Ohio Is for Lovers

Spending the night in the city with Jake couldn't have been better. But on the way home, he did something unexpected. Lena sat in the passengers seat, watching the scene pass by outside her window, when all of a sudden, Jake swerved and pulled into a rest area. He put the car in park and rested his hands on his knees. Lena looked over at him, opening her mouth to question him only to have him stop her with his own words.

"I love you. Okay? And not this high school bullshit love we had all those years ago. I love you more than that now. You're the only girl in this world that I can imagine being with until I die." He glanced up at her and then averted his gaze to the steering wheel in front of him. "I know I said I wasn't ready to marry you when you found that ring in the Triscuts box. But being away from you has proved to me that I can't make it on my own without you. How do you do when I'm gone? Do you feel the same?" This time, he looked up at her, and kept his eyes right on her. "Because I need to know if I'm sitting here pouring my heart out to you for nothing... Say something..." He finished. "I'm giving up on you."

She sat there with her mind cleared of every thought she ever had. Her brain had become a blank slate. She watched his pleading eyes bore into her own, empty eyes as he anxiously waited to hear what she had to say. What was she supposed to say? Sure, Andy wasn't really part of the equation anymore, but she still had Derek lingering in the back of her mind. She wanted to get to know him more as well.

"You kill me." Jake said before she could speak. "You know you do. You kill me well. You like it too, and I can tell."

"How could you say that?" She shot back. "I love you." She said slowly. "But you don't seem to understand what's going on in my life. I may be the only girl in your life right now, but you're not the only guy in my life, Jake." She watched as his heart started to break apart, piece by piece. "Derek is still in my life and it wouldn't be fair to just drop him like that." She sat back in her seat. "I don't know how you came here expecting me to just drop everything so we could be together again. It doesn't work like that. Relationships aren't as easy as you think they are, Jake."

"I know this isn't going to be easy, Lena." He let her name slip through gritted teeth. "I just thought maybe..."

"We're both really shitty people, aren't we." Lena said. "We only care about ourselves. If we were really supposed to love each other, we would care about each other more, wouldn't we?"

Jake nodded. "So how do we fix that?"

"You need to let me at least work through things with Derek. And I need to give you a second chance. I think once I figure things out with Derek, we can work on us. But you need to be willing to work with me on this. If you do love me, you need to let me go; as cliche as that sounds. And I love you, and I want things to work between us." Lena felt as though this was what they needed to do. In order to get out of the high school-esque drama they had been trapped in since high school, they needed to become adults and think through things rationally rather than act on stupid impulses like they had been doing for the past few years. It was only making things worse and it was becoming obvious to both Jake and Lena that they were acting like teenagers still. Jake was almost twenty-three and Lena had just turned twenty-one. If Jake really did want to marry her someday, she realized that they needed to start acting like adults.

It appeared to be a re-occuring theme in the lives of Lena, Jake, and everyone surrounding them. No one could seem to figure out how adulthood worked; they seemed to be eternally stuck in a teenage persona.