Losing Him (Mitchell Family #8)(20)

She cried more. “I deserve that.”

“You have five seconds to start talking to me and then I’m going to bed. It’s been a long day and I can tell that you don’t want to do this.”

“I’m sorry, it’s hard for me. Can you just be nice while I find the words?”

“How about you find the truth and spit it out!”

She wiped away her tears and took a big drink of her wine. “You already know who it has to do with. Nobody knows that he made promises to me. He told me we’d be together.”

“Who? Tyler?”

She smiled for a second. “I’d loved him since I was a little girl, but when we hit puberty, it became more intense, I guess because it was real for me. Every waking second of the day I thought about being together. We’d grown up together, shared the same friends, and interests. He was my first you know.”

“Your first as in you lost your virginity to him?” I could have figured that much, since she was so obsessed with him.

“He was my first everything.” She looked up at me for a second. “When I was fourteen we were at a party. My girlfriends knew how much I wanted to be his girlfriend, so they planned a game of truth or dare. He thought that they’d dare him to moon someone, or eat something gross. He didn’t know that the dare would be to spend ten minutes in the closet with me.” She took another drink and shook her head. “I’d imagined kissing him for as long as I could remember, but when he came into that closet, I just froze. We were so close that our bodies were pressed together. I could feel his breath on my face and I just stood there. Ty grabbed one of my hands and told me that we could just tell everybody we made out. He said I didn’t have to do anything that I didn’t want to do. It was so sweet. I moved my lips toward his and kissed him. He never let go of my hand as we kept kissing and by the time the ten minutes were over, I just wanted to go back inside that closet with him.”

“So, there was a time when he wasn’t an * to you?” She’d told me things that he’d said to her. I knew he wasn’t nice when it came to Heather.

“Yes, he was nice. Ty was gentle and considerate. After that night, we made out a couple other times, but he wouldn’t ask me out. I was too afraid and only told my closest friends. When I finally got the nerve to do it myself, he showed up at school holding hands with Van. I was heartbroken and even went home from school sick. It devastated me. One day he was kissing me and then dating her the next. I spent hours making myself look beautiful every day and he dated a girl that looked more like a boy than a girl.”

I saw the jealousy pouring off of her as she spoke. “My friends kept egging me on though. They told me that Ty was just being nice to Van. They said he really didn’t like her. I believed them, so I wrote him a letter. I told him that I wanted to be his girlfriend. I waited three days to get a letter back. It wasn’t what I expected. He said that we could only be friends. He said that he loved Van and he wasn’t interested in me like that.”

“Let me guess. That’s when you decided to be the other woman? At age fourteen?”

She shook her head. “No, of course not! I cried for the first week, trying to hide my embarrassment from telling him my feelings. Nobody wants to hear the person that they love say they love someone else, even if we were just kids. For the next year, I tried to move on. All along I thought that one day they would break up and he would see that I’d been waiting for him. They had nothing in common anyway. He was the quarterback and I was the captain of the cheerleading squad. We were together all the time, but he never mentioned that letter. After every game I had to watch him getting a kiss from her. I watched him putting his arm around her and walking down the hallway with her holding hands. It never got easier, seeing them so happy when I was so alone. Each time he’d smile at me, I got my hopes up for nothing.”

“Why didn’t you just move on? I’m sure plenty of guys wanted to be with you.” I just didn’t get it.

“We lived in a small town. Everyone knew everyone. I was afraid that if I dated someone else, it would mess up my chance of being with him. There was that bro code thing and dating one of his friends would mean he’d never date me himself. I wasn’t willing to risk that. I needed to save myself for him, because I believed that one day we’d be together.”

“That’s pretty pathetic, if you ask me. You kept yourself from living, while waiting for someone that was unavailable.” She needed to see that. I hoped she wasn’t that na?ve.

She wiped her eyes again and poured more wine. “I know. I couldn’t help it. I couldn’t stop loving him. I tried. It just wouldn’t happen. Anyway, after another year or so passed, we both ended up at the same party. Ty had been drinking and he was pretty out of control. Van, being the good little student and daughter that she always was, had gone home early. After he made a fool out of himself by starting a fight, I took him into a room and tried to calm him down. It just so happened that it was someone’s bedroom. It was dark and we were alone. He laughed about the situation, at first. There we were, alone in the dark, like we were years before, except I was the only virgin in the room. Ty had been with Van. When it happened the whole school talked about it. So, there I was, standing in the room, alone with the guy that I’d been in love with since the third grade. I’d also had a couple of beers, so my anxiety was non-existent. Ty wouldn’t shut up about Van, so to make him stop talking I kissed him. I thought that if I was just good enough, if I was better than her, he’d want to be with me.”