The Good Luck Charm(24)

“What part do you want to explain? Why you broke up with me like a coward over the phone and I never saw you again until you were forced to move back here? Why you stopped talking to me? Why all of a sudden you seem so interested in being my friend again, or whatever you want to call this?” I gesture wildly between us.

“I want to explain all of it. Just give me a chance.”

“Nothing you say is going to change the past.”

“It could change the future, though.”

My chest tightens, so many possibilities unfolding with that one truth.

“One minute we were making plans for our future and the next you were out of my life completely,” I say softly.

“I’m sorry for a lot of things, Lilah, but I’m the most sorry about how things ended.”

“So am I.” I pull out a storage bin and sit down, my legs still shaky.

He pulls one out too and settles beside me, close but not touching. “Remember how hard it was that first semester I was in college? How tough it was to get used to only seeing each other a couple of times a month instead of every day?”

His absence left a hole in my world. I’d been so bereft at first, missing the person who’d been my constant since I was in kindergarten. “We managed.” Barely.

“I almost dropped out after the first semester.”

“What? Why?” This is new information. We’d had nightly phone calls back then. Sometimes we fell asleep talking, and I’d wake up in the morning to the sound of his breathing, or his alarm through the phone, and vice versa.

“Because I hated being away from you. Between studying and hockey, I had no time. There weren’t enough hours. I had trouble keeping up with classes. You weren’t there to keep me on track. But more than that, I just missed you. I thought about you all the time, the way you used to tap your lip with your pen when you were annoyed, how you used to get all grossed out when I’d try to kiss you after practice and I hadn’t showered yet, the way you’d unwrap the entire package of Life Savers so you could pick out the green-apple ones and save them for last. I missed being part of your life every day. I didn’t feel like I could do it without you, and I didn’t want to. I thought maybe I should put the scholarship on hold and take a year off, wait for you to graduate so we could do college together.”

“But then you were drafted to the farm team.”

“Yeah.” His head is bowed, shoulders curved forward, elbows resting on his knees.

“So you broke up with me instead.”

“I was fucking miserable, DJ.”

“Why break up, then? And why eradicate yourself from my life?” It’s a strange feeling, being here with him, but not really knowing him anymore—not the way I used to. All of our history still exists but with a wall built between then and now. I don’t know if it’s possible to break it down, or if I want to.

“It was only going to get harder. The being apart from you. Minnesota State was only a couple hours away and it was barely tolerable. I was going to move to the other end of the country. I didn’t want to put that much pressure on you.”

“What kind of pressure would you have put on me?” I don’t understand his logic. He’s also had eight years to rationalize this. Enough time to frame it in a way that makes sense to him.

“To make it work. To make us work. You can’t tell me the long distance wasn’t hard for you. I know it was. I heard the ache in your voice, Lilah, and I shared it. I kept watching all these relationships fail in my first year of college, and I kept thinking as long as we could get through the year we’d be fine, because then you’d be with me. But being drafted changed everything. Nothing about my career was certain, and I didn’t want to drag you along for that fucked-up ride.”

“You didn’t even give me a choice, though. I had no voice.” And maybe that’s the part that had eaten at me the most. We’d planned our paths together. We’d depended on each other for years. We’d made decisions based on a future that contained each other, and then all of a sudden I had no say.

He shifts until his knee touches mine. I want to sever the contact, but it’s as comforting as it is painful. “Would you have been okay with breaking up?”

“I didn’t have an opportunity to be okay with it.”

“I know you, Lilah. Or at least I did back then. You wouldn’t have given up on us like that if I’d presented you with a choice. You would’ve been determined to make it work. To prove all the statistics wrong, because that’s who you are—or were—and it’s one of many reasons why I loved you so fucking much.”

He runs his fingers over the back of my hand. Reflexively I flip it over and he twines them together, squeezing. “Training was intense. Far beyond anything else I’d ever experienced. Hours of practice almost every day, not a lot of downtime. And that was just the farm team. NHL training is even more consuming. Off-season is a few short months, and the rest of the time I would’ve been away. I didn’t want your focus split, or mine. You were in your last semester of high school, and I was being moved out to LA. It wasn’t logical to stay together, and I was trying to be logical, because God knows, nothing about the way I loved you was rational.”

The emotions that swirl and swell between us are so much different from the ones I experienced when he broke my heart all those years ago. He’d been so assured, so calm in his ending of things, so certain it was the right thing to do. Or at least that’s how I had perceived it. Now his voice is full of sharp regret. It’s in this picture he paints for me, in his broken expression and the waver in his voice, that my hurt over this is echoed in him.