The Pace (21 page)

“Really? I couldn’t tell. You looked like you’d seen a ghost.” I giggled.

He turned away, and I squeezed him tighter, so my forehead was touching the back of his neck, just to let him know I preferred less distance.

“Sophie, I was living in the darkest abyss possible until you came back into my life.”

I nestled closer to him. He turned his head back toward me, which suited me just fine. Then, he softly said, “Which is why I don’t think this is such a good idea.”

I wasn’t sure I’d heard him, so I lifted my head and was about to ask him to repeat what he’d said when he continued.

“You are so young, Sophie. I have a lot of experience here, and I admit that you make me happy, but I don’t think it’s enough.”

“What does that mean?”

“It means that I know where this is going, and it’s not good, so I want to do us both a favor and spare us any more pain before we get too close.”

“I have no idea what you’re talking about.” I shook my head in disbelief. “What are you saying?” It was all so sudden.

He stood up and took two steps toward the door. Without turning around, he quietly murmured, “I can’t do this with you. I just can’t.”

Hopping up, I lurched forward and moved in front of him. “What do you mean, you can’t do this? You’re confusing me.”

He remained just a few inches from me, but he looked away. “I’m sorry. I don’t mean to confuse you. I just can’t go through this again.”

I was losing my patience with him. I felt my chest tighten. One minute, everything felt so right, so perfect. And now, I’m not exactly sure what was going on, but it felt very wrong. “Stop it,” I snapped. “Again? What do you mean by again? We’ve never been through anything like this. Please just tell me what’s going on.”

I was almost embarrassed. I’d never begged anyone for anything before. I’d always gone out of my way to distance myself from someone, and yet there I was clinging to every word he said. I took a deep breath and let out a sigh. We stood there in the darkness of my room facing each other, although I was the only one trying to make eye contact.

I studied the perfect angles of his face, which were illuminated by the glow of my computer. I examined the crease between his eyebrows and wondered why he looked so troubled. More like pained. It made no sense. I reached for his face, and in the same motion, he leaned away from me.

Rejection and anger were building in me. Before I had a chance to get one word out, he cleared his throat and said, “I’m sorry, Sophie, I just can’t be with you anymore. Not now. Not ever.” Then, he turned and looked at me, as if trying to see if I understood.

I shook my head, and then he whispered, “I’m sorry. I really am.”

“Wait!” I gasped, and just like that he was gone. I lurched to the door and cried out, “Wait!” Only this time, it was raspy and barely audible. Not that it mattered because there was nothing out there. No one to hear me anyway. He was gone, and only the darkness remained; yet I couldn’t bring myself to turn back into my room. I stood there trying to understand, trying to make sense of this. I had no idea what had happened.

My eyes searched the darkness while my mind frantically ran through the last twenty minutes in my head. I tried to pinpoint exactly what had gone wrong.

Thinking back twenty minutes wasn’t far enough. Once I thought about it, I knew right away. The look on his face when he arrived had been distant. I
had
noticed something was off, only I’d ignored it.

With that last thought, the realization of what just happened gathered together in a lump in my throat. I had not imagined this. It was real. He was gone. Whatever happened, whatever the change in him, it happened prior to these last moments with him sitting in my room. He had come over specifically to break things off. I blinked, and with that last revelation, the first tear spilled over.

When I woke up the next morning, my eyes stung in the sunlight. I must have literally cried every last tear I had, because my eyes felt dry and sore. I rolled back over and covered my head with the pillow in an effort to drown out each thought. The memories of the night before wouldn’t go away. I remembered the butterflies I’d had in my stomach as I leaned against his back. I felt the warm sensation when my arms wrapped around his waist. And then I felt the gravitational pull that yanked my heart out of the door into the darkness. I had nothing left, and all I could do was curl up into a little ball with the pillow still over my head. I didn’t cry. I’m not sure if I was out of tears, or if crying and cringing in anger didn’t mix.

I had no idea where any of this had come from. We had been going out for almost five months. I saw him just about every day. He had opened my eyes to things I hadn’t known existed. There was nothing else in this world like him. He was magnificent. He was caring. He was nothing I would ever find again. And that did it. The cringing turned to crying again.

I think I cried for about an hour more and slept for another two hours, because it was lunchtime by the time I woke, and I hadn’t eaten anything. My stomach was growling. I blinked away the sunlight again and was greeted by more stinging in my eyes. I sat up in my bed and waited for the blood to catch up to my head. Once I felt I was capable of holding my head up, I walked myself to the bathroom to brush my teeth. It wasn’t a pretty sight.

My hair was all over the place. Part of the top was laying to the left, part of the top was laying to the right, and the back was sticking out. What was most shocking was that my eyes were bloodshot, with red circles under each of them. Seeing myself in such a state made me angry. I brushed my teeth without looking in the mirror again, and when I finished, I wiped my mouth on my towel and headed downstairs to get something to eat.

I grabbed a bowl, the milk, a spoon, and the box of cereal in one trip and plopped down at the table and began eating.
Oh crap
, I thought.
It’s Monday, and Mom is off today.
If I had been coherent enough to have remembered that, I would’ve stayed in my room starving, but it was too late; she came around the corner as soon as the thought crossed my mind.

“Hey honey,” she said, entering the kitchen.

“Hey.” I had a mouthful of cereal, and I kept my head down, hoping she’d pick up on the idea that I was too busy eating to talk.

“You look terrible,” she said.

“Thanks.”

“No, I mean it. Look at me.”

I decided I had eaten enough breakfast, so I tilted my head down, grabbed my bowl, and began making my way to the sink. “No, I am fine.”

“Sophie, I know you well enough to know you are not fine. I am your mother, you know. You can at least tell me what is bothering you. I won’t pry.”

“You’re prying now,” I pointed out, as I put away the milk.

“Just tell me what happened.”

“Fine. Wes broke up with me last night. Okay?”

“Oh,” she said, nodding her head in understanding. “Do you want to talk about it?”

“No,” I answered, making a quick exit from the kitchen.

“His loss,” she called out.

Although I didn’t reply to her, I liked the sound of it. He
did
say that I was the one who brought him out of the abyss. I mean, he was the one living the miserable, empty life all alone, feeling like a freak, and being bored out of his mind. My mother was exactly right. It was his loss. At least that was what I told myself.

When I reached my room, I saw the copy of
Othello
on my desk, and it reminded me that I had a paper due at midnight. I sat down at my computer to log onto my class so I could confirm how many pages the paper needed to be. When I logged on, I could see that almost the whole class was online, too. We were probably all working on this thing, procrastinating together.

I clicked on the assignment link and saw that it had to be three to five pages. That was nothing. I could easily write five pages on being stupid. This paper was going to be especially easy and bitter after what had happened last night.

I pulled up an empty Word document and sat there staring at my screen, a crease developing in my forehead. After a few minutes of thinking, I began typing my title: “
Othello: Too Blind to See What Could Have Been.
” It was one of the best papers I had ever written, and although I got an A, it was little compensation for how I felt.

By Wednesday night, I hadn’t heard from Wes at all, and I couldn’t stand the distance between us. I called him, but I was only greeted by his voice mail. After several calls and unanswered messages, it became clear to me that he’d meant what he’d said. There was no mistake that he’d take back the next day. I felt completely hurt, frustrated, and angry all at the same time.

I didn’t understand how everything could be fine one day and then the next, my whole world could be turned upside down. I tried to convince myself that he was an evil person, but that didn’t fly. He wasn’t evil. I almost wished he had been incredibly mean and awful to me, then it would’ve made it that much easier for me to get over him. But, he wasn’t mean at all. He had managed to break my heart as nicely as possible. I even remembered the pain in his eyes when he’d said it, and he did sound sorry about breaking it off, so it still didn’t make sense.
Then why?
I kept asking myself. What was it that had him backpedaling?

I found myself just as confused, then, as I had been the day I’d first met him. Everything was a mystery when it came to him, and that both bothered me and motivated me to try one more time to reach out to him. I was tired of leaving messages and not getting a response, so I tried sending an email hoping he would give me something. If he didn’t want to talk to me, he could perhaps reply in writing. I opened my email and began my message:

Wes,

I’m not sure what I did, but I’m sorry. I truly am. You’re making it clear that you don’t want to talk to me, but I refuse to believe this is how we end. Please give me some answers. Please give me
something
. I miss you.

Love,

Sophie

By Thursday, there was still no response from him, and I was falling into a minor state of depression. I lay around on my bed practically doing nothing all day, every day. I was a zombie. I did my schoolwork, and as soon as I was done, I went to bed. I was miserable. I lost track of how many times I cried in my room, but I did a pretty good job of not letting my mother know how bad it was. She left me to my privacy. I suspect she knew I was not myself, but when I was around her, I did a decent job of carrying on her theme that it was his loss. I pulled myself together long enough to go downstairs for food and to have enough conversation with her that she didn’t need to feel worried. Maintaining that was going to be difficult while I was on campus, but I had to try.

Driving to lunch that week, I was fine. I knew he wouldn’t be there before my lunch, so I could concentrate on having a somewhat relaxing lunch. It was the leaving that I was worried about.

I had almost gotten used to the idea of not seeing him, so I was afraid a fresh image in my brain would make me ache more. However, on the other hand, I worried about not seeing him, because it would mean he was purposely avoiding me. I largely considered what would be the worse of the two, but never anticipated the true ache I was about to feel.

After lunch with my mom, I headed back toward my car. It was rather chilly that afternoon, so I put my hands in my pockets as I walked. It helped calm the nerves, but it didn’t help with the pounding in my chest as I neared the wooded path that took me straight to the parking lot. My heart was beating so hard, I thought it would jump out of my chest. I tried to regulate it by pacing my breathing, and that was when I saw him.

He was about fifty yards down the path, but I knew it was him right away. He had on his large, wool zip-up gray coat and his navy hat pulled over his ears. No one else would’ve been dressed that warmly in fifty-degree weather. It was definitely him. I started to perk up a little as I realized he wasn’t going out of his way to ignore me.

Just as I was about to veer toward his side of the path to cut him off, he began smiling and laughing. It took just a few seconds after that for it to register in my brain that he was walking with someone. My eyes diverted to a petite blonde walking beside him. When he laughed, she laughed. At one point, she seemed so tickled with him that she leaned in toward his body and patted his chest with her hand.

I was furious. I had only a minute or so before we would pass each other on the path. Several things shot through my mind. One of them being to pull out every last strand of the girl’s long hair, and the other was to shove both of them off the path. I couldn’t believe it. It was so unbelievably tacky and hurtful. I knew if I said anything at all, it would only come out in a bunch of gibberish, because I was so dumbstruck and hurt at the same time. I feared my words would betray me in the form of rambling nonsense, so I tightened my lips. I couldn’t bear anymore embarrassment. As they drew closer, I looked toward the ground. I turned my head down and away so neither one could see my face. She was still giggling as they walked by. After they passed, I managed to mumble the word, “Thanks.” And I knew he could hear me.

It took everything I had not to break into a sob when I got into my Jeep. I found myself wanting to ram into another innocent car, but I decided against it. I went to the overlook instead. Thankfully, no one else was there. I stayed in my car, leaned over my steering wheel, and cried. I felt like a complete idiot. I was both sad and angry with myself for believing in him. I’d convinced myself that he was interested in me. I had fallen for him, without a doubt, and I was stupid to believe it was reciprocated. Kerry was right. She always tried to be so supportive, but I could tell in her tone that she didn’t even believe it was possible for him to be that perfect. We were just high school girls, and he was a college boy, magnificent, a wonder. I was foolish to think that a girl like me could hold him.