Always Will

by Jacobson, Melanie

  And I wasn’t happy about any of it, not in the way that daydreams about my future with Will had made me happy, but I felt good about the choices I was making, especially the ones I was making to leave Will free to go the way he wanted to.

  I didn’t know what I was looking for now that my goal had changed so utterly. But I made a three-page list of all the ways in which I could give myself opportunities to figure it out.

  And then I opened a second fresh, clean notebook and made a new plan for how to disentangle my life from Will’s so I could breathe as much as I needed to. It would be hard because I’d gone so far out of my way to tangle my life up with his for so long.

  By five thirty, every part of me was wrung out. My hand hurt, and the pad on my finger where the pen had rested while I wrote for hours was sore. But I’d done it. I’d pulled a Gwyneth Paltrow and figured out how to consciously uncouple from Will. Except I was the only half of that relationship who’d ever thought we were a couple, albeit in embryo. It didn’t matter. I was done. I’d figured it out. And I’d do it. I’d do it because I was his friend, and true friends do hard things for each other.

  I’d also do it for me because I’d earned the right to pick a path that would make me happy. Someday. Maybe.

  I scooped up the first notebook and took it down to the pool, where I set it in one of the charcoal grills the complex installed for the residents, and I let the notebook full of the hopes and dreams and wishes of a young girl who should have figured it all out much sooner burn.

  Chapter 14

  When I walked past Will’s door on the way back to my place from the pool, I reminded myself not to poke my head in for a fix of him. That couldn’t be a part of the routine anymore.

  But I hadn’t accounted for him opening it as I passed and pausing for a startled moment like I’d given him a heart attack. “Geez!” he yelped, and I jumped.

  “Whoa. Sorry. You know, for walking down the hall where I live.”

  He shot me a dirty look. “I didn’t expect you to be right outside my door.”

  I waved at my door. “I have to be outside your door several times a day if I want to get to mine. And I do want to,” I said. I started down the hall again, but he protested.

  “Wait. You gotta help me pick my shirt for tonight.”

  “I really don’t,” I said. Don’t get in Will’s way anymore had made the list of how to be in my post-Will reality. Help Will with dates had not. “Good luck.”

  I slipped into my place and collapsed on my couch with a pillow over my face so I could scream into it. How could he have been so clueless for so many years? How had I let myself settle for that? Never again. One more frustrated bellow and I’d get up and do one of the first things on my “Figure Out What Makes Me Happy” list: call Jay. And tell him I was working on a broken heart, but if he was okay possibly being my rebound, I was down for more dinners and adventures and baseball arguments.

  But I didn’t even have time to let out the second scream before my front door opened.

  Ugh. I should have thrown the bolt. I’d been too focused on getting away from Will to think about it.

  “What is wrong with you?” he demanded. “Is this a PMS day?”

  It enraged me on multiple levels. First, that guys always assumed that girls being angry at them must be a function of hormones and not a legitimate beef. Second, that it was such a sibling thing to say. And third, it was so condescending. Guys could spout their clueless sympathy about that stuff the day they started dealing with it. But fourth, PMS had nothing to do with anything.

  “Why would you even say that?” I demanded, shoving myself up from the sofa and pushing my hair out of my eyes so I could glare at him.

  His eyebrows quirked at me, then he pointed to the kitchen table and shrugged. “You’ve obviously been home all day. That wasn’t there last night.” As evidence went, it was kind of damning if you didn’t know the facts. Several empty water bottles, empty nutrition bar wrappers, banana peels, discarded orange rinds, and crumpled bits of notebook paper littered the surface.

  But I did know the facts of the day. And it made me crankier with him. “You don’t know nearly as much as you think you do,” I growled. “If this was a hormone thing, you’d see empty bottles of Coke and Snickers wrappers.”

  “But something went down,” he said. “You all right?”

  “No.”

  “What’s wrong?”

  What was wrong was that I had to execute the hardest part of my plan. I had to break off a relationship Will hadn’t known he was in. I had to find a way to tell him the truth so I could buy the distance I needed from him. If I didn’t give him a reason why we couldn’t treat each other’s apartments as an extension of each other’s living space any more, then I would never get the emotional space I was going to need. Desperately. And so I’d have to tell him enough of the truth to scare him away, more than I’d ever wanted to expose about myself but still not so much that it wrong-footed us in a way that we could never get back to some kind of normal, even a new normal, between us.

  I’d worked for a full hour on this part alone, writing out all the things to say, and I itched to pick up the notebook behind him and read him the carefully crafted script.

  But that had only been for me to organize my brain, and reading it aloud would add a hard varnish of awkwardness to seal what was already going to be a painful conversation.

  I cleared my throat and pressed my hands together like that would somehow channel the words to come out the right way. “I kind of had an epiphany fueled by health food and the realization that my personal life is a disaster.”

  He frowned. “Something go down with that Jay dude who wouldn’t quit texting last night?”

  “Yes and no.” The words weren’t going to come out. I could feel it. I could imagine them falling between us, the bombs I’d told Sophie they’d be, detonating any chance of even a normal friendship. My throat closed up. I couldn’t do it.

  But if I didn’t, if I didn’t somehow make this all right, there would always be something between us in our friendship anyway. It would come out of me at some point, and knowing me, it would be the worst possible time, when it would wreck the most things. So I had to do it. To save Will and Hannah as friends, this amputation of my ghost wishes had to happen now.

  “Hannah?”

  I closed my eyes for a second, running through my script, and then I started a controlled detonation. “Remember when I was seventeen and I told you I had a massive crush on you?”

  I expected him to get the grin he got every time we talked about shared funny memories. He didn’t. He went still. “Yeah.”

  “It seems like these things are cyclical. Something about you announcing you were looking to get married set off a panic inside of me, and I decided that it was you and I who are meant to be together.” I held up my hand when his eyes widened and he opened his mouth to speak. I dropped my hand and looked down at my lap. “It’s okay. I made an elaborate plan to make sure you couldn’t find anyone you’d really like online, then I went out of my way to show you that I’m really the girl for you.” I smiled. I wished it didn’t tremble, but I was proud that my voice stayed even.

  “It was dumb. I know. ‘Meant to be’ is a concept both people have to be aware of. It’s pretty clear in hindsight that it can’t all be in one head to be true. And I’ve had a couple of epiphanies over the last few days.” I swallowed, wishing I hadn’t worked my way through all my water bottles already. I didn’t want to get any from the tap because it would bring me too close to Will, and I didn’t need that right now.

  “What were these epiphanies?” he asked, his voice low. And gentle. And I hated that. It was the voice people used to talk to a panicked child or a hurt animal, something they were trying to soothe, to talk down from the wild edge of hysteria.

  “Epiphanies is probably too strong a word, I guess.” No, it wasn’t. The truth had sliced through me with breathtaking clarity, a laser of pain. But this conv
ersation was about pushing through. So I’d play it cool. I smiled and waved my hand, my fingers drifting through the air to disperse the extra-dense molecules that seemed to have gathered around me to mess with my breathing. “I realized that I’ve gotten back into a rhythm with you since you moved in practically next door. It took me back to our growing-up time. And it took me back to wandering in and out of each other’s houses and watching ball games and snitching food. That’s comfortable for me. Like going home. But I think it also took me back to another part of that time, which was that stupid crush.” I looked up to see him flinch at the word crush.

  “It’s okay. I told you I figured it out. I just fell into an old habit,” I continued.

  He didn’t look reassured. His forehead was furrowed, and he wore the expression he always had when he was taking a rare moment to pick carefully through his words before speaking them. My heart lurched a little that he would do that for me, and the automatic analysis started. He doesn’t do that for just anyone. At some level, you’re special to him, or he wouldn’t be trying so hard to be diplomatic.

  But I shut that voice down. That voice had led me into wearing rose-colored glasses for so long that I’d forgotten how the real world looked. But that was where I had to plant my feet now: on solid ground, not dreamy cloud wishes of happily ever after. I searched for a way to make him understand that I was going to move on and we were going to go back to normal. “Going out with Jay the other night made it all gel for me.”

  His head jerked in surprise. “Why? What happened?”

  “Nothing special. But maybe that’s why it was special. We laughed. A lot. I don’t usually laugh like that on dates. There were no awkward silences. It was a constant stream of things to talk about it. I came home happy. It was a good night. And then he . . . never mind.”

  “What?” His voice was hard.

  “Nothing. It was just a good night.” And if Will had inferred, as I hoped he would, that my evening with Jay had ended with some highly favorable kissing, good. It hadn’t happened, but if Will thought it had, it might help convince him that I was going to move on and leave this crush far behind me.

  I was going to try. Because at the moment, the only crushing that was happening was the vice around my insides as it tightened at Will’s slow nod. He leaned against the counter and ran his hands down his thighs a few quick times, a nervous habit he had. But he settled down and put his hands in his pockets and nodded again, a decisive nod. “I’m sorry I didn’t realize, Hanny. I thought we were such good friends that . . . I don’t know. I’m sorry. I’m sorry I didn’t know.”

  “I wish you didn’t know now. Or not that. I’m glad I told you. I wanted to clear the air between us. I was afraid if I didn’t tell you that I would start acting even weirder and ruin everything between us anyway. But I love our friendship, so I want everything to be clear, you know? And I know it’s maybe going to be awkward for a little bit, but I think we’ll be okay.” I pulled up the smile I always used when I was teasing him. “My plan to put us back to normal is even better than my plan to get you to marry me.”

  He lost some color at the “marry me” part. “You . . . we . . . what?”

  I rolled my eyes at him. “Quit being weird.”

  He choked. I ignored him.

  “I’m on an honesty campaign now.” Not really. If I were, you’d know that my heart is trying to push in on itself, to fold up and go away, somewhere it can’t hurt. “So I’m going to offer Jay a chance to be my rebound guy. Tell him I’m coming in emotionally damaged and probably not emotionally available but that I promise to make him laugh and be good company. And I’ll see if he goes for it. I think spending time with him might be the perfect antidote.”

  “To me? Because I’m some kind of illness?”

  I shrugged like it was no big deal, even though his tone had been heavy. “Yeah. Now that I’m not in denial, this should all be easy to fix.”

  “To fix,” he repeated.

  “Yeah. I’ve been freaking out about how if you got married it would change everything. And then I changed everything by being weird. But I’ve been forcing myself to look at reality for the last few days, and I’m going to be okay. You and I are going to be okay. This’ll be fine. But I had to put everything out there if we were going to move past it. So you can congratulate me on being a grown-up whenever you’re ready. Oh, and P.S., the sheer maturity I’m demonstrating right this second should be all the proof you need that I’m an adult and you can quit hovering over me all the time. I can handle myself.”

  Will listened with no expression, his arms folded across his chest, but his eyes had the hard look they got when he’d drilled in on the core of a problem, the look he got right before he’d drawn up the diagram that finally worked for the Gatorade fortress in his spare room.

  “Will?” I wanted him to say something, anything. Or maybe I didn’t. I would have been less naked if I’d stood up and stripped my clothes off. But he stayed silent, his focus fading to a problem-solving blank gaze into a distant point only he could see. “Will!” I repeated, sharper than I’d intended.

  His eyes jerked to mine, a quick flash inside them that made my stomach clench before he stared at me like normal, except for the tight line of his jaw. He hadn’t been as far away as I’d thought. “You just told me you’ve been plotting to marry me for weeks. Which is . . . crazy. And now you’re not. And while, in your mind, you’re pushing us right back to the footing we were on before, you’re going to have to give me time to work through it. I’ve had about three minutes to process all of this. I’m going to need longer.”

  “Sure, take some time. Or you can do what you did when I was seventeen, and you can laugh and forget about it, and we can move on.”

  He scrubbed his hands over his face, a quick, angry motion, like he was trying to scrub my confession off of his skin. “It’s night and day. This isn’t the same thing at all.”

  “It is. They’re my feelings. I know whether it’s the same or not.”

  “You know whether it’s the same or not for you.” For a second, my heart slammed against my rib cage and shot up into my throat before it plummeted at his next words. “To me, it’s all confusing. Was what you said at seventeen built on anything? It didn’t seem like it could be. It’s a rite of passage, isn’t it? To develop a crush on your older brother’s best friend? I mean, I brushed it off, you know? And you seemed fine after that. It was done. But as you like to remind me constantly, you’re not a kid. So when you tell me something like this now . . . I don’t know. Is this real? It seems like it has to come from a different place. Doesn’t it? And I don’t know what I’m supposed to make of it. But I know it’s going to take me more than a handful of minutes to come up with something.”

  The wobbly hold I had on my mood slipped away completely. I had wrapped myself into knots over this for weeks, first agonizing over my stupid plan and then making this confession. But despite his misguided opinion to the contrary, there was nothing for him to sort through. They were my feelings. Mine. Not his problem to solve. Mine. And I was so tired of him doing this, of stepping in and trying to fix things for me. “I get that this puts you in an awkward position, and I’m sorry,” I said, trying to keep the tension out of my voice. “But I’m telling you right now, I’m letting this go, and you’re going to have to let it go too. I gave this to you as something for you to know, not something for you to fix. I’m fixing it.”

  He started to say something, but I rushed in ahead of him. “Give me a few days. I need space and a lot of distraction, and we’ll be fine. Spend those few days figuring out how not to be weird about this, okay? Please?” His eyes darkened, and the corner of his mouth turned down, but I pressed him. “Please. I’ve grown up in every way except emotionally. Let me do that. I’ve told you the truth like a healthy adult should, and I’m confessing that I’ve never been able to shake the childhood crush I had on you. Somehow my vision of true love stalled out at seventeen. It’s stupid. I know that.
You’re a habit of years. But I’ll break the habit. And then you and I can be friends more like you and Dave are, on equal footing. But we’ll have this whole great shared history. And I can be me inside of it, not the version of me that’s trying to be the perfect girl for you. Just Hanny, same as always. But I need the time and space, okay?”

  His arms had locked across his chest again, the same tension playing along the tight line of his jaw. He kept his eyes on the floor in front of him for a long moment, and I was thankful. It meant I could endure my stinging cheeks without a witness. The heat was fading by the time he looked up. “Total honesty from now on, Hannah. You should have told me forever ago that you still had that crush.”

  “No way. It is the stupidest thing in the world for a twenty-five-year-old to be as swoony as her high school self.”

  “But it could have wrecked us.”

  I curled my hands into the sofa cushions, grasping as much of the soft twill as I could, filling my hands with fabric so they were too busy to flail with the irritation surging inside of me. “We were cruising toward that whether I said anything or not. If we wreck now, it’s because you let us. So don’t. Give me some space to breathe. We’ll reset. We’ll be fine. I’ll preoccupy myself with this handsome boy. You do your thing. Don’t worry about me. And then when I know I can be cool around you, we’ll do our Will and Hannah thing.”

  “Our Will and Hannah thing,” he repeated, his voice void of any emotion. “How long do you think it’s going to take to get there?”

  I don’t know. I wanted to scream the words. I don’t know because I’m barely holding myself together to act like this is some funny aberration and not like my insides are scaling away in an acid peel. “It takes as long as it takes,” I said. Forever. “Maybe a few days. Maybe a few weeks. Not forever. I’m not going to disappear.”