When I toss his clothes from the bed into a pile and straighten the books and papers into a tidy stack, a letter printed on creamy, heavy paper with an embossed school logo at the top of the stack catches my eye. It’s the logo for the Chicago College of Law.
I shouldn’t read it, but the first word jumps off the paper at me: Congratulations.
I can’t help it— I keep reading. “Congratulations on your acceptance to the Chicago College of Law.”
The middle stuff I don’t care about, but it closes with, “Please sign and return this letter as soon as possible to secure your place in the incoming class.”
And below that, unmistakably, is Ben’s signature.
Ben walks into the room in sweats and a T-shirt, rubbing a towel over his wet hair, but he drops the towel when he sees me. “Hey, what are you doing here?”
I clear my throat. “I came to see how you were because I was worried. Seems I didn’t need to be. You’ve got everything all figured out.”
His gaze drops to the paper in my shaking hand, and his expression goes flat. Not shocked or nervous, just resigned.
“What the hell is this, Ben?”
He sighs, loud and frustrated. I move toward him, letter in hand.
“I was going to talk to you when you got back—”
“You’ve been telling me over and over that you won’t go, but you’ve been planning it this whole time.”
“No—”
“Yes, you were! When did you apply?”
He looks away, his jaw working as he grinds his teeth together. “Christmas day. I just did it to shut my dad up.”
I wave the letter. “Did you just accept the spot to shut him up, too? Are you going to spend three years getting a degree just to shut him up?”
Ben sighs. “It’s complicated.”
“Yeah, you keep saying that, but it seems pretty straightforward to me. Your dad is telling you what to do, and you’re doing it.”
“You don’t understand.” He’s not meeting my eyes, and those words are so dismissive. The room goes hot— I clench my fists. After everything we’ve been through, we’re right back here, with Ben discounting me, underestimating me.
“Then explain it to me! You know what you want, and Ben, this isn’t it.”
“I don’t have a choice!”
“You always have a choice.”
Ben barks a humorless laugh and spins away, hooking his hands behind his neck. “I don’t. If I don’t do this, I lose everything. This is bigger than a major, Hannah— I’m talking about the rest of my life, here. You don’t get it.”
I reel back. “I don’t get it? Seriously? I’ve been working toward my major since I was four. I was supposed to major in chem and become a drug researcher and cure the fucking disease that killed my mom. I was working for a lot more than just some major, and I walked away from that. And you think I don’t get it— What, because I’m some dumb freshman? I just went home and told my dad everything. You went home and caved. Tell me who the grown up is here.”
His eyes glint behind his glasses, and his eyebrows furrow into an angry line. “It’s not the same thing at all,” he snaps. “We’re in entirely different situations. Yeah, you quit the Honors Program, but you still have your dad. Whatever you fucking deal with, he loves you, and he’ll always support you. I don’t have someone on my side like that. I’ve never had that.”
My heart sinks and my eyes sting. How could he say that, after everything? “You had me. I supported you, no matter what.”
Ben’s eyes soften, and he steps toward me. But if I let him touch me right now, I’ll just give in to him, and that wouldn’t solve anything. He has a big problem he’s been hiding from me for weeks, and there’s nothing I can do to fix it. This one’s all on him.
I hold up my hands. “No, forget I said that. It clearly doesn’t matter.”
I shove past him and head for the door. He grabs my arm, but I yank it out of his grasp.
“Hannah, what are you doing?”
“Leaving.”
“Seriously? Can we just talk about this?”
I shake my head. “Talk about what? You’ve already made up your mind without telling me. You’re moving to Chicago to go to law school. That’s all there is to say.”
I pause at the door with my hand on the knob. I don’t look at him because I won’t be able to leave if I do, and I really need to leave because tears are welling up in my eyes. “Good luck, Ben. You’re going to need it.”
The afternoon fades into evening as I sit on my bed in my dorm room, staring at my hands in my lap. Every now and then my phone buzzes at my side, but I ignore it. I didn’t exactly plan to break up with Ben, but when his first call came in, I hesitated. If I answered, he’d apologize it away, I’d pretend I didn’t care, and we’d go back to being us. But he’s moving away in a few short months, and he’s been hiding that from me.
Maybe, all along, I was the one who assumed he was going to grad school here in Arlington, but he was never so sure. I’m so in love with him that I could easily take him back and ignore the truth, grateful to have him however I can. But he keeps going after what’s “right” instead of what he loves. How long until that includes me? Am I just like the master’s degree for him? The thing he knows he loves but can’t commit to?
Ben’s on some collision course with his future, and I don’t want to be on board for the ride, even if it’s with him. So I let his call go to voicemail. And the next one, and the next. All afternoon, it gets harder to deny him, but I do. I have to.
I miss my mom in a way I don’t too often anymore. If she were here, would we talk about Ben? Would she have given me advice or comforted me as I cried? Would she have made me feel certain that I’m doing the right thing, or would she have told me I’m making a mistake?
The door slams open, light floods in, and Jasmine blows into our room. “Jesus,” she gasps, slapping her hand to her chest. “You scared the shit out of me. Why are you hiding here in the dark?”
I open my mouth to respond, but I can’t talk. I’m crying. I’ve been crying all afternoon, and my face is wet and my eyes are puffy.
“Hannah?” Jasmine rushes to my side. “What’s wrong?”
“Ben,” I choke out. “We…kind of had a fight.”
She strokes my hair. “About what?”
“Law school.”
“Is his dad still giving him grief about that?”
“He doesn’t have to give him grief anymore. Ben’s going.”
Jasmine leans back. “Hold on. He’s actually doing it? I thought he wanted to go to grad school here for lit.”
“He did. He does. But he’s accepted an offer to go to law school instead, even though he knows he’ll hate it. God, we’ve talked about it so many times, but he never said he was actually going to go.”
She sighs and slips her arm around my shoulders. “Maybe he just needs to work this out for himself. You can tell him a million times it’s a mistake, but until he tries it himself, he won’t be convinced. This fall, when he’s actually in the thick of it, he’ll figure it out and—”
“He’s moving to Chicago.”
Jasmine grimaces.
“He applied to law school in Chicago, and he didn’t say a word to me about it. So even if he finally figures it out in the fall, he won’t be here.”
“You know,” she says gently. “People do manage to survive the long distance thing. Sean and I did it for a year. It’s not the end of the world.”
I shake my head. “The problem isn’t Chicago. He’s choosing this thing he hates because he thinks he should. How long do you think it’ll take him to find a girlfriend who’s a better choice than me?” As soon as the words come out, my stomach sinks, and I cover my face. “You know, Alex is going to law school, too. He always wanted her first anyway.”
“Hey, you don’t know it’s going to go that way.”
“No, but I don’t want to be around to see it if it does.”
I start c
rying again, the sobs swelling up and drowning me. Jasmine wraps her arms around me and rocks me as I cry. My phone buzzes again, and Jasmine hesitates. “Is that him?”
I nod.
“You sure you don’t want to talk to him?”
“And say what? Good luck in Chicago next year? Have fun without me? It’s just…” I sit up and wipe my face. “He was the first person I talked to about the whole chem thing. And he’s been there, cheering me on the whole way, even when we were just friends. But now the tables are turned, and he kept it a huge secret. Even when I asked him, he didn’t tell me the truth. I don’t matter enough to him to even be a part of this decision.”
“Oh, Hannah… I’m so sorry.”
Jasmine’s pity is worse than anything. I almost wish she’d snark at me or tell me to put on more eyeliner and get over it. But who am I kidding? Right now, anything she could say would make me cry because Ben might as well already be gone.
Chapter Twenty-Five
Ben
It’s snowing again. The third time this week. It’s not heavy, but it’s been enough to keep most of the customers away. Too bad because I could really use the distraction.
It’s been a week since Hannah walked out of my apartment and not a word. I called at first—straight to voicemail. I left messages pleading with her to talk to me. Then I texted. Then I was pissed she wouldn’t even hear me out and got drunk with John. And somewhere in the middle of a wretched hangover the next day, I realized she was right. About part of it at least.
I’m going to law school in Chicago in the fall, so maybe this is all for the best. Letting her go hurts more than I could possibly have imagined, but it would hurt even worse at the end of the school year, when we were in so much deeper. So maybe I should quit chasing her and let her go. She’s the first of many things I have to give up.
I’ve felt sick since the second she walked out the door. Before that. Since my father told me in no uncertain terms that I fall in line or fall out for good.
I chase it around and around in my mind. I want Hannah, but she doesn’t want this version of me. She wants the guy she fell for last fall, the idealist who handed her a book and expanded her mind. That guy gets his MA in lit, and probably his PhD, too, and spends his life talking about books. But that was a pipe dream; this is reality. Maybe the truth is, Hannah and I don’t work in this reality.
The bell rings— Someone’s actually here? This close to closing? I crane my neck to look around the stack of books I’ve been cataloging—well, trying to catalog. I want it to be Hannah in the worst way, but if she can’t be bothered to answer my texts, there’s not a chance she’d trudge out here in the snow just to see me.
And it’s not—It’s Alex, brushing snow from her shoulders as she bumps the door closed behind her. She gives me a small smile and sets a cup onto my desk.
“Hot chocolate,” she says. “You think I didn’t notice that you never drank the coffee? I just didn’t realize you preferred hot chocolate until you ordered it with Hannah.”
The mention of Hannah and hot chocolate sends me spinning back through memories, sunlight on her eyelashes, whipped cream on my lip, and her thumb in her mouth as she smiled at me. My stomach cramps as I force a smile. “Thanks, but you don’t need to bribe me to come hang out here, you know. We’re friends.”
“I didn’t come to hang out and swap retail war stories. I came to drag you out for a drink.”
“A drink?” Alex and I have never hung out outside of work—unless you count the party, which I don’t. This is something I always wanted before Hannah, but now? I’m not sure what to say.
She smiles. “Look, we’ll both be at Chicago College in the fall. I figured we should hang out. Form our own little alliance, like on Survivor. I hear it’s cutthroat there— It’d be nice to have a friendly face on my side.”
I laugh. Finding out Alex was also accepted to Chicago College of Law was possibly the only thing about the past week that hasn’t sucked. She’s right, having a friend makes it marginally easier to stomach.
“Sure, a drink sounds good actually. Want to wait while I close up, or should I just meet you someplace?”
She shrugs awkwardly, which is weird for Alex, who is usually nothing but self-assured. “I’ll wait for you. If that’s okay.”
“Yeah, whatever. It’ll only take a minute.”
We end up at Smitty’s because it’s close and my favorite. Alex looks around as we walk in, taking in the seventies-era wood paneling, the beer lights old enough to be collector’s items, and the clientele, a bunch of weathered old locals and a handful of college oddballs like me.
“Cute place,” she says.
“I like it here. It’s casual.”
“I’ll say.” She follows me to a half-circle booth in the corner. It’s too early for the evening crowd, so it’s pretty empty. Alex eyes the cracked vinyl seat for a second before sliding in next to me. We order a pitcher of beer, which is cold, cheap, and delicious, and spend a few minutes talking about the admissions process. Well, Alex talks, and I listen. She agonized and sweated over her application and took the LSATs three times to maximize her scores. I wrote a half-assed personal statement in less time than it takes to order a pizza, and a friend of my dad’s did the rest. It’s actually really shitty that I got in at all when there were applicants like her working their asses off.
“So,” she says. “I haven’t seen Hannah around lately.”
I wince—hearing her name still hurts. Kind of feels like it always will. “Um, we… I guess we broke up.”
“You guess?”
“We did.” Not because I wanted to. Not because I don’t want her.
“Okay,” Alex says, and then she draws in a deep breath. “So maybe we should go out sometime. Or now. We could be out now. Like a date.”
I stare at her, blinking stupidly. Did Alex just ask me out? Me? Shit, are we on a date now? How the hell did this happen?
“Um… What about Chip?”
“Oh, him.” She shrugs dismissively. “Turns out we were in an open relationship, and I was the only one who didn’t know it.” She laughs. “See? I told you I have terrible taste in men. But I was thinking about all these assholes I go out with and telling myself I need to find a nice guy to date, and I realized I already know a perfectly nice guy. I figured maybe I should try dating him.”
“Well, that’s really…um…” To be honest, the way she put it is slightly off-putting, like I’m a default “nice guy” to try out for some social experiment. But I think I get where she’s coming from, even if the way she asked was clumsy.
Alex charges on, filling the gap as I fumble for something to say. “And since we’ll both be at Chicago College in the fall, it just makes sense.”
“It does?”
“Sure. We already know each other. We already get along great. We’re going to the same law school in the fall, and we have the same goals.”
I’m half expecting her to pull out her laptop and give me a PowerPoint presentation about all the ways her and me together is a great idea, but that last thing she said is hanging me up. I’m pretty sure Alex and I don’t have the same goals at all. Not really.
I must be an idiot, because the girl I wanted for nearly a year is sitting here with me, saying she also wants me. And she’s right; we’d make sense together. But I don’t want any of it. Not law school and not Alex— Everything in me still belongs to Hannah.
“So what do you say? I think we could be good for each other, have some laughs—”
“Alex, I’m sorry.” I can’t believe that after a year of pining for her, I’m the one letting her down easy.
“Oh. You’re not broken up with Hannah?”
“No, we are. It’s just…”
She sits back and smiles ruefully. “Ah. You’re still in love with her.”
My heart stutters. Still in love with Hannah? “I am?”
“Aren’t you?”
My head falls forward, and I squeeze my eye
s shut. Of course I am. Feelings like these don’t just disappear when the other person leaves you. That’d be too easy. “I guess I am.”
Alex hesitates, then leans forward onto her elbows. “What happened? If you don’t mind my asking.”
“I kept a big secret from her.”
“You could apologize. Hannah’s seriously nice, and frankly, she adores you. I’m sure if you talked to her, she’d reconsider.”
Considering Alex has gone from asking me out to giving me advice on winning back my ex in the space of five minutes, I’m guessing she wasn’t all that romantically invested in me in the first place. Which actually makes me feel better— Maybe she’s realized we’re better off as friends.
But of course, that doesn’t really solve the problem. “It wouldn’t matter. I still have to do what I was hiding, and when I do, I’ll lose her anyway.”
“Which is?”
“Law school. I didn’t tell her I was applying. In fact, I told her I wasn’t going. And when she found out, she was rightfully furious.”
Alex scowls. “Well, if it’s what you want to do with your life, she could try being supportive.”
I can’t help it. I laugh— It’s just so ridiculous looking at it ass-backward. “But it’s not. That’s what she’s really mad about.”
Alex looks even more confused. “Wait… You don’t want to go?”
“No. It was my dad’s plan. He’ll cut me off if I don’t go and…” I sigh and shake my head. “He’s probably right. Law school is the smart thing to do.”
She narrows those sharp, ice-blue eyes at me. Damn, Alex’ll make a kick-ass trial lawyer because she hasn’t said a word, and I’m already sweating like a defendant on the stand. “You’re seriously going to go to one of the toughest law schools in the country to make somebody else happy? Ben, that’s insane.”
“Yeah, but my dad has a point. A master’s in English Lit isn’t going to make me rich. At least law is like, a thing.”
A smile slowly overtakes Alex’s face. She chuckles and shakes her head.
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