Page 60 of The Lover
I looked up at him then. His face was blank but that muscle was twitching at the back of his jaw.
“Oh no. You don’t get to make this about me.” I could feel my anger bubbling. Anger would be good right now. Anger would get me through this.
“How can I not make this about you? You’re sitting there telling me you want to go. You’re done with me. I don’t wantyouto go. I want you to stay. So yes, Ellie, this is about you and your choices. Not mine. Never mine.”
I was nearly incredulous. Was he kidding me right now?
“Hey Jake.” I stood then, my hands braced on the table. “Breaking news just in. I LOVE YOU. I HAVE LOVED YOU FOR YEARS. And you know it! You goddamn well know it. But you don’t love me. Oh yes, you care for me. I’m family. But you’re not in love with me. You know how I know? Because when we woke up after my birthday you should have saidI love you, Ellie. Come home with me.Because when I told you I was pregnant you should have saidI love you Ellie, please marry me and make me the happiest man alive.But you didn’t. Not oneI love you. Not once. So yes, I’m done, Jake. I deserve to be loved as much I love you. I deserve the kind of happiness my parents had. I do.”
He said nothing and I straightened my back until I was as tall as I had ever been.
“I’m going to go back to the room over the Hair Stop. You are going to build your house as quickly as you can and move onto your land. Some day in the future we’ll find a way to get along somehow. And that is the end of the Jake and Ellie story. Goodbye, Jake.”
I made it to the front door when I heard him.
“Don’t go.”
I turned around to tell him not to make this any harder, but when I did I saw he hadn’t been looking at me when he said it. His gaze was off as if staring at a ghost over my shoulder.
“That’s what I said to my mother the night she left. She came into my room. I was eleven at the time. You don’t remember her, I know, you were just a baby. Anyway, she came in to tell me that she was leaving. That she couldn’t stay in Montana anymore and that it was better if I stayed with Dad. Then she said it would be cleaner this way. I didn’t realize at the time she meant she was just going to forget she ever had a son. Then she left the room, and I ran after her down the hall and I said,Mom, I love you. Please don’t go. And she left.”
The tears came and I couldn’t stop them. “You never told me.”
He shrugged his shoulders. “Who wants to tell that story? I told myself I would never say those words again. That wasn’t going to happen. No way. That… being rejected like that…that just hurt too much.”
“Oh Jake, I’m so sorry.”
“I tried to show you. I thought I… did. I tried to give you presents I knew you would love so you would see. I tried to be there for you when you needed me. I tried to be the man someone like you deserved. I… in bed… I mean I tried to show you what I was feeling the whole time. I thought you knew. You had to see it. Feel it. Yeah, I thought if I could show you. It would be enough.”
He walked toward me then and I was shaking so hard I couldn’t move.
He fell to his knees in front of me and rested his head on the womb that used to carry his child.
“I love you, Ellie. Please don’t go.”
Then he did something in my life I had never seen Jake Talley do. Not when his dad died. Not when my dad died.
He sobbed. He wrapped his arms around me and sobbed and it was the most heartbreaking sound I had ever heard in my life.
* * *
Jake
Icamein through the back door with a sense of dread of another night like the last few nights had been. Ellie still couldn’t talk to me about what happened. She was just this zombie going through the motions. I was trying to be as careful as I could around her, but I felt this distancing from her. Like our lives were tied together with a hundred pieces of string that she was cutting one by one.
“Hey, how are you feeling?” I asked when I saw her sitting at the kitchen table.
So damn beautiful, I thought. Just a stupid t-shirt and jeans. No makeup. There were times I couldn’t believe she was really mine.
“Fine,” she answered. In that short clipped way she had been since it happened. Like I was some distant stranger she barely knew.
Maybe it was the fact there was no food on the table, or cooking on the stove. But for some reason this felt like it had twelve weeks ago. When she had a bombshell to drop on my head.
“Ellie, what is it? I can tell something is wrong.”
“I’m leaving.”
I heard the words. But they didn’t make sense.
