Page 20 of Tomorrow Belongs to Us
“And you think giving them to my aunt was any better?”
“I told her I’d seen you standing by the bus stop in the rain soaked to the skin, so I gave you a change of clothes and drove you home. Your aunt told me that your mom was recovering in the hospital and that she’d be home in a few days’ time. I thought it best to lay low.”
“Lay low?” I hiss.
“You didn’t need more complication in your life.”
“Who were you to decide what I did or didn’t need?” I snarl.
“I’m sorry I wasn’t there for you, to take the heat. I wasn’t thinking.” He fixes me with an apologetic stare.
“Yeah, you left, unexpectedly, and without warning. You. Just. Left.”
Like my father had.
“How is your mom now?” he asks, not answering my question. Probably because he has nothing else to say.
“She recovered, and we all lived happily ever after.” My mom would be furious if she could see me now. Lance Turner’s name is as bad as a curse word in our family.
I take a sip of coffee so that I won’t have to meet his eyes. It’s unsettling, sitting here opposite the man who’s consumed so much of my life by not being a part of it, a man I’ve built up into some mythical god and who, by his absence, has turned into something bigger than the man he is.
It’s been emotional, a fantasy in my head, and I’ve often wondered if he has wasted as much time as I have in thinking about us. I try to tune out the fact that I’d become so emotionally embroiled in my feelings for him; that I’d stopped seeing him as my teacher, and instead started to see him as a friend.
I notice the scar along his jaw. It’s still there, if a little fainter than I remember. Lance had told me how he’d gotten it while he was trying to save his younger sister from hurting herself. He’d been around ten years old, and was helping her to learn to ride a bike. It got to the point that she was confident enough for their dad to remove the training wheels and he’d been encouraging her to cycle forward and get over her fear of falling. She’d come towards him, then veered towards the fence. He rushed towards her, throwing himself in front so that she would hit him instead of the fence. She did, and fell with the bike, on top of him, the bell hitting his jaw hard and slicing it.
I still have unanswered questions. “Why didn’t you ever call me? Did you not understand what had happened to my family? That’s all we ever talked about. You always seemed to care, but the way you left, the way you never got in touch with me tells me they were just words. I didn’t matter to you at all.”
“That’s not true.”
“It is true. You knew where I was. I’m the one who didn’t know where you disappeared to.”
“I had to stay away. Megan. You know we couldn’t be together.”
Heat crawls along my cheeks when he says it like that, bringing my past into my present and holding up a mirror to my advances that night. He doesn’t need to remind me.
“Where did you go?” If he’s ready to give answers, I want to know.
“To Nebraska.”
So, it was true.
“I got a job out there.” His words punch into my heart like a blow from a hammer. He’d moved halfway across the country in order to save his career and forget he ever met me.
“How nice for you. How easy for you to put Overton High behind you and move on.”
“It wasn’t like that.”
He’d like me to believe that, but I won’t fall for his words again. All that pretending to care for me, all that concern over my failing grades, none of it had been real.
Eleven years I’ve waited for an explanation, and he gives me this? A warning from the Principal, and what happened that night was enough for him to pack his bags and go.
I take another sip of my coffee and curse when the drink is too hot to finish quickly because I’m desperate to leave. “I need to go.” I put the lid back on my coffee cup so that I can take it back to the office.
“Already? We only just got here.”
I hear a low beep. It’s my cell phone. “Sorry.” One look at the caller ID tells me that it’s one of my clients. “I have to take this.”
He nods.
