t have to.” I leaned against the doorway. “Bree isn’t going to be pleasant.”
“I’d say she’s been more than unpleasant for a while now.”
“True, but I’m not in the mood to deal. She’ll probably be smug or worse…happy.”
Hadley made a face that was as unpleasant as my sister’s attitude had been. But she didn’t say anything else.
“How can you always be so freakishly understanding?” I nudged her and tried for a real smile.
“Because I’ve been there. Well, maybe not exactly where you are, but I’ve had my heart broken so bad I didn’t know what to do with myself.”
I opened my mouth but shut it again. “I want to tell you that my heart isn’t broken. I want to tell myself that my heart isn’t broken.”
Hadley moved off the couch and stood by me, resting her head on my shoulder. “Love sucks.”
“Yeah.” I took a deep but shaky breath. “I feel like people keep slipping through my fingers.”
“It just feels that way.”
“My own sister won’t even look at me, blames me for all of this. All I did was love Jordan, Hadley. So many things happened between us before I moved and then again when I came back. Devin thought he knew me. But he never did. Not the way Jordan did. No one knows what he knows.”
She squeezed my hand. “I think, maybe, you’re wrong about Breanna.”
“No, she made herself pretty clear.”
“Then why is she sitting outside on the steps of my apartment complex, smoking a cigarette?”