Page 1 of Heart to Heart
CHAPTER 1
AVERY
“It’s not me,it’s you.” Guy uttered his declaration just as matter-of-factly as one would announce, ‘I’ll have the fish, please’.
Like a punch to the gut, those five little words managed to knock the air from my lungs. Whoever coined the phrase ‘Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words will never hurt me’ was full of heaping piles of shit. Stunned, I sat across from him at our table overlooking Lake Michigan, a dinner date at the restaurant that had employed us both once upon a time. The waitress and the busboy, a tale as old as time.
My lips parted, my mouth struggling to say something—anything—but my brain was unable to formulate anything resembling words. All I could do was stare at him, jade eyes meeting honey-brown.
It was a slip of the tongue, perhaps? A case of relationship word vomit. Surely, he couldn’t be breaking up with me at the very place where our story began? Didn’t that violate some code of ethics for relationships? I waited for him to correct himself, to say he was kidding, that it was all some kind of twisted joke;some sick humor he’d picked up from his classmates at his university in the Upper Peninsula.
Instead, he sat slumped in his chair, folding his paper napkin into some kind of origami swan; the kind that was perched on plates in restaurants far swankier than our current table at Lou’s Place, with its resin patio chairs and matching weathered tables. My fingernails picked at the blue paint that was chipping away from the arm of my chair, watching the flakes fall like snow to the cement beneath my feet. Across from me, Guy neared the completion of his masterpiece. A wing displayed stains from the marinara sauce that had accompanied our mozzarella sticks. It looked like the bird had been shot down mid-flap—a metaphor for our relationship.
Guy Winston didn’t know what to do with idle time. He never could sit still. It was a nervous tic of his, keeping his hands busy while silently telling me that he’d meant exactly what he’d said.
“Avery,” he finally broke the silence, obviously frustrated that it had been him and not me, “say something. Please.”
By now, my stomach had twisted itself into a gastrointestinal pretzel, and for once, it had nothing to do with the greasy food at Lou’s. “Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around—that saying?”
“I guess, usually. Not this time, though.” He looked down at his poor excuse for a swan, which resembled more of a goose having been mowed down by a car or five. “We just…Look, you know we haven’t really seen each other much over the last few months.”
“Because we’ve been attending schools that are five hundred miles away from each other. We talked about this, remember?” By the time I finished my nervous peeling, my entire chair would be stripped of paint.
He let out a sigh. Guy speak forHere we go again. “I know, I know. But discussing a situation is vastly different fromexperiencing the situation.” When he made eye contact with me again, I hoped to see an ounce of regret, or even the tiniest shred of pain etched on his face, but all I saw was weariness, like one who had been sent to complete a task they knew was going to be unpleasant.
Even though the harsh Michigan cloud cover was clearing in favor of early springlike warmth, I was still chilled down to the bone. I stared at the beach spread out before us that, in only a matter of weeks, would be crowded with people seeking respite from the punishing summer heat. These off-season days were the ones I cherished the most; when I had the beach virtually to myself and didn’t have to hunt among oiled bodies for a square foot of space to pop a squat. All I wanted to do was get up from the table, sit in the sand, and beg the water to provide me with some clarity.
“Look, Ave, these past months have been rough on the both of us since we both decided to transfer schools, and you chose not to come with me. And to think, we have three years left of this if you attend law school. Can you really say you can handle our living situation for that long?”
“Yes, Guy,” I whisper-yelled, trying not to attract the attention of the other diners around us. “I can, in fact, say that because I know we’re working toward a common goal. Three years may seem like forever, but it’ll fly by, right? I mean, that’s what we settled on. Absence makes the heart grow fonder, and all.”
“No,” he shook his head, scoffing like what I’d said had been the most ridiculous thing he’d ever heard. “It makes the heart tired. The late-night calls, the constant need to pencil each other into our schedules. You had to drive over two hours to meet me here in our hometown. I’m tired, Avery. And I think you are, too.”
“But I’m not,” I whispered, the bile rising from my stomach high enough to burn my throat.
My eyes stung as tears tried to force their way out from the inner corners of my eyes. I’d always hated crying in public. Guy hated me crying in public, too. As intelligent as he was from a scholarly standpoint, he was intellectually stunted from an emotional one. It was so pervasive that I swore those memes online depicting someone in distress and their friend comforting them with a pat on the back using a broom in athere, therefashion were fashioned by someone who’d encountered Guy at one point in their life.
Sensing incoming emotional distress, he ran his fingers through his hair, propping himself up straighter in his chair as though preparing himself for battle. “I know you may not believe me, but this is the right thing for us, Ave. We can both concentrate on making it through school and once we graduate, we can agree to live in the same area code. Maybe then we can try this whole thing all over again.”
He flipped his hand between us as though believing I needed the visual of such a flippant gesture to fully understand what he was telling me. I hated being told what I needed and when I needed it, and his mere inference added irritation to the host of emotions washing over me.
Guy had been my first serious relationship. Over the years, I’d just naturally assumed he would be my only one. Things, I thought, had been going well. But then, they hadn’t been, had they? I’d grown complacent, not allowing myself to see the forest for the trees. In hindsight, the signs had been there for months—phone calls cut short, texts unanswered. Everything I had written off was coming back to me now, including the fact that Guy wasn’t one to be alone. He hated it, in fact. That’s why he’d begged me to apply to Michigan Tech with him.
It struck me then, the obvious that had been sitting next to me, staring me in the face all along. Nausea washed over me like waves crashing against the shore. The contrasting combination of rage and heartbreak made my head spin.
Sick. I was going to be sick. Swell.
One thing I hated more than crying in public was projectile vomiting in public. It had happened to me once before after spending the entire nine innings of a Tiger’s game outside in blistering ninety-degree heat, an experience to which I would award zero out of five stars—a definite do not recommend. But there was no other explanation for such an about-face from Guy. He could never be alone; it wasn’t in his nature. And the knot in my stomach twisted even tighter.
My eyes darted from the surf to Guy’s face, boring into him as I searched my mind to figure out how to broach the question I wanted to ask. After receiving nothing more than a shrug of the shoulders from my brain, I knew there was only one way to go about it: I just had to rip the band-aid right off.
“Who is she?” I asked, secretly hoping my intuition was just being a paranoid, salty wench.
He flinched, a sign that I had hit the nail right on the head.Son of a bitch—a figure of speech, of course, as Mrs. Winston was quite a lovely woman.
His back-stabbing mouth opened and closed a few times, wisely thinking over and then retracting the words he originally was going to say before settling on, “You should have come with me.”
“And you shouldn’t need to have me around to ensure you keep your dick in your pants!” I hadn’t meant to yell, but then again, I also hadn’t meant to flash my high school’s marching band at the opening football game of my junior year. But when the T-shirt I’d been wearing chose to follow the sweatshirt I’dpulled off after I’d gotten too hot sitting in the crowd, flash them, I did.
