I'll Be Your Blue Sky (Love Walked In #3)(24)
“You don’t get to tell us how to feel, my girl,” said Cornelia. “We watched you around him, always on tenterhooks, constantly poised to jump in and smooth things over. We should have intervened, helped. At least, let us help you now.”
“I can’t just leave you to deal with the fallout!”
Cornelia said, wryly, “If it makes you feel any better, there’s bound to be plenty more fallout later. You can deal with that.”
“Go pack,” said my mother, pointing to the door. “Everything but your wedding dress. Then, go home. Although you are certainly not getting behind the wheel of a car.”
“But I want to be alone.” This wasn’t true. Being loathsome and cruel, I was actually the very last person I wanted to be alone with, but I didn’t want other people, either. What I would’ve most preferred was to be put in a medically induced coma for at least a week, possibly a year.
“Sorry,” said my mother. “Not on those winding country roads, not with those shaking hands.”
“They aren’t shaking.”
I glared at my hands, the little traitors, clenched them to try to stop the trembling, then gave up in disgust.
“We’ll ask Dev to drive you back,” said my mother.
“Not Dev,” I said, quickly.
She glanced up at me, startled.
“Because it might hurt Zach,” I said.
Such a sweet and considerate girl, so thoughtful of Zach’s feelings, so protective.
God, I made myself want to throw up.
Hildy and Aidan drove me home, and even though the two of them were among my very favorite people to both talk and listen to, I couldn’t do either. In the backseat, I hunched my shoulders, pulled my cardigan around me like a straitjacket, and tried to think about nothing at all, while outside the car windows, twilight dwindled, turning the Blue Ridge gray.
*
At 4:22 a.m., at home in my childhood bed, I woke up panicked, sure in my bones that I’d made a terrible mistake. Zach was right when he’d said marriage meant adapting! Everyone knew that! I should have stood by my word, zipped on my stupidly expensive white dress, and marched down the aisle straight into my beautiful future. Panting, sweating, with my heart stuttering and my sheets twisted around me like a boa constrictor, I swore to myself that it wasn’t too late. I would call him, beg him to take me back. I would fix everything. My scrambling hands groped my bedside table for my phone and yanked out the charger.
On the illuminated screen was a text message from Dev that he had sent after I’d fallen asleep: If this is totally inappropriate and exactly what you don’t need, delete immediately. The message accompanied a photo of him and Teo shoving handfuls of wedding cake into their mouths, the pocked and dilapidated cake listing in the background. I didn’t laugh, but I almost did, came closer than I ever thought I could, leaning back into my pillow and smiling ear to ear into the dark like an idiot, and not only because the photo was funny, but also because of what had always been true: even when I wasn’t with him, just knowing that Dev existed in the world made me happy.
Okay, no, that hadn’t always been true. Almost always, but there was a year in there—my last year of high school—when it hadn’t been true at all, not by a long shot.
When we were a couple, Dev and I didn’t live in the same town and would go as long as two months without seeing each other, and there were moments when I missed his physical proximity acutely and in very specific ways: his arm against mine—the slightest whisper of skin on skin—as we lay on our backs on a blanket, staring at the night sky, or his head in my lap as we watched TV, the blue light resting on the side of his face. But, while there were tough days, the missing never hurt that much because we texted constantly, e-mailed, and talked into the night, and I could always see an end point not far away, a date on my calendar, circled with a heart and marked “D-Day.”
And then Dev went to Africa. Africa. Not Spain or France or Oxford, England, or New York or any other place I’d ever heard of a person spending his gap year. Dev signed on for nine months in South Africa doing HIV/AIDS education and assisting in a rural medical clinic, with an additional three months at an orphanage tacked on for good measure. South Africa, and not even Capetown, but a village so tiny and remote that his phone would be useless.
When he told me he wanted to do it, my whole body went cold, but I gave him my support. Who could argue against helping people who were sick and poor? Who could align herself against orphans? Also, the gap year wasn’t just for these people; it was for me. Dev had skipped eighth grade, so that even though we were the same age, he’d graduated from high school a year ahead of me. But our plan had always been to start college together. He deferred his acceptance to the University of Virginia, where I would apply early, and where, as a resident of the state and a crackerjack student besides, I was sure to get in. The one year apart meant we’d spend the four following—and all the years after that—together.
I held up nobly—everybody said so—until Dev’s graduation party, a week before his flight to South Africa, when I stood in Cornelia and Teo’s pretty, bloom-riddled backyard watching Dev laughing at something Cornelia’s brother Toby had said, his head tilted forward, his eyes dancing, and felt the bottom fall out of my world. I didn’t settle for just breaking down; no, I exploded like a pipe bomb, barely making it into the house before the jagged pieces went flying. Sobbing hysteria, flailing, unintelligible ranting. When my mother put her arms around me, I threw them off and ran blindly upstairs and into the nearest bedroom, which happened to be Dev’s. Confronted with his books, his computer, his sneakers lined up in a row inside his open closet, his Milky Way poster, his basketball signed by Allen Iverson, his old cotton quilt worn to the softness of silk, and picture after picture of a dark-haired girl so glossy and sassy and blithely grinning that she could not possibly be me, I lost my bearings and fell, missing the bed and landing on the rug, completely unhinged. Dev lay down on the floor of his room and held me, clamped on tight and whispered shh, shh, shh like a mother to a child until I finally calmed down.