Page 34 of If Only You Hurt

After everything I’ve been through in this life, you’d think the pain of watching your best friend leave wouldn’t hurt as much as the loss of life. But it guts me. Because I know it’s my actions that have caused this divide tonight. The pain of that day nearly crippled me eleven years ago, but I had Grant there to help build me back up. A slow, tortuous build he took on, and he had the patience to do so. But I didn’t give him that chance to know the details of why I felt so broken inside.

For so long, I took on the narrative that he had no idea what this kind of hurt felt like. But I didn’t take a moment to reflect on the fact I didn’t give him the opportunity to feel this pain.

Chapter Sixteen

GRANT

Walking out of Laney’s room, I pull out my phone and order an Uber. I don’t go through the house and say my goodbyes. I have a feeling I’m shit company right now, and I honestly feel so blindsided that I just need to get away. The moment I step through that front door, I’m met with the frigid winter cold. Each step away from her feels like the ice is seeping deeper into my heart.

I didn’t want to walk away, but I also couldn’t take a full breath while I was standing so close to her. The one person who gave my body life turned out to be the one to pull the life out of me with one confession.

I knew Laney was holding onto something; I knew there was something in her that needed to be let out. However, I never imagined this was what she had to tell me. I never thought this was the crater that had lodged itself between us, keeping the two of us from taking the next step. I was completely thrown by her confession, and I need time to break down what all this means. I have never felt this way toward the person I called my closest friend.

Laney has held my heart since the moment I could form memories. I’m not mad that she had to process the miscarriage. I’m not upset she had to come to terms with what she witnessed that day, watching her friend die in her arms.

What guts me is all the time since then. She could have said something. I can’t even say I knew there was something this big in her heart because who am I to know how she’s going to cope with a fucking mass shooting. My therapist always said that each victim who survives such a trauma deals with it differently. It was my job to give her space, to let her decide the pace at which she wanted to take each step forward.

I’d like to think I did that for her. I gave her so much fucking breathing room, and she couldn’t even, not once, give me a bit of the reality she was living with. It wasn’t just a piece of her that was lost that day. It was a piece of me too. That’s the part that hurts most. I felt like I was an outsider looking in, trying to understand my best friend as she absorbed the shock of what occurred to her in that school. Top that with the fact that my love for her runs deep, and I made it my mission to help her through the trauma.

I saw her pain as mine, but not literally. I did not even think for one second she was pregnant. All I remember from my call with her that morning was the fact that I wanted to tell her I wanted forever with her beyond our friends-with-benefits relationship that was going on at that time. I wanted to explore our lives being together as a couple. My thoughts were singular. I never thought what she might want to talk to me about was a pregnancy.

I look over toward my sister’s place, knowing all I would have to do is walk over there and tell her everything. Becca could sit me down and give me her two cents on what she thinks of all this. I could figure my shit out and hopefully go straight back to Laney, and we could move forward.

But that’s the thing: I don’t want to go back that quickly. She needed eleven years to process how to tell me, then I need a fucking minute. She got more than a decade, and I deserve some time too.

Does this change my love for Laney? No. I still love her. I love her to the point I’d lay myself on the line to see her happiness shine. Loving her was a balm to my heart, but right now loving her feels like a vice around my heart. It feels like it's suffocating me because I'm so fucking pissed yet so damn hung up on her, that I feel conflicted on how to move from this precipice I'm currently at.

The thing that stings lies in the fact that she disregarded my feelings for her own. She put her own thoughts first. She didn’t put my needs, my emotional well-being, anywhere in her grief. I don’t need her to put me first, especially during one of the hardest times of her life. But it feels like I was literally last. I fucking gave her all the emotional breathing room possible, and she couldn’t give me just a bit of this pain she carried?

People don't put enough weight on the need to feel pain when that discomfort is warranted. I was raised by a mother that taught me that pain is part of life. It's something we have no control over, yet it's something that allows for growth and perspective.

Losing a child, even if she lost that baby at an early stage of pregnancy, still is a loss. Maybe, even knowing about that child, wouldn't change where Laney and I are today, it would have allowed for reflection and growth. Laney made a choice for both of us and for that, I'm resentful at this moment. I can't help feeling this way and I'm allowing myself this space to feel everything that’s bubbling up with this news.

The Uber shows up, and I’m quick to open the door and sit myself inside the heated interior. The driver tries to initiate conversation, but he must sense my mood and lets it go after a few failed attempts with my curt answers.

For the remainder of the drive up to my mom’s place upstate, I close my eyes, and I see those emerald eyes staring back at me. The problem is, my emotions carry me in completely opposite directions: I feel my heart ache to hold her again, yet I feel a twinge of pain as I think about this huge weight she’s carried while I lived life unaware.

She needed time, I get that. She needed to process, understandably so. But so many questions hit me at once: Why not share this loss of our child with me? Why act as if this was her burden, her pain, to carry alone? When did I ever give her the impression I wasn’t part of her team?

Those questions are the foundation of why I had to leave. How do I move forward with trust being at our center when she couldn’t even trust me with such a huge piece of her grief?

For all these years, I’ve grieved the life Laney could have had if she hadn’t been at that school at that time. In the beginning, I constantly went through the what-ifs of Laney’s pain, but at the core of that pain, I imagined her loss was that of her friend.

Now, I am grasping at the fact that the shooting signified more than just loss of life for those students. It signified more than the loss of future happiness for those who lived through it and grieved their friends and loved ones. I am now having to come to terms with the fact that I not only lost a part of Laney that day, I lost a part of us.

So many different feelings pass through my mind, and they are on constant replay. I continue to lay my head back on the headrest and keep my eyes closed. This drive will give me the time to sit with this information and figure out how I move forward.

The moment I feel the car slowing down, I open my eyes and realize I had, indeed, fallen asleep. The news Laney shared drained me, and I must have needed that time to rest my mind.

Once I’m dropped off, I look up to see my mom’s door open, and her head pop out. I see a smile spread across her face, and it feels a lot like Becca’s welcoming expression. They both look a lot alike, and it feels like coming home no matter what age I am.

I make my way up the pathway to her door, and the moment I reach her, I throw my bag down and pull my mother into my arms. The second I embrace her, my mom must sense I’m in pain and holds me in her arms, even though I tower over her.

We pull apart, and as soon as she sees my expression, I think a part of her breaks a bit. Without asking anything, she turns and opens the door a little more, welcoming me in without any questions or clarification.

The house is quiet, and as if she can read my mind, my mother says, “Rick and Olive went to grab some food from the store. I think Shane is on his way too, trying to outrun the storm that’s headed this way.”

I nod, the frog lodged in my throat, making it hard to form words right now.

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