Unexpected Arrivals(28)
The whistling stopped and my lungs burned with the breath I held. There was no way I’d let her pin her decisions on me. “You made a choice, Cora.”
“You’re absolutely right. I did. I made a choice to go to Chapel Hill. And another to follow you here. And now I’m making a choice to follow my dream.”
“No one says you have to choose. I’m just wondering when we get back on the same path. When the us becomes as important as the when. When we decide that we have to have the happily ever after we’ve promised each other.”
“We’re not even engaged, James. It’s pretty hard to keep making life plans based on a fairy tale that I seemed to have conjured up in my head.”
“You wanted to wait until after graduation!” I hollered in her face, somehow making my lack of moving forward her fault. I had the stone, I had just never found the ring. Maybe that was just some twist of fate that was destined to keep us apart. Or maybe it was me stalling. Or maybe it was me not being certain this was right. It seemed no matter which way we turned, another obstacle moved in front of us. I couldn’t dodge them all, and she’d quit trying.
“Undergrad, James. That was almost two years ago. We’re twenty-four years old, and we’ve been together since we were seventeen. At what point do you know it’s right? Because if you haven’t figured it out by now, then maybe there’s nothing to figure out.”
I jerked my head back, not believing what she said. “Is that what all this is about? The fact that I haven’t proposed, yet?”
Her chin dropped to her chest, and a melancholy sigh escaped her lips. I waited in silence, unsure of how to proceed. The words we were dancing around were heavy and life changing. And something I never thought the two of us would consider.
“That’s just it, James. There never should have been a timeline. When it was right, it should have just been right. Don’t you think?” The resignation in her voice, the loss of fight…it sent up bigger red flags than the words out of her mouth.
I stomped over to my dresser and pulled out the top drawer. Digging through the socks and boxers, I found the velvet box. But when I presented it to her, it had the opposite effect I’d assumed it would. Instead of the smile returning to her pouty lips, or the glimmer dancing in her eyes, I’d sealed my fate.
“What’s this?”
“The diamond I bought months ago to put in your ring.” I knew where this was about to lead, and no matter how hard I tried to think of words to draw us away from it, my mind went blank.
“What happened to the ring?”
“I couldn’t decide on one. And then I decided to have one made.”
“Hard for a jeweler to make a ring when you have the stone in a box in your underwear drawer.” Her voice was soft and defeated. When she handed me the box back, her teeth worried her bottom lip—she was about to throw my life completely off course.
“We’ve both had a lot going on, Cora.” I was desperate for her to see how much I loved her, to feel the depth of my emotion in the way I looked at her. Except when I met her stare, all I saw was sadness.
“Exactly. If it had been a priority, you would have made it happen.”
She sat down on the edge of the bed, and I took a seat next to her. I didn’t want to be the one to speak next. Words would be messy, and I wasn’t sure I could handle anything she had to say.
“I’ll always love you, James. Maybe our lives are just going in different directions. Maybe we need to follow our own paths to see where they take us. One where you’re not inhibited by having a shadow, and one where I’m free to follow a path I might have to walk alone.”
I slowly bobbed my head, unsure of how to get her to reconsider without pleading. “This doesn’t sound like it’s open for discussion any more than the benefit Drake is taking you to next weekend.”
“Don’t you need to breathe? Just a little? Try things out—spend time in a new city as a single, adult male?”
“No, Cora. I don’t. Since you walked into my life, I haven’t had any desire to live a day without you. I dropped the ball on the ring, but that didn’t mean you weren’t and haven’t been my top priority. I guess I always thought everything I was doing, I did for us—our future.”
She inhaled through her nose and released the breath through her mouth. “Maybe the best thing for our future is to spend some time apart.”
And that was it, she’d chosen him over me.
7
Part Two
James
I hadn’t heard from her since the day she’d left. My goal had been to give her time to miss me and realize she’d made a mistake. However, as the days turned into weeks without any communication, my willpower waned, and I thought my sanity would follow shortly behind.
Two shots of tequila turned into four at a bar down the street from our house. I’d become quite the regular in an attempt to avoid my apartment, my best friend and his perfect romance, and the room I’d shared with the only woman I’d ever loved. And after the fifth shot, the drunk dialing started to take shape, and the closer I came to resembling a blubbering idiot than James Carpenter.
“Don’t do it, dude.”