“What?”
I fist my hands at my side and raise my chin. “That I’d never do anything to jeopardize what you had with her. I’d never do anything to come between you two. No matter how desperate I got. Because your happiness is my happiness. When you smile, I smile. When you hurt, I hurt. So if you love her, then you should be with her.”
When I stop, I make myself tight.
I clench my muscles and I flex my fists. I keep my eyes on him, unflinching.
If he wants to hate me for falling for him, for loving my sister’s ex-boyfriend while he was still with her, then he can do that.
I’ll take his hatred and whatever he has to say to me. Because as I said, I do regret it. I do regret that I fell in love with him when he was with Sarah.
But I refuse to regret the very act of loving him. I refuse to regret loving him to the point of misery and doom.
But all he does is blink and say, “And if I don’t?”
I shift on my feet, more ready than ever. “If you don’t what?”
“Love her.”
It takes me a few seconds to put together what he meant.
If I don’t love her…
That’s what he meant, right?
If he doesn’t love her then what?
Up until now, I felt like my breaths were frozen. I thought my body was chilled to the bone and I’d never be able to get any feeling back into it.
But everything comes rushing back. Everything comes hurtling back and punches me in the chest. It punches me in the gut, and I let out a shocked breath.
“Then I’d say…” I open my fists and loosen my body. “Choose me.”
“You.”
I nod. “Yeah, choose me.”
“Why?”
This is the easiest thing for me to say, the easiest of all the things that I’ve ever said to him. “Because I love you, Arrow. I’ve loved you for years and if you give me a chance, I can make you happy.”
“You can make me happy.”
I swallow. “Yes.”
“By loving me.”
He’s saying all these things in a flat tone but that’s not the part I’m worried about, or at least not the only part.
The fact that he keeps repeating everything that I say is even more concerning to me.
“Y-yes,” I reply.
He nods.
Then he ducks his head and shifts on his feet before looking up. “I just have one question though.”
“What question?”
He cocks his head to the side and asks very casually, “Did I ask for love? From you.”
“I…”
“Answer me!”
He yells out the words and it’s such a shock after his curious tone that I flinch and whisper, “No.”
“What did I ask for?”
“Arrow –”
“Answer the fucking question, Salem. What did I ask for?”
“My body.”
He narrows his eyes. “Bingo. I asked for you to spread your legs for me. All I ever asked from you was your tight little pussy. That’s it. I asked for a good fuck. Because you’re supposed to be my fuck doll. Or did you forget that? Did you forget what your job is supposed to be? Your job is to shut the fuck up and take it. That is your job. Those are the rules.” He scoffs then, shaking his head. “But then, who am I talking to? You can’t follow a fucking rule to save your life, can you?”
I wring my snowy, cold hands and blurt out, “But I just thought if you could try…”
To love me…
“Try to do what?”
“T-to open your heart and maybe love –”
Something about that makes him laugh.
It not only makes him laugh, he even throws his head back and lets out that bark of a sound – a broken glass sound – up to the snowing sky.
The flakes settle on his harsh face and disappear. They settle on his agitated chest, his shoulders, his sun-struck hair and disappear.
I watch them, wishing I could be like that.
I wish I could be like snow. I wish I could touch him.
I wish I could disappear.
I wish…
A second later, he lowers his face and it’s… agonized. The hollows of his cheeks, the arch of his brows, the line of his jaw, bathed in some kind of misery.
Some kind of torture.
“You wanted to know what happened in LA, yeah?” he says, his voice tight and heavy with both anger and something I don’t understand right away except that it’s hurting him. “You wanted to know if I still loved her. You wanted to know that, right?” He laughs again. “Yeah, okay. Okay. Let me tell you. Let me tell you that no, I don’t still love her. I never loved her.”
“What?”
He scoffs, looking at the sky again, running his fingers through his hair, fisting the strands almost, before looking back down at me with tormented, desolate eyes.
“All this time I thought our relationship was perfect and she was perfect and that she threw everything away. And I couldn’t figure out why. I couldn’t figure out why she would do that to me, why she’d break my trust like that, why she would cheat on me and destroy eight years of our love. I couldn’t figure out how my perfect relationship, my perfect love fell to pieces. But the truth is that it wasn’t love. There was no love between us. There never was.
“What I thought was love, what I thought love looked like, turned out to be convenience. Apparently, it was easy to be with her. It was easy to be with someone who was exactly like me. Ambitious, perfect, driven. Someone who didn’t interfere with my precious fucking soccer. Someone who didn’t distract me from my goals.
“Well, until she did. Until I read those goddamn messages and I lost my focus. Until my perfect girlfriend became a distraction and I lost a game. And last night in LA, I realized that I’m angrier about that lost game than I am over the fact that I lost my girlfriend. I’m angrier about the fact that my perfect relationship turned out to be a lie than I am about the fact that she slept with someone else.
“Last night in LA, I realized that I was never in love with her and she was never in love with me. We were just two perfect people in love with perfection. And I was so damn focused on my career and my game and my strikes and kicks and how much I can bench press, that I never noticed. We were together for eight years and I never fucking noticed. I never noticed that the girl I was going to marry was with me because she had high ambitions and I was with her because she never interfered with those ambitions.”
He pauses here.
But I don’t think it’s to take a deep breath or gather his thoughts.
He pauses because he wants to let his words sink in. He pauses so he can stare at me, look me in the eyes and say, “The fact that I didn’t see you wasn’t because I was falling in love with your sister, it was because I was fucking blind. Because I’ve never noticed anything other than my soccer. So you didn’t betray her because what you thought was love, what I thought was love, turned out to be a simple matter of convenience. That’s what you thought, didn’t you? That I loved her. That’s why you wanted us to get back together. That’s why you were so tormented over our breakup. Yeah, you should save yourself the heart attack. It wasn’t love.”
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
That it was love.
That’s what he thought too. I can see it on his face. I can see it on his rigid body. He thought he was in love.
He believed it.
He believed it with every fiber of his being but somehow, it turned out to be a lie.
Somehow, Arrow and Sarah were a lie.
They were a perfect lie.
And the pain of it is so visceral.
The pain of it is so big and huge that it almost feels like it’s here. It’s here with us. It’s standing somewhere off to the side, casting its shadow on him and I have to go to him. I have to hug him and absorb him in my body.
I have to hide him fr
om it.
But he doesn’t give me a chance because he goes on. “So now you know what happened. Now you have all the answers, don’t you? Now you know that I’m not only your nightmare, I’m worse than that. I’m worse because she didn’t make me empty, I’ve been empty all along. She didn’t kill my heart, my heart was dead all along. It was dead because I killed it myself. I killed it in my pursuit of perfection. I killed it because I wanted to be motherfucking perfect. I wanted to be the best of the best, to be on top. I wanted to be The Blond fucking Arrow.
“And so I destroyed every other emotion inside of me. And you know what? I’m glad. I’m glad because this is how it’s supposed to be. This is how I’m supposed to be. I’m supposed to be my father’s son. I’m supposed to be The Blond Arrow. That’s my destiny. Being great. Being fucking legendary. That is why I was born. That is what I’ve been working for.
“So get out of my face, all right? Take your love and get the fuck away from me. I don’t want it. I don’t know anything about it and I don’t care. All I care about, all I’m supposed to care about, is soccer. All I’m supposed to care about is being my father’s son. And my father’s son doesn’t fall in love. He doesn’t have emotions. He doesn’t have time for emotions or love or fucking friendships. I almost destroyed my career, my dream, my father’s dream over supposed love. I failed. But not anymore. So just leave.”
“No.”
I’m surprised that I said that.
I’m surprised that I said anything at all, that I have the strength to say anything after all the things he just said to me.
After all the things he said about himself and all the things he has realized about himself.
But I have to say something because I’ve been wanting to say something for a very long time and once I’ve said that, I’ll go.
I’ll take my love and I’ll leave.
I’ll get out of his face.
“You’re wrong,” I tell him, and his chest stops moving, or at least it looks like it. “You’re not a failure. You never were. You don’t fail because your relationship wasn’t as perfect as you thought it was or because you punched a guy or because you got kicked off your team. Or because you missed a goal or didn’t win a trophy. Falling down and making mistakes don’t automatically mean failing. It means you’re human. It means that along with being The Blond Arrow, the great soccer player, you’re also Arrow. You’re a human being and you bleed and you hurt and you stumble and hit the ground like the rest of us. So no, you’re not a failure. You’re only human.
“But that’s not all. There’s something else. Something else that you’re wrong about. Something very important. Your heart isn’t dead. You didn’t kill it. Because when Sarah cheated, it hurt. When she broke your trust, it hurt. When she betrayed you, it hurt. And when something hurts, it means that you can feel. It means that your heart is not dead. That’s the whole problem, isn’t it? Because a heart never dies. You stomp on it; you stab it with a knife; pour gasoline on it and set it on fire; you ignore it and bury it in the pursuit of perfection. You do whatever the fuck you want to it, Arrow, but it doesn’t die. It beats and beats and feels. It feels all the things, good or bad, like this crazy little maniac that doesn’t know how to quit.
“And you know how I know that? Because a heart is the reason why a girl falls in love with a boy when she’s ten and stays in love with him for years even though she knows he can never be hers. Heart is the reason why a girl cries for that boy every night and yet smiles at a single glimpse of him. Heart is the reason why she writes secret love letters to him and why she sneaks out at night to see the boy she writes them for. Heart is the reason why a girl like me falls in doomed love with a clueless fucking guy like you. So no, your heart is not dead, Arrow. You might be The Blond Arrow but even you don’t have the power to kill it.”
By the time I finish, I feel like an age has passed.
I feel like we’ve lived a thousand years, and in that time, the snow has thickened.
Instead of disappearing, it’s sticking to the ground now. It’s sticking to the leaves, the grass, the earth.
It’s sticking to him.
The flakes are settling on his hair, on his eyelashes. They stay on the collar of his damp shirt. They wet the angle of his jaw, stick like droplets on his cheekbones and lips. I even see a few drops run down from his forehead and get into his eyes.
But instead of blinking, he keeps watching me. He keeps staring at me like he’s… still so riveted. And yet furious at the same time.
The boy I love.
So cold with the snow but so hot with all the things inside of him.
I wish I could do something about it. I wish I could do more for him.
But I can’t, can I?
I can’t save him if he’s unwilling to save himself. I can only love him.
Turns out though, he doesn’t want that either.
So this is it then.
This is all I can do.
With one last look at him, at his tall dark form, I take in a deep breath and turn around.
I take my love and leave like he told me to.
I trudge through the snow. The beautiful, hateful snow.
God, I hate it.
I hate everything about this stunning, gorgeous thing. So much so that somewhere between scaling the fence and getting inside the back door of the dorm building, I’ve started to cry again.
I’m not outright sobbing though.
Not yet.
I don’t know why. Maybe I need another push.
A bigger push. A more forceful push.
A push that will jar me back into reality that what just happened, really happened. I told him that I loved him and he told me to take my love and get lost.
I told him my biggest secret and he rejected me.
A few seconds later I get that, that last push that thaws this chill and numbness that I’m feeling, when I sneak back into my room, all wet and shivering, and stumble on something.
It’s one of my soccer cleats. The ones he bought for me.
I usually stick them under the bed, but somehow I must’ve forgotten to and so now I trip and stumble because of them.
And then, I just can’t stop crying into my pillow as the love bite he gave me throbs painfully on my neck.
I write you letters… I have shoeboxes full of them…
That’s the one thing echoing in my head as I ride back to my motel in the snow and tear through the door. I march over to my nightstand and snap it open.
And there they are.
Not the letters, no. Not the ones that she’s been writing to me for eight years. These are the ones she’s been leaving me these past weeks.
The ones I’m addicted to.
Every day I open my mailbox, that piece of shit junk that gets jammed and I have to shake it open, telling myself that I’m doing it because that’s what’s expected of me.
As a member of the faculty, I need to be apprised of what’s happening at St. Mary’s. The staff meetings, a memo about lunchroom cleanliness and all the bullshit that goes on at a high school.
But when I stick my hand in to collect those documents, the very first one that I open is her orange envelope.
I fold them over and put them in an orange envelope…
That’s what she said, right?
That she puts them in an envelope like these, the ones that I have scattered around the gray carpeted floor as my body crashes on my knees.
As I go to fish them out of those envelopes though, I realize my fingers are wet and snowy. So I wipe them on my pants. I wipe them on the sheets of my bed, dry them before I touch those notes.
Before I read what I’ve already read a thousand times.
A thousand fucking times.
I actually like to read them when she’s here. When she’s sleeping because I tired her out after sex.
So I can look at her rosy cheeks while reading her words.
> So her moans are fresh in my mind.
I read them and get jacked up.
Then, either I wake her up to fuck her again or I work out like a demon.
Because her written words flow in my veins, float through my chest like the nicotine smoke of a cigarette and I don’t know what else to do.
She thinks I’m exercising, breaking my bones, tearing up my muscles because I have some kind of a death wish. Because I want to be at the top of my game when I get back.
I don’t tell her that it’s because of her.
Because I don’t know what to do with her.
I don’t understand her. I don’t understand where she came from and how she affects me like this. I don’t understand what to do with the words she leaves me.
I don’t tell her that I’m obsessed with her letters.
Because what the fuck is that going to accomplish anyway?
I am going back.
I am going to be at the top once again.
That’s my destiny, isn’t it?
That’s what I’ve always wanted. That’s what they taught me to want, my parents. My mother.
Greatness and perfection.
So I don’t understand why there’s a pain in my chest. Why it hasn’t gone away since yesterday, when it appeared at the party.
Why is it so intense, so fucking massive that my heart – the thing that I thought I’d killed a long time ago – almost rips out of my chest and thumps on the floor, sullying the notes spread out before me?
It’s beating and beating. Pounding, my heart.
As if it’s really a crazy little maniac, like she told me. The most alive thing in my body.
The most alive thing in the world.
The most alive it’s ever been.
For the girl who writes me letters.
Hundreds and hundreds of letters. Thousands even. Because she’s been writing them for the past eight years.
My Darling Arrow Page 30