Page 111 of The One I Love
It also led me here: alone, angry, and wondering if my best friend, who is also the woman I love, just walked out of my life forever.
I fucked up. Badly. She’s right. I was pushing her. I wasn’t listening. I was coming up with ways in my head to justify what I wanted to happen instead of talking to her about whatwewanted to happen.
I didn’t give her a choice the night I kissed her, and I havebeen basically doing the same thing since this whole fake engagement thing started.
I know I was wrong. I know I need to apologize. The problem is I don’t think just an apology is going to be good enough. And for the life of me, I can’t figure out what else to do.
A knock on the front door startles me, and also makes me wonder who’s coming by this early in the morning. If it were my mom, she would have just let herself in. Oliver is still away. Wes is likely at football. Who knows what Simon is up to. And Amelia…I know that’s not happening.
So when I open the door to see Luke and Mariah standing in front of me, I immediately get choked up.
“What the hell, Shane!”
I don’t know if I’m more startled at Mariah’s choice of words or her pushing past me as she stomps into my house. Then there’s Luke. Unlike Mariah, who chose to use her words to tell me how she’s feeling, he’s going the opposite way. Silent. Staring. It’s a look I know well.
“Come in.” Luke barely makes eye contact with me as he follows Mariah into the living room. The silence is deafening as they make their way to my couch and take a seat. I pull up the ottoman so I can sit across from them with only the coffee table between us.
“What are you two?—”
“What happened?” Mariah asks with an edge. Okay, then. No small talk.
“I don’t know.”
“You don’t know?” Mariah asks. “How can you not know?”
“It’s complicated.”
“Complicated?” she yells. I’ve never been on the receiving end of a Mariah verbal whipping. I’ve always been proud of the way she can speak her mind. I’m still proud of her now, even if it hurts that her words, and her anger, are directed at me. “Itdoesn’t seem complicated to me. You’re here looking sad and mad. Mom’s at home crying in her bedroom, which she’s been doing since yesterday, with the door locked. Doesn’t take a genius to figure out you two had a fight.”
I nod and do my best not to avert my eyes to the floor. I don’t want her to think I’m not acknowledging her. But seeing the fire in her eyes right now physically hurts. It’s a look I saw yesterday. Because now more than ever, Mariah is the spitting image of Amelia.
“Why is she crying?” Mariah continues. Her face is getting redder, and I can tell there are about fifteen emotions ready to explode. “We couldhear her. She hasn’t come out of her room. Do you know when the last time she did that was? Right before she left Dad.”
The gut punch I feel is immediate. I was injured in war. I’ve taken punches that I’ve felt for weeks. But nothing has ever hurt me like those words just did. And it’s not just the words. It’s knowing that now, for the second time in two days, I’m being compared—and rightfully so—to the man I’ve spent years trying to be the exact opposite of.
“What happened?” Luke asks the same question Mariah did, but his tone is drastically different from hers.
“We got in a fight.”
“Obviously,” Mariah says sarcastically.
“Mariah, chill,” Luke says, which makes her cross her arms and sit back against the couch in a huff. “Shane, what happened? I know couples fight. But this seems…you and Mom have never fought, at least I didn’t think you did, and this seems bad.”
“It is,” I say. No bother in pretending or lying to them. “I messed up.”
“About the engagement?”
I nod. “We…didn’t see eye-to-eye on some things.”
“Then fix it!” Mariah yells. “Why do adults make everything so complicated?”
From the mouths of babes…
“It’s not that easy.” I can tell Mariah isn’t believing a word coming out of my mouth, even though it’s the truth. “I said some things that, while they weren’t lies, were delivered in a very cruel way. I didn’t listen to her. I was assuming things without talking to her about them. We had a fight and, well, it’s going to take a lot more than for me to say I’m sorry.”
That’s the one thing that I’ve realized since Amelia walked out yesterday. It’s what kept me up all night. I said things—hurtful things—that had truth in them. They were what I was feeling. Whether I was in the right or wrong, they were, at the time, my truth. And instead of talking to her about them in a rational way, I exploded like a bomb and left it to burn.
“So what are you going to do?”
