Time Will Tell

I fucked up.

I don’t know what the hell I was thinking. I was missing Teagan and hurt that she hadn’t called, and still a little pissed about the coffee thing, but I can understand why she did it. I was a complete ass. So now I’m watching Teagan walk away after watching me kiss Celeste. I stand up to go after her but Erin presses her hand against my chest, stopping me.

“I wouldn’t do that if I were you,” she says coldly. “You’ve hurt her more than enough. It took me this long to get her to leave her house and now this! She’s never going to listen to me again – but you will. You stay away from her. I don’t care about you or your baby or whatever shit you’ve got going on, but leave her out of it. She deserves more than to be stuck dating some guy who only uses her for a babysitter. Little tip, don’t ask out a girl you have no intentions of touching.”

“Baby, what’s wrong?” Celeste asks, coming up behind me and wrapping an arm around my waist.

“Get the fuck off me,” I growl, untangling myself from her and pushing Erin aside.

Neither of them are keeping me away from her right now. I step outside, the cold air hitting me in a rush. I look towards Erin’s car, but Teagan isn’t there. I look around and finally spot her walking across the street towards the mall. I race after her, darting a few oncoming cars.

“Teagan,” I sigh once I’ve caught up with her. She keeps walking like she hasn’t heard me and I put my hand on her shoulder, trying to get her to acknowledge that I’m there.

She turns and looks at me, but I almost wish she hadn’t. Her eyes are red, tears falling down her cheeks. She’s got her arms wrapped around herself like she’s desperately trying to hold herself together. She just looks like she’s in so much pain.

She shivers and I shrug out of my jacket and wrap it around her shoulders – this not being the jacket that she threw in a puddle the last morning I saw her.

‘Teagan,” I plead. “It’s not what you think.”

She shakes her head, staring at me blankly. “You’re a son of a bitch, you know that?” she asks me.

I frown. I deserve it… I think.

“Where were you that night if you weren’t with Reese?” I ask her, pained at the thought of her spending the night with me and then sneaking out in the middle of the night to go fuck him.

She rolled her eyes and groaned. “Dammit, Noah, I told you!” she cried. Tears fell down her cheeks again and she wiped them away – if she hadn’t I was going to. “I was at Erin’s! I was upset and I left and you turn it into me going to fool around with Reese?! If you didn’t want me than why the hell did you ask me out?!”

I just stare at her. What the hell is she talking about? Since when do I not want her?

“What do you mean if I didn’t want you why did I ask you out?” I ask.

“God, Noah!” she exclaims picking up her pace. I stumble along behind her. “I meant exactly what I said!”

“Since when do I not want you?!” I demand.

She spun around then to glare at me. “You sure as hell never acted like I was your girlfriend!”

“What the hell are you talking about?!” I yell at her. “I told you every day how much you meant to me!”

“Yeah, you asked me to watch Grace – which I never minded – and you told me you cared about me but I humiliated myself trying to get you to touch me when that’s obviously the last thing you wanted to do! I made up excuses, but really? You never wanted to touch me! You always pushed me away! With Reese I didn’t have to beg for anything and I wasn’t about to start with you!”

I gape at her, my mouth hanging open and my eyes wide. She thinks that I don’t want her – that I never wanted her.

“Are you really that stupid?” I demand before grabbing her face in my hands and pulling her mouth to mine. I kiss her, deep lingering kisses that she doesn’t pull away from… at first, anyway.

After about what seemed like forever just kissing this girl I missed more than anything in the world for the past week, she pushed me away.

She glared up at me. “Don’t touch me!” she demands. “One second you’re kissing Celeste and the next you’re kissing me? Gah, Noah, you’re not who I thought you were at all.”

She starts walking away again then but I grab her arm and pull her back to me.

“I missed you like crazy, and I don’t know what the hell you’re thinking but I did want you – I still do want you – more than anything. I thought you were with Reese that night, to me it made sense. You leave on the night he’s looking everywhere for you? It was just too much. And that kiss with Celeste,” I grimace just thinking about it. “It was nothing, not what you thought.”

“Then, what, Noah? What the hell was it?” she asked, her hands on her hips.

“She knew we weren’t together, and she wanted to see if things could work between us. I told her no, but she insisted on knowing for sure. She said that if I kissed her and I still didn’t want to be with her then she would leave me alone – not that I believed that for a second – but it was worth a shot. And then you walk in and you see the whole thing. I made you cry. It killed me to know that I’d done that to you. I kept hoping you would call me and work things out and I realized you weren’t going to but I also wanted to call you and I just kept remembering how mad you were, and I kept wondering about the Reese thing, and,”

“Stop,” she interrupts me. “You should have called – you should have known in the first place that I wasn’t with Reese! But you should have called me! I sat around for a week thinking I didn’t mean anything to you! After everything we’ve been through and you can’t even call me to work things out?”

“I know I screwed up, Teag, just please understand.”

She looks up at me then, her bottom lip poking out in the saddest, most adorable pout. “You didn’t trust me,” she mumbles. “You lied to me about lunch with Celeste and when you told me nothing happened, I trusted you. Why couldn’t you do the same for me?”

I sigh and run a hand through my hair. “I’m sorry.” It’s all I know to stay. “I should have trusted you, I know, but I kept picturing his hands on you and I couldn’t – it hurt too much to think, and then I let you walk away from me. That was the worst mistake I could have ever made. Please, Teagan, forgive me.”

She shakes her head sadly at me and turns in the opposite direction, walking back towards Erin’s car where I can see her standing, watching us.

“I’ll think about it,” Teagan calls over her shoulder.