Page 61 of Homesick
He lied. The rest of the restaurant blurs into gray around me. A million different reasons race through my head at once. Each one more hurtful than the last. Rehashing the past is going to hurt a lot more than I thought it would.
“W-why,” I start to ask, but stop myself. “I don’t understand. Isn’t that what you wanted?”
“Yes,” he breathes, letting go of a long-endured confession. “I wanted to follow you, Wren. I really did. But I couldn’t leave my mom.”
A familiar sharp pain begins to prickle at the edge of my heart, and I’m transported back to that night when my world felt like it had shattered into a million pieces.
“I got the acceptance letter in the mail a few weeks after we had her remission party. I thought the letter would make me happy, but it just created all this guilt about leaving her after such a difficult time in her life,” he explains with glossy eyes. “It has been just us for so long and I felt like I was abandoning her.”
I can feel my palms begin to sweat and my heart thumping against my chest in perfect rhythm. I was hurt that he lied to me, but I was devastated that he felt like he couldn’t tell me why he chose to stay.
“I was there for you that entire year,” I state calmly. “Why couldn’t you just tell me that’s why you didn’t want to leave Honey Grove? Instead, you lied to me. After everything we’d been through.”
“I thought I was protecting you,” he admits. “You stood right by my side when my mom was sick and I was worried if I explained to you why I couldn’t leave, you’d find a reason to stay, too. I wanted you to go to school and find a life outside of this town. Outside of me.”
As my fingers dance across the cool surface of the glass in front of me, I let Blake’s confession wash over me.
I was young and in love. There’s a good chance I might’ve found a closer college or taken online classes just to be with him. When you’re young, you hold on to first loves. You hold on so tight, it’s hard to see anything else.
“That wasn’t your decision to make. Instead, you were a coward and pushed me away. If I knew what you were going through, I could’ve been there for you.”
My eyes shift around the room. Trying to find a reason not to get lost in the field of green in front of me.
But it’s not enough. I can’t help being pulled back into him like two magnets that have been pulled apart too many times. Our connection is inevitable.
“Wren,” he says, causing my eyes to snap back to him. “I’m sorry for how I handled things. I thought that pushing you away was the right thing to do.”
“That still doesn’t explain why you broke up with me,” I wince. “We agreed that we were going to make it work long-distance. We agreed that what we had was too important to let a couple hundred miles get in the way.”
Blake breaks eye contact with me when tears begin to outline my eyes. All the pain and hurt comes crashing back in one fell swoop. It’s like I’m eighteen again, trying to figure out why my best friend didn’t want me anymore.
“This is going to sound selfish, but seeing how happy you were those first few weeks of school was hard on me. I really thought I was going to be able to do long distance, but the longer you were away, the more I felt the strain on our relationship.”
I divert my gaze to my hands safely stowed away under the table. I want to curl into a ball and hide away from the hurt spreading in my heart.
“Do you remember the weekend I came to visit you at school? It was during homecoming, I think,” he says, scratching the scruff on his chin.
“That was the longest we’d gone without seeing each other, and I was so excited to see you. Then I got to your campus, and it reminded me of one of those colleges you see on TV or in movies. I was intimidated the second I parked my truck. But all of that faded away when I got to wrap my arms around you for the first time in weeks.”
Blake takes a sip of his beer before continuing.
“I remember how you gave me a tour of campus and introduced me to all your suite mates. You were glowing the entire time, and I could tell you were in your element. You were thriving away from home and selfishly, I hated it.”
I swallow hard and nervously shift in my seat. The first few weeks of freshman year were great, but after he broke up with me, I never really recovered.
If anything, I threw myself into the college experience. I drank too much and kissed too many strangers. I was constantly searching for a way to forget how much he hurt me.
I never did find a way to dull the pain sitting in the back of my heart. It was consistently there, poking and prodding.
His body begins to fidget in place and a part of me wants to reach my hand over for comfort, but I stop myself.
“I hated it because you used to glow like that around me. The entire time I was there, I kept thinking about how you were going to do great things and leave me behind.”
I grasp at the faux leather seats of the diner and look anywhere but at Blake. Everything he’s saying makes sense and I don’t want it to.
“But I loved you and I knew that my feelings would only turn into resentment after time. I thought that if we were really meant to be then you would come back to me,” Blake says as his jaw tightens. “So, then I decided to break things off. I pushed you out of the truck that night because I knew if you stayed and we talked about it, I would change my mind. Well, I actually did end up changing my mind, but by that point you didn’t want to talk to me, so it didn’t matter. I knew I just had to wait things out.”
“What do you mean you changed your mind? That night was the last time I heard from you,” I state before leaning into the table.