Page 29 of You Belong With Me

“You know, sometimes I think about just sitting out here all night,” I told him. I knew that nothing I said would ever compare to what he was going through right now, but I hoped sharing might make him feel better. Maybe help him see that it was okay for him to talk to me about this. “Every time I get home from school and know that my parents will be inside, screaming at each other, I wonder if I should just stay away. They never stop fighting. It’s constant. And yeah, I guess they’re not huge arguments, but they fight over every small thing.”

“Death by a thousand cuts,” Sebastian murmured.

“Exactly. Sometimes I think they just actually enjoy fighting, because I can’t see any other reason for thempicking fights over everything they can. But I hate it. I hate having to listen to it all day and I hate that they don’t care if we can hear them.”

“Dean always figured they’d be divorced by now,” Sebastian said softly. “At the start of every summer, he was sure it was the last one they’d be together. And then every fall, he’d be surprised they made it.”

Dean always thought they’d divorce in the summer because it would be easier on us if we got used to the new arrangement when we weren’t in school. Plus, he figured everyone else was off on vacations the whole time, so they wouldn’t face the shame of everyone seeing. He’d be sure every summer, but I’d given up the summer before high school.

“I don’t think it’s ever going to happen. I think in some weird way, they need each other. And they both know that if they leave, they’ll only make it a couple of weeks before they come crawling back.” I swallowed thickly. “Do you think that’s what love is? Needing somebody so badly that you don’t care if you make each other crazy?”

“No,” Sebastian said immediately. I glanced over at him in surprise. I was sure he wasn’t going to answer, or if he did, he would be more hesitant. Because wasn’t that exactly what he had with Tiffany? All they did was fight and fight until they eventually reached the tipping point of breaking up. Then they would get back together and start the cycle again, repeating it over and over again.

They were just like my parents. Even though my parents didn’t break up, they got close to it. They would fight and walk away and come back because they knew that they couldn’t leave completely. They knew it wasn’tan option. But for Sebastian and Tiffany, itwasan option. And they always knew the other would come back to them in the end. It was like a safe break-up—taking a step away, knowing they would be back in no time at all.

“What do you think love should be then?” I asked.

Sebastian rolled the cigarette between his fingers and I watched a couple small sparks fall off the end and land on the gutter by his feet.

“I guess it should be the feeling of coming home every day,” Sebastian said. “Like you’re where you’re meant to be.”

I couldn’t help myself from asking the question I knew shouldn’t be voiced.

“Is that what you have with Tiffany?” I asked. “Is she where you’re meant to be?”

Sebastian scoffed, and for a second I thought he was angry that I’d dared to ask him about her. But then I realized that the scoff was the answer. That the idea of him and Tiffany being that in love was so incredulous to him that he could only respond like that.

“I don’t know that you can fall in love in high school,” Sebastian said. “How can I fall in love with her knowing that we’re going to go off to college next year? I know what she’s like, what she wants from her future—she’s gonna find some future doctor or lawyer to marry one day, who won’t give a damn if she cheats on him every weekend because he’ll be doing the same to her.”

I was surprised by the bluntness of the answer, especially given how his own parents’ marriage had ended. But maybe that was why he was being so blunt about it, because he saw what infidelity looked like.He knew it was real and he preferred to hold the light up to it, instead of leaving it to lurk in the shadows. But it also begged the question: if he was so sure she would cheat on her future husband, was she also cheating on him now? I wasn’t sure why he would stay with her if she was, but I didn’t want to open a can of worms by asking, so I stayed with a more neutral question: “What’s the point of dating if you’re not even open to falling in love?”

“I don’t know,” he admitted with a sigh. He dropped the cigarette and stomped on it with his foot. I watched as the small embers disappeared, the smoke continuing to flow through the air. “I don’t know. Sometimes I ask myself what we’re doing, and sometimes I figure we might as well just keep doing it. What’s the point of stopping now, right?”

“But what if there was somebody else?” I asked. I hated myself for the words even as they came out of my mouth, but how was I supposed to stop them? I had to know, even if I told myself that I was over him. I just had to know what the answer to this was going to be. “What if there’s somebody else you could be meeting now, but you’re not because you’re with her? What then?”

“You think there’s someone else out there waiting for me?”

“I…” The words fell off my lips as he turned to look at me, his heavy gaze pouring into me. I wished I could say yes. I wished I could tell him that the kiss had meant something, thatIwas waiting for him. But I promised myself I wasn’t going to do that. Trying to break him and Tiffany up just because I wanted him was not the way to support him. So I shrugged and said, “I don’t know. Butmaybe there is. Is being with her worth risking missing out on it?”

“I don’t know,” he said. “Maybe if I ever find my dad again, I’ll ask him.”

The words were a sharp slap to the face because it hadn’t even occurred to me that he might take it like that. His dad had walked away, had decided that being with his wife wasn’t enough to keep him away from the person that he needed to be with.

“You know, sometimes I think we’re all destined to remake our parents’ mistakes,” Sebastian said, saving me from having to think of a response to my awful blunder. “Well, that, or steer as far away from them as possible.”

“What do you mean?”

“I watched my parents for years. I saw the way my dad wasn’t happy but kept crawling back, how he would bring her those flowers every Friday night as if that made up for anything. I always knew that there was probably something else going on, but they kept getting back together again and again and again. And that’s what I’ve done too, because that’s all I’ve ever known.” He let out a shaky breath. “I guess being with Tiffany just makes sense to me. She and I… we don’t make sense together, but being with her does—because what else am I going to do?”

So, he saw what the rest of us did—that he and Tiffany weren’t meant to be. That they were so incompatible that I couldn’t even begin to understand how they’d gotten together in the first place. But once he got in the cycle of breaking up and making up, I guess it was hard to get out again.

“But you…” I could feel him looking at me but I couldn’t bring myself to look. Not when I felt like he was looking into my soul right now. “Your parents stick it out. They don’t love each other, but they stay there, never stepping away. And because of that, you refuse to let yourself fall in love.”

“Well, that’s a big assumption for you to make,” I mumbled, but I could feel the cracks working their way through my heart. I’d never thought about how my parents’ marriage had affected me, but was he wrong? I always told myself there was nobody I was interested in or that the ones I did want were out of reach. But what if there was something deeper, something I’d been avoiding that I just wasn’t willing to say?

Sebastian, who I was convinced Dean would kill me for going after.

Thomas, who should have been perfect for me and yet I never let myself imagine it. Even now, I still hadn’t texted him after Clementine went to all that work for us to meet.

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