Pieces of You(64)

“You look different.”

“I do not.”

“Yes, you do,” she insists. “You look older. Wiser.”

I don’t want to tell her that it’s probably the dismal year I spent without her that aged me. Then again, maybe she needs to know how completely miserable I was to know how serious I am about never letting her get away from me again.

“I’m only a few months older than you and I didn’t get to spend my birthday with you this year for the first time in five years. Worst birthday of my life.”

Her smile disappears and she looks down at where her hands are folded in her lap.

“I didn’t mean that the way it sounded. I just mean that I wanted you with me. And now that I know what you were going through in May, I wish I could have been there for you.” I scoot closer to her and she looks up at me warily. “I wanted to call you every day that we weren’t together, but I didn’t work up the nerve to actually do it until a couple of months after we broke up and by then you’d already changed your number. I should have tried to hunt you down, but I figured you changed your number because you moved on. Then my mom told me you weren’t calling her anymore and I began to have crazy thoughts, that you were planning the breakup for a long time.”

“That’s stupid.”

“I know, but I wasn’t in my right mind.” I pause as I think of all the times I fucked a girl in the dark hoping to convince myself for just a minute that she was Claire. “The worst part is that I’ve never been more inspired than when I was deep in that darkness. You did do what was best for me when you let me go. And as much as I hated being without you, I’ll always be grateful for that.”

I look her in the eye and wait for the right moment, that moment where her breathing slows and the connection is made.

“I’m so confused,” she whispers as she closes her eyes. “Sometimes I want everything to be the way it was before we broke up. Other times, I want everything to be the way it was before….”

“Before what?”

“Before Adam left.”

She opens her eyes and I have to look away because I don’t want her to see the mixture of pain and rage that’s boiling inside me right now. I grind my teeth together to keep from saying something I’ll regret. Part of me wants to kill him for taking her away and another part of me wants to thank him for being there for her. Mostly, I just want to kill him. The thought of the two of them together makes me sick.

I take a deep breath to drown this burning jealousy then look her in the eye again. “I want to know everything you went through while we were apart. Everything since the day we broke up.”

She’s quiet for a moment then she begins. “I was sitting in my SOC 101 class of all places when I started feeling sick to my stomach. I didn’t think anything of it until I got back to the dorm and Senia offered me some of her leftover Chinese food. The smell in our room made me so sick, I threw up in the wastebasket.

“I though it was some kind of virus, so I stayed in the dorm the next day and slept pretty much all day. The whole day I lay in bed thinking about how I hadn’t gotten my period since you and I… since the day we broke up.”

I think back to that day and I wish we had never had sex that day. Not just because of what happened with Abigail, but because I’m sure both of us were haunted by the memory of that day for months afterward. I couldn’t stop thinking of the taste of her skin and the pure bliss of being inside her. The memories were pure torture and I can only imagine what they were to her knowing she was carrying our child—the result of that overwhelming passion we shared.

“How did you find out?” I ask.

“I went to the clinic and the doctor walked into the examination room and told me I was pregnant. She looked at me with such pity when I started crying instead of jumping for joy. I wanted to slap her.” I reach forward and grab her hand and I’m surprised she doesn’t flinch. Instead, she looks up at me with the most painful look in her eyes and says, “Everyone judged me. At least, that’s how I felt.”

“You didn’t do anything wrong. I’m the one who should have been there for you. None of this is your fault.”

Her face is blank as the tears roll down her cheeks. “I hated myself for so long. I thought I deserved that judgment.”

I pull her into my arms and she buries her face in my neck as she sobs. I try to hold it together, but I can’t. Even though she’s the one who broke up with me, I feel like I destroyed her. After everything she went through with her mother, she didn’t deserve that.