“What the fuck is your problem, Mia?” he bellows. “What the fuck do you think you’re doing?”
“Is this how you still deal with things when life doesn’t go your way? When someone tries to understand you?” I couldn’t care less how angry he is. “You just decide to move on to someone else?”
“You have no idea what the hell you’re talking about. No fucking idea, you’re just jumping to your usual dumbass conclusions!”
“Who is she?” I push him away from me. “Who is she!”
He steps back and glares at me, seemingly trying to calm down.
I don’t give him the chance. “I want an answer, and I want it now.”
“Of course, you do.” He hisses. “You want everything done your way, on your time, and you still don’t give a fuck about anyone’s feelings outside of your own.” He moves closer to me again, so close that we’re chest to chest. “You still haven’t changed one fucking bit in that aspect, and that, THAT is why I didn’t want to talk to you today.”
“That’s bullshit.”
“Is it?” His voice is even louder. “Is it, Mia? Or does everything you can’t control, somehow always seem to fall under that category?”
“Who is the woman in the bar, Dean?” I feel a lump rising up my throat. “Who the fuck is she?”
“She’s a friend,” he says. “One who actually knows how to let shit go.”
“You were never going to talk to me about what happened to us, were you? You were never going to—”
“It’s because you were so fucking selfish, Mia!” His skin turns a deeper shade of red. “You were so fucking selfish and you couldn’t even see it. Even now, you’re still running around playing like you’re some type of victim.”
“You hurt me, Dean...” I say, my voice cracking more than ever. “I was the victim.”
“No, but you’d get a goddamn Oscar if that ever was a category.” Hurt is in his eyes again, but his tone is all anger. “I was trying to move past your bullshit. I’ve been trying to let everything that happened go, by making up for the stuff that I did cause, but it’ll never be enough for you, will it? You’d rather hurt someone else in the process of trying to make yourself feel better, right?”
“Do you hear yourself right now? Do I need to list the ways that you hurt me? Is this your backwards attempt at trying to place all the blame with me?”
“Mia—”
“Fuck. You.” My heart aches. “Fuck you, Dean. I’m not going to stand here and let you vilify me over something I’ve been trying to understand ever since I got here. If you don’t want to tell me, fine. If you want to go the rest of your life, living in some type of world where people don’t address their issues, fine. And if you want to continue hurting the person who has loved you for the past ten years, even when I didn’t want to, that’s fine, too. But you’ll be doing that shit alone.”
“So tell me. Tell me right now...” I’m bawling and I know my words are coming out partially warbled, but I don’t care. “What’s it going to be? You can either tell me what the fuck happened between us right now, so we can try to get past it, or we can be done forever and I will never, ever come back to you, or speak to you again.”
“What’s it going to be?” I ask again, feeling the rain falling against us even harder.
He stares at me, jaw still clenched, but he slowly steps back. “It’s not going to be anything. We can be done forever, as far as I’m concerned.”
His words hurt, and my heart doesn’t want to accept them, but my mind will be playing life-director from here on out.
“I’ll never say another word to you again,” I say, and I quickly walk off, not giving him a chance to have the last word. I rush back to where I parked Eric’s car and shut myself inside, breaking down behind the steering wheel.
I now have no excuse for moving on from him, and I’m humiliated that life has had to teach me the same lesson twice. That I’ll have to call Autumn in the morning and tell her that I was dumb enough to fall for the same exact tricks, ten years later.
He’ll never change, but I will.
I’m done.
Regret ** Resentment** Redemption
REDEMPTION (n.) The act of Dean Collins finally coming clean about the past and finally atoning for the mean ass shit he put you through in high school (also: the act of Mia finally understanding why things happened the way they did, and her realizing where she went wrong, too.)