Page 142 of Nothing Like the Movies

“No, youdon’t,” she said emphatically, passionately, almost as if we were arguing. She put a little smile on her face, like she was kidding, but it was forced.

“Please help me understand what’s happening here, Lib,” I said, a weight settling in my stomach as the thing I thought had returned to me backed farther away. “Because I’ve neverstoppedloving you.”

She shook her head back and forth, tucking her hair behind her ears and biting down on her lower lip. She looked haunted—hunted—as she insisted, “No. Let’s not talk about that. I don’t want to talk about the past.”

“I’m not…”What the hell is happening?I looked into her eyes and explained, “I’m not talking about the past, Liz; I’m talking about my feelings for you.”

“Wes.” She said it through gritted teeth, like she was trying to hold on to her patience or something. “I don’t want us to do that.Let’s just go forward, okay? Let’s just, like, pretend this is new. You’re a freshman who took me out on a date tonight. A really great date. Can’t we just be that for now?”

Pain—was it pain?—pinched in my chest as she said those words, because the whole time I thought we’d been coming back to each other, had she been trying to pretend I was someone else? To forget everything she’d ever known about me?

Is that what she has to do to be okay with me?

I swallowed and tried to come up with words, but the only one that came to me was, “No.”

Her eyebrows furrowed together. “No?”

“We aren’t that, Lib. You can’t pretend that I’m some guy you just met—”

“Why not, if it means we’re able to move on?” she interrupted, looking frustrated and almost desperate to convince me.

“Because you shouldn’t have to mentally split a person in two in order to love them,” I replied, a little too loudly with a voice that was cracked butfuck.

“Don’t you get it? You either love me or you don’t,” I said, not wanting to face the truth of that statement. “Because I’m not the kid next door, or the asshole who broke your heart, or the goddamn freshman who took you out on a date tonight.”

I took a deep breath and proceeded to tell her what she apparently never wanted to hear.

“I am just Wes fucking Bennett, Lib, the guy who can’t remember a single day in his life when he didn’t love you.”

She watched me with wide eyes, frozen in place, probablythinking I was absolutely unhinged. I felt like I should add something, likejust kiddingorthat’s totally fine, but it wasn’t fine.

“Do you know how many 12:13s I’ve watched pass without you? Tonight it’ll be the seven hundred and twentieth,” I said, the words burning my throat. “The last thing in the world I want is to say something that makes that number infinite, but I also can’t let you erase our history. I don’t want to remember the bad parts, but I refuse to forget the good.”

I looked into the only eyes I’d ever loved and confessed, “Because our good moments were the crumbs that fed me for seven hundred and nineteen 12:13s when I was alone.”

“God. Wes.” She wiped her eyes and stepped closer. “When you told me the truth the other day, I was so mad at you for giving up on us, and for not talking to me before you made the decision to end us, that I couldn’t think beyond those facts. I knew you’d been trying to do the right thing, but I also knew that my heart would never recover from the loss, right?”

That made my stomach hurt, the way it always had, when I thought about how much I’d hurt her.

“So my anger made me kind of blind, I guess, to your sacrifice. I was so mad that you did it, that I didn’t take the time to think about what it must’ve been like, for you, to do it.”

I wanted to touch her so badly, but I was too afraid of where this was going.

“And in my wildest dreams,” she said, her voice thick, “I never would’ve imagined that while I was crying through so many 12:13s, you were too.”

You have no idea, Lib.

“But here’s my honest confession,” she said, her eyes bright as she looked up at me. “I’ve loved you, and I’ve missed you, and I’ve hated you and regretted you, but I’ve never forgiven or forgotten you. So I just—”

“Excuse me.” A bright flashlight shone directly into our faces as a deep voice said, “Do you two have permission to be here?”

My eyes adjusted to the garish brightness, and I could see a cop, staring at us from just outside the dugout.

A cop, with his cruiser lights flashing in the parking lot.

I looked at Liz as she stared into the light, her eyes enormous.

Oh, shit.

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