To Hell With Your New Shit

He couldn’t be happy without me.

I shook my head and looked up at him, tears pricking at the edges of my eyes.

“What’s wrong?” he asked, bending his knees ever so slightly to reach my eye level. I blinked at him, frozen and taken aback by his sudden closeness. In the ten years that I had known John before I left, I never once got used to the brilliance of his eyes. I was always shocked by their intensity, always lost in their flecks of dynamic color. In the years that I had been gone, I hadn’t forgotten that John had been, well, gorgeous, but the degree of his beauty seemed to have been lost to time.

“Why aren’t you mad at me?” I asked suddenly, searching his eyes for signs of an answer.

“Do you want me to be mad at you?” he asked curiously, his brows furrowing in confusion.

“Well, yeah,” I told him, biting nervously on my lower lip. When he didn’t answer, and instead just kept looking intently at me, I pressed on, trying to make him understand. “I hurt you, John. I mean as much as it makes me sick to admit that I did, I can’t deny it, and neither can you. I don’t want you to just let everything slide as if it was no big deal. That’s just not right. I don’t deserve to get away with this.”

“Lindsay,” he sighed, taking his hand from mine and running it through his messy hair. My hand flinched at the cold that attacked my skin once his touch was gone. His voice sounded exhausted and gruff, like he was giving up. “I’ve been mad at you for long enough – for more than long enough, actually. I am so beyond mad at you now, like the only way I can get back at you is to make you stay.”

“I want to stay,” I interjected, surprising even myself by speaking up. He smiled softly at me, but continued as though I hadn’t said a word.

“I know you hurt me – you hurt me badly – but I just don’t care anymore, and maybe it’s because I’m stupid or because I don’t even care if you break me all over again, but right now, and for as long as I possibly can, I just want to be with you.”

By now, I was biting my lip so hard that I was sure I would start bleeding any moment. As I choked back a sob, I wrapped my shaky arms around his neck and buried my face into his shoulder.

“I’m sorry,” I whispered into his damp, rain-soaked skin. “I’m so sorry.”

His arms had since found their way around my waist, desperately clutching the fabric of my dress and pulling me fiercely towards his own body. All I could breath were the scents of rain and his faint cologne that stuck to him.

“Can we start over?” he whispered through my hair, somewhere chillingly close to my left ear. I sniffled and nodded, pulling back to look at him.

“What should we do?” I asked, not entirely sure of what ‘starting over’ entailed, although it definitely sounded better than the option of not starting over. John smirked at me and I immediately felt my heart skip a beat (or several) because god had I forgotten what that smirk did to me.

“First, I say we get you some dry clothes,” he responded, looking somberly at my clothes. I bit my lip again and smiled, before feeling my eyes go wide as I remembered my parents’ whereabouts.

“I don’t – My parents aren’t home,” I started, blushing violently just as soon as John innocently raised a questioning eyebrow at me. “I mean, I forgot to take a key with me when I left, and I don’t know if they’re home, so I can’t – “

“It’s fine,” John interrupted with a soft smile as he began leading me towards his truck, which I just noticed had been running the whole time we’d been arguing. “You can stay at my place; it’s closer than our parents’ houses, anyway.”

I simply nodded as he helped me climb into the seat, feeling silly for blushing every time his hand grazed my skin. If ‘starting over’ meant feeling like a sixteen-year-old on their first date, then we were definitely there. John shut the door and smiled at me once more before making his way to the opposite side of the truck. He shot me a cautious smile as the truck pulled back onto the road, and I boldly moved over to rest my head on his shoulder.

The short ride to his apartment was silent as I tried several times to stop my eyelids from drooping under the sudden weight of exhaustion that I could feel coursing through my body. As soon as he parked in front of his building, he helped me hop down from the cab of the truck and gripped my hand gently as he pulled me inside.

Tiredly, I glanced around his small apartment, surprised at its neatness. A series of framed photographs caught my attention and I approached them as John muttered something about finding clean clothes and disappeared down the short hallway behind me.

A grin began to form as I noticed a picture of John and his parents from his first birthday, then one with his grandparents, which looked to be taken around the time he moved in next door to me, and another with his brothers that looked fairly recent. I stopped at the next one and I picked it up, studying it carefully.

In my hands was the same photograph that had rested faithfully on my bedside tables for years, the photograph that always made me wonder how on earth my mom had managed to capture that exact moment. John and I were about ten years old – only two years after we’d met – and we were sitting on my front porch, ice creams in hand. The only difference between us was that the ice cream in John’s hand looked as though it was about to fall from his grasp (which it had, just as soon as my mother snapped the picture) and his face was frozen in a look of horror as my ice cream collided with his cheek.

From behind me I heard footsteps, and then John’s voice.

“Hey, Linds, I found these clothes, but – “ he stopped as soon as I turned around, holding the picture frame limply in my hand, tears in my eyes for what seemed like the thousandth time that day.

“I don’t want to start over,” I whispered, staring at him. All signs of happiness and hope drained from his face as he stared back at me.

“Wh – what?” He asked nervously, his grip on the t-shirt in one of his hands loosening considerably. I set the picture back in its place on the bookcase and took a step towards him.

“I don’t want to start over,” I repeated slowly, trying to find the right words in my head before I could sputter them out loud. “I want to… I want to start right where we left off,” I continued, before taking a large breath and yet another step closer to him. “Because that means… That means I can tell you what I should have told you three years ago.” I took one last, hesitant step forward so I was standing directly in front of John, our toes practically meeting on the floor below us. He looked at me, shifting his eyes and searching my face desperately before I finally spoke.

“I love you, John O’Callaghan.”