Page 95 of Shifting Gears

Because I was doing my best to keep you safe! Dammit, Rosalie, you’d almost died because of me. How did you expect me to act like that never happened and continue to go about our lives like I wasn’t the worst thing in yours? Your life had been better before I was in it, baby.

I wanted to reach through the phone and tell her everything. The reason I had taken her dad’s offer, why I couldn’t risk her getting hurt again. But I couldn’t, not until I knew the rest of what she had to say.

Rosalie

How am I supposed to go on without you, like you never existed? I don’t think I can.

I can’t either, baby girl. I think about you. Every. Fucking. Day.

I kept reading, my hand clenched around my phone as I scrolled further down the message.

Rosalie

I don’t want to fall asleep, thinking about your arms pulling me close anymore! If you aren’t actually here, why won’t your memory let me move on? I want to! I don’t want to keep sitting here, wishing you would walk into the custom shop every moment of the day I’m there. So, if you really love me, then tell me you miss me as much as I miss you. Because I’m done if you don’t. I’m going to move on and leave you behind.

She’d still missed me when she sent this?

You were haunted by me? I wouldn’t let you move on? What about you? I see you everywhere I go. In cars that pass by. In the colors of the sunset. When I smell strawberries. You follow me around Japan like my shadow.

But the last part of the message made my heart stop.

Rosalie

Because I can’t keep waiting for you.

“Fuck!” I shouted, standing up. I threw my phone on the grass next to where Sydney was.

She picked it up, brushing it off as she turned toward me, concerned.

She didn’t have to ask me what I’d read because I couldn’t hold in how pissed it made me.

“She said she couldn’t keep waiting for me. That was months ago, Syd! What’s the point of looking at more? It’s probably just her telling me to fuck off,” I said loudly, pacing up and down the path by the pond.

I leaned down and picked a rock, tossing it across the water. But instead of skipping, it sank under the dark ripples. I growled as I fumed, thinking about her moving on with her life.

I’d wanted her to. When I left, I hoped she would find a guy to settle with and stay out of danger. But reading about it actually happening? I knew I had been lying to myself from the beginning.

I never wanted you to move on! Shit, you’re the only woman I’ve ever loved. The only person I’ve ever cared about. Why the fuck was I willing to let you go in the first place?

“You don’t know that,” Sydney said.

“If I was her, that’s what I would say,” I snapped.

Sydney didn’t deserve to be talked to like this. I wasn’t angry at her. I was mad at myself for getting into this position.

“And you’re going to let the chance of something scare you away? I thought you were a lot braver than that, AJ. Where is the man who faced down the yakuza with me? Because he wouldn’t have been scared of a little text message and a big what-if,” Sydney said, pushing my buttons.

She knew exactly what that would do to me. I couldn’t let a challenge like that slide. So, even if I was unsure about what I might read, I was still going to read on.

She held out my phone, and I stalked over to her. I grabbed it and walked back to the bench, sitting down and opening it back up.

There was another big time jump between that text and her next. I was surprised by the time stamp on this one. She had sent it less than two weeks ago.

Rosalie

Mom told me about the real reason you’d left.

I stopped reading. Shocked. It was her dad that I’d met up with and the one who paid me to get the fuck out of town. But I never thought her mom liked me much either. To hear she had told Rosalie why I left wasn’t something I’d expected. I kept reading.

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