Page 7 of All Roads Lead to You

“Babe? Can you grab us another drink?” Lauren asked me.

“Coming right up, my love.”

Lauren winked and wiggled her fingers as I went off to grab her another cooler. In the kitchen, I took a shot of something lemony before grabbing myself a beer. I felt instantly loose and relaxed, though I had to tone down the drinking if I wanted to drive home.

I didn’t bother to look at Logan skulking in the corner, feeling his eyes burning a hole in me. What was his fucking damage? Even at a party, he couldn’t enjoy himself. He was looking surlier than usual, too. I’d seen him party before. He was usually livelier than this, even if he was broody all the time, so I wasn’t sure what was going on tonight. Was he still pissed about the ‘brothers’ comment from Wyatt? Lame.

“Holy shit, Lauren. You got into Columbia?” Shelly screeched for the fucking world to hear, including yours truly.

What the actual fuck?

“I know! Can you believe it?”

I stopped dead in my tracks, unnoticed by them, as I overheard Lauren making life plans without me as my future disintegrated into dust.

“But I haven’t told Nick yet, so this stays between us.”

I put her strawberry cooler on the coffee table a little too hard, spilling some on my hand. “Don’t bother. I heard. Like, what the hell, Lauren? We had a plan. What is this shit about Columbia?”

Shelly and Denise folded their arms, standing sentry next to Lauren. “Hey, don’t wig out, Nick. She has a right to choose what school she wants to go to.”

“Stay out of this, Shelly,” I snapped.

Lauren turned to face me with her large, soft doe eyes. Her mouth opened and closed like a fish, struggling to find her words or a fucking lie as she stood there. “I… I’ve been meaning to tell you, Nicky.”

I wrapped my arms around myself as nausea roiled around in my stomach, and my hands shook. Lauren and I were a team. We’d been making plans together for over two years, and suddenly, she just pulled the rug out from under me without talking to me about it. My mouth went dry, and my jaw clenched, willing my eyes not to get wet in front of everyone as the humiliation washed over me.

“Oh, yeah? And when were you meaning to tell me? The day before you left for New York City? What the fuck happened to California? What’s wrong with Stanford? It’s a damn good school.”

I chugged my beer down and wiped my mouth with the back of my hand. “Well?”

Of course, the party took that opportunity to go silent as everyone watched me break up with the only girl who’d ever been in my life.

Lauren couldn’t even look at me as she played with the hem of her sweater. “I… I applied to Columbia when I applied to Stanford, and I got in. It’s a hard school to get into, Nicky.” She looked up at me with eyes begging to understand. “But don’t you see? I did this on my own? I got in!” Her excitement tried to bubble to the surface, but I wouldn’t let it.

“You also got into Stanford on your own.” Why was she changing shit up now? And why couldn’t we have talked about this? “If you’d told me you wanted to go to Columbia, I could’ve applied there, too.”

“Because… I want to do this on my own.”

My gut twisted and turned as if I was dropping out of a plane with no parachute to break my fall. “Without me.”

The music came back on, and everyone went back to dancing and drinking, turning the noise into a muffled din as I tuned it out, solely focused on Lauren.

“I love you, Nicky, but… I don’t want to marry my high school sweetheart. There’s a whole big world I want to see and experience. I don’t want to go to college just to settle down when I graduate.”

I swung my hands in the air. “So? I mean, that’s cool and all… if we’d talked about it! Get a fucking career. My mom has a great one! Kids can wait. Did you think I wouldn’t understand or wouldn’t want you to become successful? We talked about what we wanted, and you said nothing about wanting anything else.”

She looked away again and sucked her bottom lip in. “It’s just… you seemed so settled, and at first, I thought it was something I wanted, too, but now…”

I rubbed my chest where my heart was beating hard enough to chip away at my bones, bit by bit. I couldn’t believe we were doing this, and in front of everyone at the party when we should’ve talked about all this privately a long time ago.

“Are you… breaking up with me, Lauren? Because there’s no way to keep dating me in Cali and you in New York. What did you have planned? Periodic phone calls? Write each other fucking letters? Meet up for holidays?”

Tears suddenly spilled out of her eyes, and her lips trembled. “I’m so sorry, Nicky. I’d been meaning to talk to you about all this, but just didn’t know how. We have a few months left… we don’t have to break up yet.”

My eyes stung and tried to leak, but I wouldn’t let them—not in front of everyone, and especially not in front of Lauren.

“What was your plan? To use me until you finished with me? Toss me aside?”

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