Page 8 of Just Like in the Movies
Micah
We had two visitation periods with a break in between. After the second one was over, I sat in my parents' living room with a cup of cold coffee in my hands and a half-eaten cookie on a plate in front of me that had tasted like sawdust. It wasn't a problem with the coffee or with the cookie, though—they were fine. No, the problem was with me.
He'd looked just like he had in high school. Oh, his hair was a little shorter, but it just made his eyes stand out more, bright blue against the black hair, with that pale Irish skin I loved. I recognized the suit he'd worn too, from our prom, and remembered what we'd done that night for the first time. The promises I'd made.
God, I was an ass.
He still looked absolutely edible in that suit. But he hated me, I could tell from the look in his eyes, and who could blame him? Twice. Twice I proposed to him, once on prom night when I'd emptied my balls into his body and sworn I'd never love anyone but him. The second time with a ring on the night before I'd left for Hollywood, riding the fire of my dreams and the fucking gas of my stupidity. I should have stayed here, worked in one of dad's businesses, eventually climbed the family corporate ladder to some well-paid and low responsibility job reporting to my brother. Married that omega, had some kids, done summer stock in my spare time.
Loved him the way he deserved.
Mom had filled me in after the first wave of visitors had passed, about how Lew had waited for me, while my phone calls got farther and farther apart. She hadn't accused me of anything, hadn't really said anything at all except the bald facts. Of how Lew had gotten drunk the night I'd broken it off with him and burned everything I'd ever given him. How the fire department had been called because it had started a grass fire that had taken six hours to put out. How Lew had smashed his car and everyone had thought it was an accident until it came out that I'd helped him buy that car with some of the money from my summer job. And that there'd been rumors that he'd been trying to kill himself, except Mom said she'd never seen anyone so mad as Lew and suicide wasn't in his nature. It wasn't just his coloring he got from the Irish, after all.
She’d also told me how he'd shown up at my parents’ door the next morning to give back that ring, still covered in soot. "I don't want anything of his," he'd said, dropped it in Mom’s startled palm, then stormed back off up the road.
Why I hadn't gone up in flames myself during all this I'd never know. I should have—I deserved it. And there was no good way to explain why I'd felt I had to do it. It was one of those 'you had to be there' things.
So I punished myself the only way I knew how, by not hiding out in my bedroom, by sitting here and letting the speculation and gossip wash around me. Letting them look their fill and talk their fill and being the perfect little 'home town boy gone Hollywood' that they all wanted.
And hating myself the whole time.
