Page 48 of The Comeback

“I wish I were.” He has everything I’ve always wanted, and nothing made that clearer than when I watched Ava hold Ruby the other day and I knew my heart was irretrievable. But everything I want is about to walk away again.

Ava clenches her jaw and backs up a few more steps, her back almost against the door that leads inside. “Is that why you’ll never forgive me?” she says in a husky voice, full of hurt.

I look down at the deck. “You ran away from me.”

“I was eighteen and scared,” she excuses herself. “You were going to throw away something you’d worked your whole life for, and I didn’t know how else to stop you except to leave.”

I nod toward the door she’s almost huddled against. “You’re still doing it.”

Her cheeks flare red with anger, her eyes bright and shimmering with emotion. She straightens but doesn’t change the distance between us. “It’s easy when you’re pushing,” she says. She shakes her head and opens the door, looking at me one last time before going inside.

I watch her shoulders rise and fall in a couple of deep breaths before she reaches Gabriella and then bends over her to whisper something. Then she walks across my family room and disappears in the direction of the front door. Her car starts and she drives away. All the while I’m rooted to the spot I’m standing in on my deck, our argument spinning through my mind and me with no way to fix it.

I’m not wrong, right? Football can end in a blink—an injury, a bad season—but she was my forever.

I get to be noble because I care more about a person than a job, don’t I?

But the way Ava just explained it right now says she cared more about a person too. About me and what my future meant without football. I never considered what I was doing, thinking about quitting. I never considered how I would feel about giving that up, because Ava was more important. I believe that still.

But once again, it’s not the whole story. She’s trying to tell me that she felt the same. That I was more important than her happiness. And she’s right. We were young and trying to figure out big adult things, and it was hard.

It’s also a revelation to me that when she left, she never meant it to be forever. For her, it was a temporary solution. I’ll accept blame there.

But how can I reconcile our past and the mistakes we both made when I don’t know how to believe she’ll stay this time?

CHAPTER 28

AVA

I scream into my pillow and promise myself this is absolutely the last time I will cry about Jett McCombs.

I should have known, should have felt it when his desperate lips first hit mine, that he wasn’t over what happened between us before, that he would never really forgive me for leaving. The way he clung to me on the field was just emotion from the game, not the real feelings I thought had returned. He was so vehement about me taking choices away from him, believing football didn’t matter, and I see why he’ll never forgive me. In his mind, I didn’t just break up with him—I took away his future.

I’m scared that he’s right.

I can’t sleep, and I can’t stop crying. Every time I think I’ve got the worst of it out, I remember the feel of his hands on my back, the touch of his familiar lips, how loved I felt to be the one with him down on the field again. How right it was.

I’m exhausted, but my mind won’t stop going over everything, like I should have said something more to make him really understand.

He doesn’t trust me.

He never will if he believes I left because it was hard between us. The unfairness of that statement is still ringing in me. I was there with him when his dream schools all turned him down, when he cried in his truck over it because he didn’t want anyone else to know about his disappointment. I stayed with him for two years of long-distance that was hard. I lost ten pounds because I was living on ramen and pb&j and working as many hours as I could get.

I didn’t leave because it was hard.

I left to save him.

And yet I can’t stop hearing his voice in my head about not giving him a choice about us being more important. We are.

We were.

I don’t know how to reconcile this—my doubts now with the things I’ve always been so sure of—even amidst the hurt.

I was devastated when we broke up. I cried for weeks. I really did believe that someday he would understand and come back to me. But in the end, I let him go piece by piece, and perhaps that’s why it never felt as final as it does tonight.

Despite getting only a few hours of sleep, I wake up early on Monday morning and distract myself with wedding planning, taking a page out of Gabriella’s book and fueling myself with what can only be described as a caffeine drip to keep me going.

She texts me midmorning with a simple Call me when you want to talk. I don’t want to rehash everything I went through the night before, not yet, so I just respond that everything is fine. Really.