Page 46 of The Girl I Once Loved

“That night. You told Sky that you were my meal ticket. I never saw you like that, Stacy. Not once.”

A timid smile crests her lips.

“Thank you for saying that.”

“Hmm.” I nod and leave before she has time to say another word.

As I walk out of her office building, I try not to dwell on Stacy’s words of advice.

I’m not sure why all the women in my life have suddenly decided to bust my balls, but between Sky, Clara, and now Stacy, it’s getting a little tiresome. Daisy is the only one not giving me a hard time, but then again, she’s far too busy with her wedding to bother.

That, and the fact she has no clue what I’ve done.

I could never tell her.

If I did, she would snitch on me to Sky so fast it would make my head spin.

But as I walk onto the ferry that will take me back to Thatcher’s Bay, the memory of the night I forfeited my soul for her happiness comes to me in tumultuous waves.

“Dude, just stop moping around my house and go and talk to your girlfriend already,” Derrick groans frustratedly, kicking me in the shins to drive his point home. “I can’t deal with you being all Debbie Downer and shit when your girl is literally still sleeping right across from your bedroom. It’s really starting to get on my nerves.”

“Thanks, D. I’m glad I can count on your shoulder to cry on,” I mumble, pinching the bridge of my nose, unable to ease the tension there.

“Fuck. Fine.” He grumbles, plopping beside me on the couch and stretching his legs on the coffee table. “You want my advice, then here it is. As I see it, you only have one option here,” he says calmly. “If the girl you love has a chance to go to the college of her dreams, then pack your shit up and go with her.”

I scoff at what he calls advice.

“You forget that I can’t just drop everything and leave Thatcher’s Bay to move all the way to New Hampshire. Unlike you, I don’t have a trust fund to lean on and pay my way. And Dartmouth would laugh in my face if I even tried to apply there, much less try and get a grant.”

“All I’ve been hearing coming out of your mouth these past couple of days is problem after problem. What you should be focusing on is solutions. Not how fucked up your life is,” he says while running his fingers through his dark hair, apparently frustrated with my response.

“That’s just the thing. My life is fucked up, D. I’m either about to lose the love of my life, or selfishly keep her here, only to have her resent me in the future. So how about you give me less attitude and a little bit more understanding, huh?”

“You have no idea if she’ll end up resenting you or not.”

“She will,” I state with such certainty it makes me sick to my stomach.

“You can’t predict the future, man. You’re not that clever,” he teases, giving me a nudge to lighten my foul mood, but it fails to do the job.

“I don’t need to be clairvoyant to know that if Sky stays with me, she’ll be kissing her future goodbye. And she’ll eventually hate me for it.”

“You don’t know that.”

“Oh, but I do. She might not think so in the beginning. Not while she’s occupied with community college on the mainland. But when she’s finished with that, and is living in a shoebox all alone, working at a menial job just to pay the rent while I’m off at sea for god knows how long, she’ll start wondering… what if. What if she had taken that grant? What would her life look like as a Dartmouth graduate? What if she had chosen her dream of being an author instead of being with me? And when that happens, those what ifs will start to consume her every thought, until only one certainty remains—that she’s made the wrong choice. And it would fucking destroy me watching her fall less in love with me each passing day. In the end, I’m going to lose her either way. And if I have to make a choice, I’d rather lose her now while she still has a chance at becoming someone and being happy, then later down the road when she’s so miserable she won’t even recognize her own reflection.”

“Fuck. That’s… pretty… heavy shit,” Derrick stammers, stretching his arm to grab the whiskey bottle from my hands to take a swig.

“Welcome to my fucking life. It’s never been easy. Why should falling in love be?”

“So what are you going to do?”

“End it.” I choke out the words. “Somehow.”

“Shit.”

“Yeah…shit,” I grumble, laying my head back on the headrest of the sofa.

“Hmm, I don’t know. If Skylar is anything like Daisy, she won’t take you breaking up with her lying down. She’ll fight you on it.”

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