Page 155 of A Love Letter to Whiskey
I couldn’t understand why she was fighting it, fighting me, why she wouldn’t be mine the way I wanted her to be. I was young, selfish, and I didn’t understand how hard B had worked her entire life for the opportunity she had at Rye Publishing.
I also didn’t understand how important it was for her to be building a life on her own after everything she’d been through. That city, that job, they were just the beginning. This was her stepping into her independence, making it through a tumultuous childhood and excruciating period of grief.
I’d been so privileged with my own childhood and family, I just didn’t understand.
“Maybe it’s time for you to ask for what you want,” my youngest sister, Sylvia, told me one night.
We were sitting on the beach, the wind on our face as I poured my heart out to her. Although, Santana was closer in age to me, Sylvia and I had just always understood each other in a way my other sister and I never did. Santana lived in New York now, but Sylvia was living at home with Mom and Dad for now, and I selfishly loved still having her close.
“I have. She knows.”
Sylvia shook her head. “I don’t mean tell her what you want and then accept when she says no. I mean, tell her that you need something more concrete than what you have now, or you need to walk away. Because, Jamie, this in-between you’re stranded in?” Sylvia shook her head. “It’s killing you.”
She was right. Over the summer, I’d found it harder and harder to eat right and treat my body well. I was drinking way more than I should have been, and never finding a restful night of sleep.
It was a special kind of hell, and yet the thought of walking away from B made me double over with a fierce stomachache.
“What if I ask her to be with me, and she says no again?”
Sylvia sighed. “Then you let her go.”
I mulled over that conversation for days before I finally got the guts to tell B we needed to talk. I hated sending that text, knowing it would likely have her wheels spinning, but there was no other way around it.
I couldn’t pretend anymore.
As you know already from reading her side of our story, timing was never kind to us. And while, in that moment, I felt completely valid in everything I felt and was asking of her, I see now how selfish I was, how I couldn’t see past what was right in front of me to the potential future we could have together.
She wasn’t asking me for anything but time and space, but giving it to her felt impossible.
She called me on the night she found out she’d been promoted at Rye Publishing. Of course, I didn’t know that yet, and so with my sister’s words in my ear, I begged B one last time to give me what I needed.
“I just need you to sit there and listen to me for a minute, okay?” I told her when she called. I was pacing my living room, heart thundering unsteadily. “I know you’re scared of us, of what we’ve been in the past and what we might not be in the future. I know you’re standing on your own for the first time and you’re proud of that, hell I’m proud of that too, but I can stand with you.”
“Jamie—”
“And I know long distance freaks you out,” I continued, because I knew if I let her stop me, I’d lose my nerve. “But we’ve made it through the summer practically as a long-distance couple, even if we didn’t title it that.”
I took a breath, knowing that that fact alone strengthened us. We’d been through so much already. I had no doubt we could survive anything.
“I’ve been thinking,” I told her. “Your internship is almost over, and I’ve been looking at some publishing places in Miami. A lot of them are hiring, and you have experience now. Your classes are online, B. You could come home, we could be together.”
“Jamie, I—”
“No, just let me finish,” I pleaded, glancing at my laptop on the kitchen table. I had tabs and tabs of publishing jobs open within an hour of where I lived, a document with all the links ready to send her the moment she said yes. “I know this is a lot to ask. You don’t owe me anything, and the fact that I’m asking you to uproot yourself and move back for me is selfish as fuck. But I realized last time you walked away from me I didn’t ask you anything at all.”
That sentence hit me harder when I voiced it out loud, because as much as I wanted to be angry with her for those three years of silence, I’d let her walk away. I hadn’t told her that I needed her, that I wanted to be with her through it. Maybe if I had, things would have been different…
