Page 42 of Rejected
“No, don’t call me that. I’m not that. I’m your friend, your everything… but not that.”
“Just tell me you feel something for me.” He was pleading now, the nearest thing to begging he’d ever come to. It tore her heart open.
“I feel everything for you,” Jo said. He inhaled deeply, reeled on his feet a little bit. “Except for what you want me to feel.”
He closed his eyes and turned deathly pale.
“I can’t lie to you, Laurie, not even to make you stay. Not if I don’t feel I should in my heart. Don’t ask me to go against my heart.”
He looked at her.Lie to me, his eyes said, raw with need.Lie.She looked away for a second.
The color slowly flowed back into his cheeks and they turned red with anger. When he met her eyes again, they held a stony expression, as if he wasclosing up his walls again. Her heart sank.This is the end.
“Then I can’t stay,” he whispered.
“Don’t go, please, I can’t… I can’t exist without you.”
“Do you think it’s just you who is suffering? Do you think I have been able to breathe since I left you?” He turned and started walking away again.
For the last time.
Suddenly, that deep, bottomless pain in her chest was replaced by unbridled fury.
“I knew this would happen! I knew I would lose you!” She shouted at his retreating back. If he heard, he gave no indication.
Except for the fact that his body coiled as a tight rope, as if every step was more painful than the last. Every step that took him away from her.
Good.
Dear Beth,
And what does the foolish boy mean by ‘getting dizzy’ every time he so much as deigns to look in my general direction? Always pretending he’s weak when I’m near. Well, the new ‘always’.
He never used to be like this before.
He was all laughter and playful pushes and pretending to fight with me and chasing me, and—I hate it. One would think the silly boy is really besotted. I mean, he is, I have known that for quite some years, but I was patiently waiting for him to outgrow it.
But love?
He is claiming it’s love now, Beth. Can you imagine?
No. I do not believe it. If it wasn’t for that maddened look on his face when he thought I was wounded, I would completely dismiss the thought.
But now… After seeing his face like that… I am not so sure. I keep seeing it in my dreams. In nightmares. That empty look of fear, as if he had lost the entire world.
So I am wondering: Is it love, after all?
Can it be something more than the foolish obsession of a lonely boy?
And if it is love, then where does that leave me?
Can I ever love him? Or anyone, for that matter?
I cannot as yet answer that question. Maybe I never will.
I am sorry for starting this letter in the middle of a sentence. I am sorry for my jumbled, sordid thoughts.
Then again, it’s not as if anyone will ever read it, is it?
