Page 87 of The Last Kind of Kiss
I don’t allow her an interval of response time before stomping over and facing her head-on. “Pasttense, Lila. And the ring—fuck, you just jumped to conclusions without even trying to talk this through. There’s a reason it’s up here in Big Bear. There’s a reason it isn’t back in Riverside with me. The fact that you were so quick to accuse me of faking my feelings for you means that you never believed them in the first place.”
Lila and I have had arguments before, sure, but something about this one seems different. It seems…irreversible. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s just this gut feeling I have. My stomach upturns and bile rushes my throat, my conviction crumbling like a delicate piece of marzipan. Her gaze is a firebrand as it sears into my pathetic layer of armor, and she squares her shoulders, looking far more intimidating than any foe I’ve ever faced before. Her indignation is a spark wheel in complete darkness, rolling, rolling, androllinguntil the lighter catches aflame.
But I don’t do the wise thing and concede. I don’t do therightthing and concede.
“Summit’s a part of my past, Lila. I can’t just get rid of her,” I confess quietly, my vision winking in and out of bleary clarity.
I’m not sure how I expected Lila to respond, but I’m caught off guard when moisture wells in her eyes. Her lower lip trembles—dented in the middle where she must’ve been biting it—and her entire posture shrinks, bled dry of the dominance that she wielded like a loaded gun.
“I know that, but I’m nother, Bristol. I’ll never be her.” Her voice cracks, and her cheeks are now caked in tears that continue to fall at an impossibly fast rate. She’s shaking, retreating backward, trying to evade my line of sight. I wish I could say this is the first time I’ve seen her like this, but it’s not.
My own face is wet before I realize I’m crying. “I wantyou.”
“Do you?” She sniffles, features pinched with a hurt that I can never imagine, eyes retelling a story that I never wanted to reexperience. “Because it feels like I’m competing with a ghost. I feel like you’re always comparing me to her.”
I thought we had fixed things. I thought I had made things better when I got her to open up to me about her insecurities, but I guess I was wrong.
“I…” My sense of reasoning here is clearly misguided, and it supersedes the emotion that’s caught my heart in a riptide. I’ve been in two relationships now and still don’t understand when to prioritize feelings over rationality.
“I don’t compare you to her” is all I say. A stupid, patheticresponse. A response designed to fix things rather than to hear her out.
“I can’t keep doing this with you. I can’t keep…competing…for your love.”
“What are you talking about? I feel like I’m the one still chasing after you! I feel like you’re not ready for things to be serious between us. You always find a problem in things that aren’t perfect. News flash, Lila, our relationship willneverbe perfect. I’m the one who’s competing against some impossible standard.”
“What standard, Bristol? We’re not even on the same playing field! All I’ve done isbegyou to want me.”
“And I do! I fucking do! But you refuse to believe me!” I scream as vertigo causes the room to spin and sucks every last morsel of energy out of my body. I feel like I can’t breathe. I can’t…my heart can’t take this pain anymore.
Her tears are quiet as they track down her face. Her chest doesn’t spasm with hiccups or sobs—she doesn’t even bother with wiping the residue off her pale skin. Her fight is…gone. She just stands in front of me, baring her bloody heart to me on her sleeve after I’ve done nothing but rip it apart with my bare hands. I wish she was yelling at me, hitting me, doing anything to punish me…but her silence is what lands the killing blow.
“How can I believe you when you wouldn’t even be with me if she were still alive?”
I can’t believe she just said that. Is she serious right now? She always loves to place the blame on me when she’s clearly the one creating problems out of nothing. How could she even insinuate something like that? She’s not being fair.
Silence becomes a failsafe for my guilt, and it becomes a crutch for Lila’s sadness. But it’s not comforting. We don’t sit and bask in each other’s company like we used to. We’re strangers again—strangers who’ve outlived the expiration date of theirfailed relationship. A relationship that was doomed from the start.
My jaw steels tight. “You’re the one comparing yourself to her. Not me. Don’t put that shit on me,” I argue, trying to wrangle the last bit of tranquility I have left before succumbing to the current of rage humming underneath my skin.
A cold, painfully distant veneer greets me, and she withholds the closeness I’ve started to take for granted. “What else am I supposed to think? You say that she’s just a memory from your past, yet you still hold on to her like she’ll magically come back to you—like you’ll magically resume the life you’ve always wanted with her. Love shouldn’t be this fucking hard, Bristol!”
“You think this is hard? Hard is losing someone you love. Hard is blaming yourself every day for letting down the one person that you were supposed to protect in this world. You don’t know the first thing about hard.”
The look of betrayal on Lila’s face makes my stomach heave. Her jaw falls open to say something, but no words materialize. She’s a second away from losing that vise grip on her emotions—a second away from grabbing her things and marching right out the door into the unending snow. She’s a second away from reconsidering this whole relationship altogether. I don’t want to give her the chance to run. I don’t want to give her the chance to break my heart, so I beat her to it, taking the coward’s way out like I always do.
I stumble backward, pawing at the wetness on my cheeks, giving in to my flight response after my fight’s been stretched thin. Everything’s hitting me all at once. There’s nowhere I can run where my mistakes don’t play in an endless loop. There’s nowhere I can hide where guilt doesn’t follow me.
The sickening taste of sulfur froths in my mouth. “I can’t do this right now, and there’s nothing I can say that will make you think any differently.”
I storm toward the door before she can stop me, refusing to look back because once I get a glimpse of the future that I’ve just compromised, I won’t be able to leave. With my back to her, the dam in my eyes suffers an earth-shattering crack, and the tears rush out with a force that I’ve never experienced before.
“Of course you’re going to give up,” Lila says, her voice a register just above inaudible, thick with so much grief that I can choke on it from here. “You always walk away when things get tough.”
29
THE ROAD TO BROKEN HEARTS
BRISTOL
