Page 68 of Next Time Will Be Our Turn
Ellery laughed and rested her cheek on her hand while she looked at me. For a second, the sight of her was too much. Frustration boiled inside me. I had to destroy this now before it destroyed me. I couldn’t leave her like this, so warm and sweet and perfect. It would haunt me for the rest of my life.
“Um, so,” I said, clearing my throat, “I’ll be leaving soon.” The words gave me a little bit of satisfaction. Hah. This time, I would be the one doing the leaving. Let’s see how she likes that. Immature, I know, but I was hurting, and love makes us stupid.
Ellery’s face fell and she straightened up on the sofa. “Yeah. I was kind of hoping to talk to you about that.”
I frowned. “What’s there to talk about?”
“Ah…” Ellery got up and, god, when would I stop noticing her height? She moved closer to me, wide-eyed with obvious nerves, and my heart burst into a gallop as she neared. “So…” She was right in front of me now, and the apartment felt so tiny, so silent, every single sound we made painfully audible. The thud of my heartbeat, the rustle of our clothes, the sound my throat made when I swallowed. “I would really like it if you stayed here.”
I swear, every drop of blood inside me drained from my body. I gaped at her stupidly. Then I managed to say, “What?”
“Stay,” she said so simply, as though it were an easy choice to make. As though it wouldn’t tear up my entire life, and suddenly, I was angry.
The thing is, just because I was in love with Ellery didn’t mean I was no longer angry at her. And when I really thought about it, when I finally allowed myself to stop lying to myselfand cut through all the layers of bullshit I’d wrapped around the truth, I realized I was furious at her. Because when it came down to it, she’d continuously chosen every other thing but me. She chose London over me. She chose Trish over me. I was never her first choice. And now here we were, and we’d just spent close to two years seeing each other almost every day, and when I wasn’t studying, my thoughts were consumed by her. Just like before. I’d fallen into Ellery’s spell and, god, I felt so fucking stupid. Nothing about us had changed. I was still the little kid who latched on to her, and for her, everything was so easy. “Stay,” she said, and that was it. Nothing more to it. Stay and remain as the friend who was obsessed with her. Stay and just hang out at her place, talking about dumb shit and wasting time until we grow old. Stay and give up everything while she gave up nothing.
“Just like that, huh?” I said.
“Yeah.” Ellery’s eyes burned into mine, her gaze unflinching. “Just like that, Tulip.”
“Well,” I snorted, “that’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever heard.” I turned away, and she caught my wrist. Her touch seared my skin, and I pulled away, but her hand only trailed down until it was clasped around mine.
“I wasn’t joking. I want you to stay here in LA. You belong here.”
With you, I thought.Say that I belong here with you.But she didn’t, and then I was so angry I could hit her. “Oh, okay, Ellery. Yeah, let me just fuck up my entire life so I can stay here and be your buddy.”
The word “buddy” was spat out with such venom that Ellery blinked. Her mouth dropped open. Then she said quietly, “I don’t want you to be my buddy.”
My insides threatened to melt, and I forced myself to harden them. I couldn’t afford to go soft, not right now. “No, I would just be your consolation prize.”
“What?” She looked genuinely confused.
“Please,” I sniffed. “I was always an afterthought. You never chose me. You were with Trish, and I was just some kid you hung out with who you never took seriously.”
“I never took you seriously?”
“You didn’t even tell me you were applying to schools in England.” There was no going back now. I ripped myself open and bled in front of her. My voice shook as I said, “You chose everything else but me. You left me behind and never looked back.”
“No.” Ellery’s eyes were filled with pain. “You really think that?”
“Yes. What else was I supposed to think?”
“That I was in love with you!” she cried.
“You were not.”
“Yes, I was, you dumbass. I was so in love with you that I broke up with my girlfriend because of it.”
All thought screeched out of my head. Time stopped. The world stopped spinning, and in this moment, there was just me and Ellery and the truth. “What?”
Ellery’s voice softened. “You were my best friend and I was so in love with you, Tulip. All I could think about was you. I was so messed up thinking about you. I couldn’t—of course I couldn’t be in a relationship with anyone else, not when I was so into you. So I broke up with Trish. God, that time that we were messing around and you rolled on top of me…” She sighed. “Every muscle inside me just froze. I was like,Holy shit! It’s Tulip! On top of me!I was freaking the hell out.”
I recalled that moment too, when my body had been on top of hers. I remembered how it felt like I’d caught fire and how, when I looked at her, she hadn’t seemed at all affected by it. Now I knew it had touched her the same way it did me. “Why didn’t you tell me?”
“Tulip, you were sixteen.”
“You were still around when I turned seventeen.”
“Still a teenager. Still would’ve been really, really wrong.”
