Page 29 of The Parkers' Handsome Holiday
She didn’t wait for me to say yes or no. She just turned and started walking. By the time I’d collected my jaw from the floor and gathered my wits enough to go after her, she had already stepped through the gymnasium doors.
I caught up with her in the hallway. We were around the corner from our old lockers. I’d paid one of the guys on my basketball team twenty bucks to switch lockers with me so I could be beside her. That seemed like such a long time ago now.
I reached out and caught her elbow, instantly regretting it. Lina yanked her arm away from me and turned on me, jabbing me in the chest with her index finger. Her beautiful face was sharp with anger. “You can’t do this to me, Cal. Not now. It’s not fucking fair!”
“I’m not doing anything,” I said. “I just wanted to make sure you were happy.”
“You don’t deserve to know anything about my life anymore,” she said. “You ruined me, Cal. Ruined me.” She looked down. Her defiance melted away as she stared at the floor, and her shoulders slumped. When she finally looked back up at me, her eyes were glassy. “I wasn’t even important enough to you to get a goodbye before you left for Harvard.”
“Lina—”
“No,” she said sharply. “I don’t even want to hear my name on your lips. I thought you were my future. I know it’s dumb, and we were just kids, but at the time, that’s what I believed. Because you let me believe it. We talked about our futures together. About what our home would be like and how many kids we were going to have. How could you leave without saying goodbye to the girl you’d convinced you were going to marry one day?”
Her eyes flicked back and forth between mine as she waited for an answer I didn’t have for her. I swallowed. “I don’t know what to say.”
“Just like you didn’t know what to say back then,” she said. Her voice was almost a growl. “You can’t just show up here and think that just because it’s been fifteen years, I’d have forgiven you.”
“Fourteen and a half.”
Her eyes narrowed. “Really? Jokes?”
“I’m sorry.”
Lina shook her head at me and looked at the ceiling. “I just wish I had seen it coming. I wished you’d told me when you got accepted. I could have wrapped my head around it, rather than felt like I was kicked to the curb like some stray dog you didn’t want anymore.”
“Lina, that’s not at all how I wanted to make you feel. I tried to talk to you that night. I tried to explain—”
“No, you didn’t. You ended things. You told me Harvard was going to be your life. You made it perfectly clear that there wasn’t any room for me in the future you wanted.”
I sighed. “I was a stupid kid. I should have handled things differently. I know it’s hard to believe, but I never wanted to hurt you. I loved you.”
“Don’t fucking say that to me right now, Cal. That only makes you feel better. Not me.”
“You’re right. I’m sorry.”
Lina put her hands on her hips. Her floor-length purple dress swished around her ankles as she shifted her weight to her right foot. She used to stand the same way when we fought as teenagers.
I ran hand through my hair. “I tried to talk to you that night. I really did. But you wouldn’t hear me out.”
“And you didn’t fight for me to,” she whispered. “And you left without trying again. Without saying a word to me. Not even goodbye.”
“I know.”
She straightened up and took a deep breath. “And that’s what I’m going to do now, Cal. Leave me alone. Don’t come after me. You’re good at that.”
With that, she marched back into the gymnasium.
I pinched the bridge of my nose and squeezed my eyes closed. “God damn it, Cal.”
How had everything I just said made everything so much worse? All I had wanted was for her to understand that I never wanted to hurt her. And I wanted her to know that I took all the blame. I knew what I did was messed up. I’d just been too ashamed to own it and tell her that on graduation night. At the time, it had been easier for me, a weak eighteen-year-old boy, to pack up and leave my home town without saying anything to her.
I’d traded one future for the other.
To this day, I still had no idea if it was a mistake or not. Every time I thought it was, I would think of Asher and how I wouldn’t have him if I’d never left Lina and gone to Harvard. And Asher was my whole world.
No. I hadn’t made a mistake in leaving for Harvard.
I’d made a mistake by hurting the girl who loved me in order to do it.
