Page 90 of Last Love

My vibrating cell attempts to redirect my attention to it. “Why did you go out with him? Why would you have any contact with him?” Rather than let her answer, I bark out a more important question. “Have you been fucking seeing him the entire time we’ve been together?!”

“No.”

“Is this the first time he’s tried to…fuck, be with you?”

“No.”

“What the fuck, Pres?!” I toss my hands upward in frustration. “Has he been trying shit this whole fucking time?”

“Not…exactly?”

“What the fuck does that mean?!”

“First of all,” she lifts a finger, teacher voice activated, “you lower your voice, or you go take a two minute breath break until you’re ready to talk without yelling.”

Displeased grumbles linger in the back of my throat.

“Second of all,” my girlfriend cautiously continues, “it means that he’s tried calling and texting and emailing and sending things and I’ve ignored them all because I didn’t care. I didn’t care that he wanted to talk. I didn’t care that he missed me. I did not care that he was still in love with me.”

“Is that why you went to lunch with him. To tell him that you aren’t in love with him, anymore. That you’re in love with me?”

“No.”

Fuck, I don’t know if I’ve ever hated that word more than I do right now.

The vibrating in my pocket begins again at the same time I prod, “No, what?”

“That’s not why I went to lunch with him. He showed up at work today – he had made an appointment. He didn’t pull I’m already in the house Scream style stalker shit. He wanted to talk about what happened between us, which was fair considering, he proposed and-”

“He fucking proposed to you?!”

She winces at the screeching. “Yeah.”

There’s no stopping my jaw from dropping.

“The same day that I got your letter. And honestly, I wasn’t gonna say yes, even if I hadn’t got it, but getting that message, getting that card of hope that maybe we’d have a second chance some day definitely brought a truth to light that I hadn’t been willing to face.”

“Which was?”

“That not only had I spent five, long years with someone I didn’t love, but that I was still in love with someone I hadn’t seen or been with for a fucking decade.”

It’s impossible to describe the emotion that chains me in place.

It’s an uneven mixture of understanding.

Gratefulness.

Longing.

Pain.

My phone starts another cycle of vibrating as she adds, “And you would think, after all that fucking time, you’d fall out of love with a person you haven’t seen in so long, someone you don’t even really know anymore, and let yourself figure out how to fall in love with someone you live with and eat with and sleep with.”

I let my gurgle of disapproval be heard.

“But that moment…that moment, Ry, never came.”

The same cycle of feelings flares a second time.

“Apparently, it doesn’t fucking matter how many times you go through the actions or mindlessly say the words, it doesn’t make it real.”

Unbearable constriction ruthlessly continues in my chest.

We’ve loved each other from the moment we’ve met.

It’s never stopped.

Not for me.

Not for her.

And I’m even more committed now to do whatever I have to to make this right between us whether that’s beg or bleed at her fucking feet.

Her soul calls to mine.

That’s why I found her.

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