Page 101 of Pitcher Perfect
“Why?”
“I felt guilty.”
“If it was just a drink with a friend, why did you feel guilty?” A seven-hundred-pound weight sat on his chest. “Were you curious to see if your feelings were really gone?”
“No. I know they’re gone. They were never even as deep as I thought they were.”
“Then I’m still in the dark, Skylar. Why do you feel guilty?”
“Because I saw...” She took a long, shuddering breath. “Eve googled you and this website came up that she showed me. It has details, like really specific details about you a-and women you’ve been with. There are pictures of you and you look so happy like that. It just blindsided me.”
This was his first time hearing about a website with pictures and intimate information on it that pertained to him, and his first thought wasTime to grow up and get a good lawyer, bro, but he’d worry about that later. Right now, he was quite simply sick to his stomach just speculating on what Skylar might have seen or read. God, that must have been hard for her. If the shoe were onthe other foot, that kind of imagery would kill him. At the same time, he couldn’t change the past.
Maybe he’d been naive to try to change her mind about him in the first place.
His actions and words were all he had—and they obviously weren’t enough. “I’m sorry you saw that,” he rasped, in a tremendous understatement. “But I can’t change the things I did before I met you.”
She took a step forward and stopped, her tone sincere when she said, “Of course not. And I wouldn’t want to change any part of what made you this Robbie. I fell for that Robbie.”
He only half heard that statement, because the pieces that formed tonight were coming together. “And yet you saw this website and decided to go out with Madden, anyway. Was that to spite me, Skylar?”
Her face was already in her hands.
“Wow.”
A huge part of him had expected her to say no. To give another explanation.
There wasn’t one, though, and now a hook twisted inside of his chest cavity, making it very hard to breathe. Anger and resignation and regret caught him in the chin all at once. “Well,” he managed, staggering to his feet, getting his phone out of his back pocket and opening the Uber app, ordering a ride, so he wouldn’t have to borrow Skylar’s car. “Who’s the one who can’t be trusted now, huh?”
She came closer, looking down at the screen of his phone and starting to breathe faster. “Please don’t go. I want you here.”
“I want to be here, too, of course I do, because I love you. I love you, Skylar. But I’m fucking mad. And I feel empty and sick right now andyou’rethe one.Youtaught me to trust what I’m feeling and stop laughing everything off. So I can’t laugh at this.I can’t pretend I’m not feeling judged and punished when I just came here tolove you.”
“I’m so sorry,” she whispered, hands pressed to her cheeks.
The sheen of tears in her eyes almost broke him in half.
He wanted to get on his knees and crawl to her, ask her to forget everything and go inside and make love and wake up tomorrow like nothing happened. But would this happen again? Could he live worried that she’d punish him every time an unsavory detail emerged from his past? And he meant what he’d said. Skylar had shown him how to express himself openly and now that he’d experienced that growth, going backward was impossible. The fact that this girl had made him a better person and he had to leave her there crying was the worst insult to injury imaginable, but right now, he had to.
His hurt was valid. He wasn’t going to disregard it.
Ignoring the agony in his middle that came from walking past the girl he loved without drying her tears, Robbie picked up his bag and strode for the end of the driveway to go meet the Uber that would take him back to Boston.
“Maybe I shouldn’t have left,” Robbie slurred on Monday as he bit into his Stouffer’s lasagna. “Maybe I should have stayed and fought it out. She wascrying.”
“You shouldn’t cry and eat at the same time, man,” Mailer said, handing him a napkin. “You’re going to choke to death.”
“Good.”
Mailer reared back, alarmed. “You don’t mean that.”
“I fuckingdomean it.”
“Ah, she’ll come back around,” Mailer said, recovering from his shock enough to slug him in the shoulder. “They always do, am I right?”
“No. That’s what I’ve been telling you. She’s not like anyoneelse.” Robbie stood and lumbered to the refrigerator, searching through various frozen meals for another lasagna. Not that he could find anything he was looking for when his brain was only showing him visions of Skylar. Practicing flirting with him at that rest stop. Pitching to those kids. Her face covered in raindrops. “She’s Skylar.”
Mailer groaned up at the ceiling. “You know, everything was fine when we were having empty sex with strangers.”
