Page 114 of Hitting the Goal Line
“Are you okay?” I ask him, reaching up and gently gliding my finger along each of his cuts and mapping out the bruises.
“I should be asking you that,” Blake says, his icy blue eyes darkening and his hands tightening as he lets them rest against my hips.
It doesn’t go unnoticed that he is still holding me, that he’s keeping his hands on me as if he doesn’t want to let go.
I think about his question and give him a small smile. “I will be.”
Blake lets out a sigh before finally moving one of his hands off my body and bringing it up to my face. “Soph, you should have told me what was going on.”
His voice is filled with pain and just hearing it breaks me in half.
A tear escapes from the corner of my eye and Blake wipes it away. “I wanted to. More times than I can count, but then I thought that if I left him, I could put it behind me and I could just put what he put me through behind me and never mention it again.”
Blake cringes at my words, all the whole his eyes are filled with pain.
He opens his mouth to say something, but then one of the baristas starts up the coffee machine and stops him. He looks around and lets out a sigh.
“We should get out of here and go somewhere we can talk,” he suggests, finally letting go of me but only to interlace one of his hands with mine.
He starts to pull me away but I stay rooted in place. Blake quickly turns to look at me.
“What’s wrong?” he asks, bunching up his eyebrows in the process.
“You don’t hate me?” I ask, the question that has been on my mind since this morning finally making its way out.
He gives me a look of confusion. “Why would I hate you?”
“Blake, you were just in jail because of me. You were facing battery charges. That’s reason enough to take me out of your life and hate me forever,” I whisper-yell at him since we are in a public place.
Who knows if the baristas recognized him when he walked in and are secretly taking videos of us.
My best friend looks at me for a solid minute, his eyebrows close to his hairline as if he’s surprised about something.
After another thirty seconds, he finally lets out a snort and now I’m the one that is surprised and confused.
“Why are you snorting?”
“Because I thought that you were going to hate me,” he says, a small chuckle leaving his lips.
“Why would I hate you?”
Blake lets out a sigh, composing himself in the process. “I beat up your boyfriend, Soph. I heard the paramedics say that I broke his jaw,” he tells me, cringing a little bit as he does.
“You were protecting me,” I tell him, reaching up to sooth his cuts again, even if they don’t need soothing.
“I know, but that doesn’t negate the fact that he was still someone you cared about and that if the police hadn’t pulled me off him, I could have done a lot more damage than I did.”
The words ‘he would have deserved it’ are on the tip of my tongue, but no matter how much I want to say or how true they are, I can’t voice them.
Elijah hurt me, physically, mentally, and emotionally, yet I would never want to do the same to him. Even with voicing words.
“But you didn’t,” I say to Blake giving him a small smile. “And even if you did, I still wouldn’t hate you. I never will.”
I look into his eyes for a second as he looks down at me. They are my favorite version of blue that the world has to offer. I can’t count all the times that I’ve gotten lost in them or wished it was his eyes I was staring into when on a date. Whenever those blue eyes look at me, the make me feel safe, protected, special. Most importantly, though, they have made me feel loved, in every sense of the word.
That’s what I feel when I look into them now.
And I want to tell him that, given the circumstances of today and where we are, it might not be a good idea.
