Nick. Holy shit. How long has it been since we last talked?
Chills raced down my spine. Nick didn’t call for no reason. Hell, Nick didn’t call anymore at all. It had been three months since our last conversation. Three months since he told me to start packing. Three months since I’d heard his voice. Almost seven months since I’d seen his face.
Seven months without Nick . . .
If you would have asked me a year ago, I would have insisted that I’d never last that long without him. Funny the things your heart is capable of handling without your knowledge. We are so much stronger than we realize.
“Hey.” I tried to sound nonchalant as I answered, pretending that hearing from him wasn’t sending me into an emotional tailspin. I thought about him and Carla, and suddenly wanted to throw up. That was a first.
“Jess,” he said, his voice thick, deep, and instantly recognizable.
“Nick. How are you?”
“Good, I’m good. How are you?” The fact that he sounded calm—too calm, too relaxed—rattled my every last nerve.
“Good. Just doing some required reading.” I closed my textbook and set it aside.
He paused, sucking in a breath before he spoke. “I need to tell you something.”
“What is it?” I pushed myself up until I was sitting straight up, preparing myself, but for what?
“Well, first off, I’m dating someone,” he said, his voice barely above a whisper, and I knew there was more to this phone call than that tidbit of information I already knew.
“So? Why would you call me to tell me you’re dating someone? Good for you, Nick. I’m dating someone too,” I lied. “So what?” Anger swirled in my gut, mixing with regret, fear, and sadness. In that order.
“We’re getting married.”
What?
If I had ever thought that my world had crashed around me before, I had been wrong. Dead wrong. Because in that moment, the sun dropped from the sky and fell into the sea, leaving the world shrouded in the darkest shade of black.
“You’re getting married? Are you kidding?” I prayed quickly to God that this was all a joke. I even looked at the calendar on my wall to make sure it wasn’t April first. This couldn’t be real.
“I wanted to be the one to tell you. It would kill me if you heard from someone else,” he said, as if that somehow made this all okay.
“How noble of you. So, who is it? Who the hell are you marrying, Nick?” I tried to sound like I didn’t care, but the shakiness in my voice gave me away. Not to mention the anger.
He stayed quiet for a heartbeat. Then two. I wasn’t sure he’d ever speak when he sucked in a breath and said, “Carla,” his words like knives.
Thud.
“Carla?”
Tears fell without warning, blurring my vision until my surroundings turned into a watercolor painting where things mixed together with no distinction, everything all blurred. His words were like knives. I wanted to scream into the phone, What are you doing? but I refrained, although that sentence repeated itself over and over again inside my mind.
He was planning on marrying Carla.
Nick planned to marry someone who wasn’t me.
I never realized until that moment how much hope I’d still held out for us. Apparently I’d buried the sliver of hope somewhere deep inside me, but here it was, making itself known, feeling less like a sliver and more like a redwood tree.
He cleared his throat, and I realized I’d been sitting silently on the line with no clue how long it had been.
“Is it your dad? Is he making you do this?” I had to know, because none of this made any kind of sense.
“No. It has nothing to do with him. I got to know her and we have a lot in common,” he said, his tone unconvincing.
“You’re joking, right? You have nothing in common with that horrible person.”
“Jess,” he growled, telling me I’d crossed a line. “It just seems right, you know?”
I shook my head. No, I didn’t know. I didn’t know anything anymore. “Bullshit. That’s total bullshit. You can lie to everyone else, but you don’t get to lie to me. This has your dad written all over it. How is he possibly getting you to do this, of all things, for him?”
His silence told me everything I needed to know, so I continued. “Remember when we talked that one day about the things he asked of you?” I waited for his confirmation, but he still stayed quiet. “I told you that one day he’d ask you to do something that would be a turning point. That if you did it, there would be no going back. This is it, Nick. This is so it.”
He sighed, sounding utterly exasperated. “You don’t understand, Jess.”
“Then enlighten me!” I yelled, my emotions overwhelming me.
“I can’t,” he said, sounding so broken, and I got pissed.
“Of course you can’t. Have a nice life, Nick. You’re a fucking idiot.”
I ended the call, expecting to cry hysterically, but the tears had stopped falling. I was too angry, too disappointed, too pissed off to cry.
There would be no coming back from this for us. There would never be an us again if he went through with this.
It was supposed to be me—it was always supposed to be me. Nick and I were supposed to be together.
I never planned to stay away forever. Once I graduated, I intended to move back home to Southern California. I’d stupidly assumed Nick and I would pick up where we left off, like I’d told Rachel that night. No matter what he said or how much time had passed, I always figured we’d find our way back to each other. I never once thought that I’d lose Nick forever.