by K. Ryan
He nodded carefully, his eyes still squinting at me, still seeing right through all my defenses despite the fact that I might as well be running away from him and screaming my head off.
I couldn’t get my key in the door fast enough.
That was almost a week ago and since then, it’d just been more of the same. Finn blowing up my phone. Finn waiting outside my door when I came home from the café. Finn knocking on my front door and my patio door. Finn begging me to listen. Finn pleading with me to just let him back in.
I evaded him at every opportunity. I ignored his texts and sent his calls to voicemail. When I found him waiting outside my door after work, I listened politely for a few moments, backed away when he reached out to touch me, and told him I couldn’t talk to him before letting myself inside my apartment.
By the end of the first week, I knew how much I was hurting him—I wasn’t a good enough liar to convince myself otherwise...I could hear it in his hoarse voice, see it in his watery eyes every time he managed to catch me coming or going from my apartment, and every time he reached for me, I wanted to reach right back.
I just didn’t.
By the end of the second week, I’d become so detached, so numb that I managed to convince myself that I really didn’t care anymore when or if Finn called, that my heart really didn’t tug and leap into my throat at the sight of him waiting by door or camping out on my patio, even though I’d long closed the blinds so he couldn’t see inside. Even when he left me a voicemail to tell me he’d finally spoken with Principal Denfield and that the major players involved with the senior skit had been suspended, I just felt nothing.
All I knew was that I just wanted my life to go back to how it’d been pre-Finn. Post-Finn was painful, agonizing, and swallowed whole by tears and regrets. Pre-Finn I’d been alone, but at least the only person I’d been hurting was myself...there was no one else to bear the brunt of all my issues. Finn didn’t need that. He deserved to have a girlfriend who hadn’t been seen naked countless times on the internet. He deserved someone clean, someone good, and someone who was capable of giving him a long-term commitment.
Maybe I didn’t know how to do casual, but I didn’t know how to do commitment anymore either. Anything that involved leaving myself so bare, so vulnerable...I just couldn’t do it.
I couldn’t let him in.
By the time the third week rolled around, I gradually heard from Finn less and less. He hadn’t given up necessarily, but the calls and texts were fewer and farther in between and he only knocked on the door once when he knew I was home from the café, waited a few minutes, and then left.
Every night I cried myself to sleep. Every night I wished I could be different, that I could really be the girl Finn thought I was...he was right though. I was too scared to try and there was nothing I could do about it. And now, I was sitting here on my couch, living in agony knowing that Finn was just feet away, but I was just too stubborn to put one foot in front of the other.
Every night I came home from work and tried to resume life as normal, pre-Finn. Blogging, listening to music, Netflix, wine...it wasn’t enough to distract me. Finn was right. He’d gotten too close and now, that closeness suffocated me. I couldn’t get away from him...everywhere I looked, everywhere I turned, Finn was always there. I saw him on my couch. I saw him in my kitchen, on my patio, in my bathroom...and especially in my bed.
I’d tried sleeping on the couch, thinking that maybe that would solve my problem, but all I got was a stiff back and an annoyed cat, who was more than disgruntled that there really wasn’t enough room on my couch for both of us to sleep through the night comfortably.
Now, Noah’s warning echoed in my head: “Are you sure it’s a good idea to date your neighbor? If things don’t work out, it could get awkward…”
This wasn’t just awkward. This was agonizingly painful. Every time I caught a glimpse of Finn, whether he was coming or going in our shared parking lot, my heart twisted and throbbed, screaming at me to either put it out of its misery and just cut it out of my chest or stop being so stupid already and talk to him. Sometimes Finn stopped to try to talk to me and sometimes he didn’t.
Slinger wasn’t much better. During that first week, he’d wave grimly with a tight smile on his face. After that, the cordial niceties stopped and I was lucky if he even made eye contact with me in the parking lot or the hallway.
So, I did something drastic and if I was being completely honest with myself, really cruel...but the idea of being cruel to be kind...that resonated. I felt that. And so, I found a new apartment. At this point, it was really the best thing for all parties involved.
If I moved, Finn would have to leave me alone—he might still be able to call and text, but I wouldn’t find him standing outside my door anymore, wanting to talk and wanting to fix someone who couldn’t be fixed. If I moved, we could all just move on with our lives and forget this ever happened. Finn could forget he’d ever known the crazy, neurotic girl across the hall and I could forget I’d ever had a chance at...well...a second chance.
I told myself that I probably would’ve had to move eventually anyway because of the cat, but even I knew that excuse didn’t fly. Here I’d thought having an ‘illegal’ cat or contraband as Finn so fondly put it, would be more of a problem, but in reality, I’d never gotten so much as a letter or a phone call for a ‘random’ inspection that obviously wouldn’t be random. If anything, all my worrying about my landlord was just an excuse to keep from doing something that scared the hell out of me.
The problem was always in my head, just like the real reason I wanted to move lied just beyond the door right across from mine.
Luckily enough, all I needed to do was give my landlord a 30-day notice and I could get out of there. Even though I was the only one who could easily leave, given that Finn and Slinger had only been in their apartment for about three months, it was only fair that I was the one to go. I was the one who’d made it awkward. I was the one who wouldn’t talk to him. I might as well be the one to bite the bullet and move first.
Finding a cat-friendly and a budget-friendly apartment in Milwaukee wasn’t an easy feat, but I’d managed to find a decent and clean one-bedroom about 10 miles away from Finn, which meant I’d have to sacrifice the ability to walk to and from the café—a small price to pay for the distance I so desperately craved.
Oliver and I could be happy there if only I could actually figure out how to let myself be happy.
. . .
By the one-month mark, I hadn’t heard anything from Finn all day. Granted, I was working a shift at the café and he probably knew that, considering he seemed to be more in-tune with my schedule now than he’d been when we were still together. My heart seized at that thought. When we were still together…
So, even though I shouldn’t have been surprised, I still stopped right in my tracks when Finn stepped through the café’s front entrance. My breath hitched in my throat and my hands shook so badly I thought the tray in my hands might come crashing down at my feet. Gone was the brilliant, bright smile I used to know and in its place, a grim, tight smile forced its way across Finn’s beautiful face.
I did that. My fault. My goddamn fault.
Finn waved weakly and he sank down into the same booth he’d sat in nearly three months ago. Mara materialized at my side a moment later and promptly slid the tray out of my hands before it tumbled onto an unsuspecting customer. She took charge, while I stood numbly by, and made sure my table got their food before yanking me into the kitchen.
“Emma,” Mara told me desperately. “You have to talk to him. Look at him…”
She trailed off, gesturing out to the floor and my eyes, as if they had a will of their own, flicked to Finn and found him sitting stiffly in the booth with his hands folded in front of him. But it was his eyes...God, his eyes...that yanked me off-kilter. So hollow. So exhausted. So devastated. I did that.
“He’s miserable,” Mara murmured to me. “And so are you. These l
ast few weeks...I don’t know what you’ve been doing and I don’t understand—just go talk to him.”
“How did he—?” I started, but the guilt in Mara’s eyes told me everything I needed to know. “Right. It all makes sense now. That’s how he always knew when I was working. You.”
She just lifted a shoulder. “He asked me, so I told him. How could I not feel sorry for the guy? He’s crazy about you...he loves you. And he’s been going out of his mind. Slinger had to practically lock him in his room last week to keep him from breaking down your door…”
This would probably be a bad time to tell her Finn still had a key or that in two weeks, Finn having a key wouldn’t matter anyway.
“He’s been absolutely miserable,” Mara pressed on, her voice taking on a more urgent tone. “That’s why he’s here. Just...please. Take your break. I’ll cover your tables. Just go talk to him.”
She pushed me out onto the floor and in a daze, my feet somehow carried me across the café until I stood in front of Finn’s booth. His sunken, mournful eyes observed me every step of the way and his expression never shifted when I slid down across from him in the booth.
His lips lifted for a moment then fell back down. “Hey, Em.”
His voice sounded different than I remembered, but maybe that was just because it’d been almost a month since I’d really heard the deep timbre I’d grown so familiar with...or maybe...maybe he’d changed. Pale skin, dark circles around his eyes, even his clothes seemed to hang more loosely and I wondered if I wasn’t the only one who’d forgotten about eating these last few weeks.
“Hi, Finn.”
Finn’s lips curved a little now. “It’s really good to see you.”
I swallowed tightly. “You too.”
It was the truth, but that knife in my heart twisted all the same.
He leaned forward on his elbows and for a split second, I thought he would reach for me, but he didn’t. Part of me wished he would.
“Look, I know you’re on your break right now and you don’t have a ton of time, so I’ll make this quick,” Finn paused just a beat to make sure I was listening, but my attention had never waned for a moment. How could it?
“I miss you, Em. I know I probably don’t have to tell you that, but I wanted to say it anyway. This last month…” he winced and shook his head, “it’s been really hard for me. I’ve been trying to respect your space, trying not to give up on us, and I feel like I’ve just been chasing my tail here. That doesn’t mean I wouldn’t do anything you asked, anything you needed if it meant we could figure our shit out and make this work...you know I’d do it. But I can’t keep running around in circles if you won’t even meet me halfway.”
I nodded slowly. I knew what he was doing and I couldn’t blame him for grasping for some self-preservation. Granted, I hadn’t encouraged him or given him false hope, but he’d suffered for a month. Hell, we’d both suffered, but at least my suffering was self-inflicted. Finn’s heart had shattered across my apartment floor and we both knew who was to blame.
Then, his next words practically jolted me right out of my seat.
“Are you really moving?”
I sucked in a harsh breath and squeezed my eyes shut. “How did you—”
“Mrs. Johannsen,” Finn answered before I even had a chance to finish. “She saw our landlord show someone your apartment yesterday.”
Of course. The whole apartment showing had been a stressful fiasco—I’d had to scrub the whole place clean to make sure there was no trace of a cat, hide every single scrap of evidence, smuggle both the litterbox and the cat out of my apartment, and drive around town with a grumpy, howling Oliver until enough time passed when I’d just have to do it all over again in reverse.
Mrs. Johannsen had always had a chokehold on the pulse of all the goings-on in our building and while it was no surprise that she knew, it was, however, a shock that she’d go as far as to tell Finn. Clearly, my tolerance of her Estelle Getty addiction had done me no favors in the end because in the end, she still sold me out anyway.
So, I couldn’t lie even if I wanted to. “Yeah. I’m moving.”
His jaw hardened, but his light eyes held only remorse and devastation. “When?”
“Two weeks.”
“What day?”
His motive was clear—if he knew the exact day, he’d also know exactly what day to be as far away from our building as possible.
“The 28th.”
He nodded stiffly, almost robotically, and I didn’t like this new, colder version of Finn in front of me. It was all just one more reminder of the damage I’d left everywhere I went...destruction after destruction in my wake.
A few moments of awkward silence passed between us and finally, Finn put us both out of our misery by leaning forward once again.
“I don’t want you to leave, but I’m not gonna try to stop you either if this is what you really want. I’m not gonna plead. I’m not gonna beg. I’ve done all that already and it hasn’t worked. I want you to stay, I want you to talk to me, I want you to…” Finn trailed off, his voice thick with emotion and he glanced over his shoulder for a moment. When he shifted back to him, his eyes were swimming again. “I just want you to be okay, Emma. I just want you to be happy and...if moving away, if us not being together, if that’s really what you wanna do, then I don’t know what else I can do or say that I haven’t already to make you see that you’re making a mistake.”
My chest heaved violently and I had to look down at my hands. This was it. I knew that. This was where we’d either try to fix things or shatter completely. He was giving me one last chance after almost 30 days of chances. And because I had no other options, I set out with my hammer, ready to start smashing.
“I know you love me, Finn,” I whispered and I hated the hope that crept into his eyes. I didn’t want to see it, didn’t want him to feel it. There was no point. “I don’t understand how or why that’s even possible.”
That did it. All the hope in his eyes died out.
“If you didn’t love me, you wouldn’t have tried as hard as you did and even though I wish you hadn’t bothered, I understand why you did,” I pushed on, desperate to just get this over with already. “But I think we can both agree that this isn’t helping either one of us. I don’t want you to keep chasing after me because we’re over. I’m gonna move in two weeks and then...then that’ll be it, okay? We’ll both be able to just move on.”
His face twisted and his eyes flicked to something over my head, his head shaking tightly. “You’re right. I can’t keep chasing after you like this. So, I’m gonna get up and I’m gonna start walking towards that door. And if I walk out that door, that’s it. We’re done. I can’t keep doing all the work here if you can’t even sit down and have a real conversation about why you’re pushing me away. I love you, but I don’t know what else to do...this is so one-sided it’s not even funny, but if you tell me to stay right now, I will. We’ll figure it out, but you gotta give me something, Em.”
We’d both suffered in silence for a month and it was time to end that suffering.
When I didn’t respond, Finn winced and scrubbed his face with both hands. Then he slid out of the booth. He stood at the table for a few beats, waiting for me to give him something that would make his wait worthwhile—I couldn’t give him that and instead, my eyes bored a hole into the cracked table in front of me.
“So this is where it ends? Right where it started?”
I looked up to see Finn standing in front of me, hands spread out wide, and his gorgeous face twisted with an agonizing mix of heartache and frustration.
“This is what you really want?”
My eyes flicked back to the crack in the table because I just couldn’t bring myself to see the pain in his eyes anymore.
“I really do love you,” he murmured one last time. “I wish I didn’t have to walk away.”
Through my tears, I let myself glance up only once and it was long enough to see him grip the door
handle, look over his shoulder as he waited—my final and absolute last opportunity to keep him in my life. Finn gave me two more moments. Two more moments to jump out of this booth and run to him. Two more moments to at least do something. But I didn’t.
And so, as tears streamed down my cheeks, I watched Finn yank the door open and walk right through it.
I thought I’d feel relieved when it was finally over, when I knew the calling and texting would stop, when I knew he wouldn’t be waiting for me at my door when I got home later...I felt gutted instead. Raw. Like my insides had been ripped out and splayed across the table. Wrung out and wrenched tight.
Mara was walking towards me now and it was only then that my feet jerked themselves free. I sprung past her and didn’t stop until I pushed through the café’s back door. My back slid down the brick wall as I convulsed and sputtered into sobs with my head in my hands and my heart at my feet.
I cried for Finn. I cried for everything I’d put him through and the pain I’d brought to his life. I cried for my own stupidity. I cried because seeing him walk away was like getting run over by a train.
But I’d be lying to myself if I said that this was the moment I shattered beyond repair. I’d been broken a long time ago.
The real lie was ever telling myself I’d be able to put myself back together in the first place.
CHAPTER TWENTY-TWO
Six Weeks Later
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