The Names They Gave Us(11)
I gesture toward his side of the table, giving him the floor.
“Well, I’d like us to think of it as a pause. We’ll already be in different locations, so I think it’s the ideal time for us to reflect on what we each want before things get serious with senior year. We can reassess when I’m up at the lake with our congregation in July.”
“Reassess? Can you be a human for a second? It sounds like you’re my boss at some boring office job.”
At this, his expression softens. Even his shoulders drop, so he looks less like a Collected Young Man and more like my sweet boyfriend. “I’m sorry. I should have practiced what I was going to say so it’d be . . . better than this.”
He’s pausing me, and yet I feel a flood of affection for Lukas Pratt. He cares so much about doing the right thing. I mean, he installs updates the moment his laptop tells him to. At every stop sign, he brakes for three full Mississippis. Of course he’d want to make sure our relationship is Right. Of course he’d table that thought when he heard the word “cancer.”
“Lucy? Can you say something?”
“Do you want to go out with someone else?”
He looks startled by the thought of dating other people, so at least that’s a relief. “I . . . hadn’t considered that at all.”
The shock of this conversation has worn off, and so has my mindless, nitrous-oxide laughter. I feel it, like a rock hitting the windshield. The on-contact snap stuns you, but then comes the slow-motion horror a moment later as the glass splinters.
I am broken up with. The initial impact happened, and now it carves a line, splitting right through me.
“Lucy?” Lukas asks gently. “Do you want to? See other people while we’re apart?”
“No!” But then I add, because I want to hurt him, “Maybe? I don’t know, Lukas.”
He rubs his hand across his forehead. “You know I love you, right? That I want to do this because I love you, and I want to make sure we’re doing the right thing for us.”
The weird thing is that I do know he loves me. I don’t doubt it, even now, as he is breaking up with me.
“I think that if you do find yourself wanting to go out with someone else, you should.” He swallows. “That’s hard for me to say. But that’s the point of being apart. I want to know that we’re sure about this before we factor each other into college decisions. Right now, I just don’t know that I’m very confident about it.”
“How long have you been thinking about this?” I mean, honestly, does everyone in my life just keep awful things from me, all the time?
When Lukas blushes, it’s not a full-face pink. It’s two pink splotches right on his cheeks. “Um, well. Obviously, I’ve been concerned since your outburst, leaving church. But that concern rose further after the incident following our date to the aquarium.”
I can feel the blush creeping up my forehead, down my neck. The incident? You have got to be kidding me, dude. So we made out sans shirts. We’ve been going out for two years! “Seriously?”
“Well, it was excruciating to sit in church the next day, wasn’t it?” he asks. Actually, I didn’t feel like we’d done anything that wrong. I felt guilty for not feeling guilty, maybe. “And I started to think about what a temptation it would be if we were at the same college. Since we’re both committed to not having premarital sex . . . I don’t know.”
That’s all it takes—the flame-burn of feeling judged—for a fire to be stoked inside me. So, I fooled around with my boyfriend of two years once. So, I’m hurt and confused by a God that has never hurt or confused me before. And because I’m human, Lukas needs to reconsider if I’ll be his college girlfriend and future wife? What decade is this?
In the past two years, I’ve all but searched Lukas for a gift tag—To: Lucy?, From: God. He showed up as the new kid right when I transferred to public school freshman year, right when I needed him. He opens the car door for me; he chats about marathon training with my dad. He sits at swim meets next to my mom. So why does he feel so much like Shruggy Jesus to me right now? Why am I tempted to place my hands on his shoulders and push?
“What would you do, Lukas? If your mom got cancer? Twice?” His mother wears a lot of candy-pink sundresses with paisley or even starfish prints. She has a Southern accent and a sleek, blond bob. I hope he’s imagining clumps of it falling out. Because that will be my reality.
When Lukas opens his mouth to reply, I cut him off. “Because I know what I’d do for you if that happened. I’d pray and fast and cry with you. But I’d also be angry with you. I would crawl to wherever you were, emotionally, so that you wouldn’t feel alone.”
He already looks ashamed, staring down at the table between us, but I’m not done. “I would not climb up on my high horse and gallop around the Piedmont Square Starbucks, judging you for how you felt about a situation I could not possibly understand.”
At this point, I’m loud enough that other coffee drinkers give us wary glances.
“This has not gone as well as I’d hoped, I admit,” Lukas says miserably.
Lord. He wanted this—pausing our relationship—to go well. It would be absurd if it wasn’t so earnest. He talked to his parents and a pastor to ensure this was the right decision. He doesn’t want either of us to make a wrong choice about college or our futures. In a backward way, this dedication is part of why I admire him.