Page 131 of The Proposal Pact
And then I cry.
“Why are you doing this, Shrek?”
“Because I care about you, little menace.” He kisses the top of my head.
“You do?”
“Yeah,” he says softly, his voice tight. “I didn’t want to, I tried not to, but I care about you.”
“Why’d you try not to?” I tense, sensing that we’re on the brink of the one subject we’d been skipping around since the beginning.
His past.
“Because caring hurts, little menace,” Clover says quietly after a long moment.
I stay exactly where I am, only burrowing further into him, showing I’m here for him as he was for me. “I didn’t know you were artistic like this. What else are you hiding from me?”
“Sometimes I wish you could’ve met me seventeen years ago,” he says, and I detect a faint smile in his tone, but I don’t dare get upfrom my position. “I was someone entirely different. Someone a lot more like Alec. Free, happy, a Casanova.” Callum snorts. “At least that’s what Mom called me. I loved to have fun and to deliver it. I dated, went out, and did all the usual things, and I drew. I was quite a painter. Have you been to my sister’s house?” I nod. “That painting for her daughter’s room?”
I twist to look at him, remembering the most beautiful mural of lavender fields pained across the whole wall. “Oh my God! Shrek, you drew that?” He smiles sheepishly. “Stop lying, Callum Clover Lovinski,” I tease trying to lighten the mood and it works.
Clover chuckles.
“I know, shocker, but yeah, my life before was all fun and games until it wasn’t.” He pauses. “Until my girlfriend came over one night and told me she was pregnant.”
I gasp, despite myself.
What? I-I didn’t expect that and a cold shiver runs down my body because I sense the story doesn’t end there.
“It was a shock. For both of us. But I loved her, we had been together for a while already, so I got a ring and proposed, canceling my plans of moving out of Loverly Cave after school, and took up a few more jobs to save more money.”
I stay quiet.
“It was an unusually rainy season that early spring, and all our friends kept talking about how high the water was getting at the pier in Santa Cruz. They wanted to see it. So did Bianca, my fiancée. She begged me to go with them, but I couldn’t.” He clears his throat. “I-I got angry that she didn’t understand I needed to stay and make money for our growing family. And I might’ve also been bitter that she was having fun while I wasn’t. So, we got into a fight, and she left with our friends by herself. Everyone could tell the storm was getting worse, and within three hours, the power in our town was cut. An hour after that, I got a phone call.” Clover’s voice trembles at the end, and I clutch onto him harder, holding him as he lives through the horror of his past once again.
I should’ve never let him go there again. I knew, I sensed it was bad. I just couldn’t imagine it…like this. That’s why none of his friends or family ever talk about it. That’s why I’ve never heard even whispers of his tragedy. They’re protecting him from reliving it.
He doesn’t have to continue. I can put two and two together.
He lost them both.
That day, he lost the woman he loved and their unborn child.
“Caring hurts,” I whisper, understanding now and he nods against my head.
“Yeah. Caring hurts. And so does guilt.”
“But it wasn’t your fault.”
“Wasn’t it? If I were there, I could’ve saved her.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I should’ve stopped her from going in the first place. And to think I was jealous…” he spits out, disgusted with himself all these years later.
“You were young, Callum,” I say, using his first name, because it somehow feels wrong to use the other now. Like it doesn’t belong in this story. “You were young, and no one can blame you for that.”
“I blame me for that. I was supposed to be a father. I was supposed to be grown up. Yet, I failed even before I got a real chance to be that. I’ll never forget that day.”
