Into the Tomorrows (Bleeding Hearts Book 1) (5 page)

A
s usual
, my mom’s words repeated in my ears. I was never silent, never far from her.

He doesn’t love you.

She might have been right. But I owed it to him, to us, to see for sure.

A few months after Ellie died, Colin held me on my bed in my grandfather’s house.

“She loved you, Trista. She’d want you to be happy.”

I hadn’t acknowledged his words, just faced the wood-paneled wall and counted the rings in the life of the tree—fake or real—that spanned across the paneling.

A year after Ellie died, Colin tried coaxing me to come to Colorado. But I had put it off. I wasn’t ready, to make a step that I had planned to take with Ellie.

Two years after Ellie died, Colin moved an hour farther south, which meant we were now a five-hour drive apart. When that happened, I stopped making trips to Colorado. It was all unfairly on Colin’s shoulders to visit, but between my unreliable car and my growing emotional distance from Colin, I had resigned myself to the fact that we’d probably never be who we were.

But now, three years after she died, I agreed. I wasn’t sure if we could really fix the things that caused us to separate from each other. But on the last night of her life, Ellie had told me Colin was good for me and I finally felt like I needed to see if she was right.

Maybe it was a pathetic reason to hold on to him still, but Ellie was the most important person in my life, the one who knew me better than anyone else. And by holding onto Colin, I felt like I was holding onto Ellie in a way. Their personalities were so similar that I could nearly fool myself into thinking nothing had changed.

If my mother had asked me why I didn’t dump him, I wouldn’t have told her. But one of the other reasons I stayed with him was always that Colin was safe. Safe couldn’t turn me into my mother.

Love lasts only as long as you want it to. And I didn’t think it would last long with Colin. I’d embraced the way the love I’d had for him had softened, how it had begun slipping right from my heart, in the months after Ellie died. I was content being his girlfriend and not being passionately in love. I wasn’t ready for another person I loved desperately to leave me, emotionally as my mother had, or physically as Ellie had.

It was as if we’d been audience members, viewing our relationship’s demise with a detached sort of interest. “I want to make you smile again,” Colin had told me the night before I’d climbed into my car. It seemed funny to me, because I wasn’t a smiley person. And funnier still, that he thought he could.

He moved into an apartment complex that he said was halfway between the best climbing spots and Denver—so he could experience both in equal measure. I didn’t care one way or another, but he was the only person I knew in Colorado, and there was nothing—no one—waiting for me in Wyoming.

So I parked in front of the café down the road from his apartment, wanting to meet on somewhat-neutral territory first.

He was already waiting when I entered the café, which I took as a good omen. He didn’t see me when I walked in the door, so I waited a second longer, just watching him.

His black hair was a little longer, taking on a wave. He wore a few weeks’ worth of facial hair and was tapping his fingers on the table. When he turned and saw me, his mouth split wide open, dimples tucking into his cheeks. And I waited for the rush of feeling that didn’t come. And felt a sick kind of pleasure when my heart kept beating steadily.

He rose to standing and took wide steps to me, pulling me against him immediately, arms around my waist, in my hair, lips against lips and a “You’re here” spoken into my mouth.

“You always say that like you’re surprised,” I returned, pulling my head back because I was suffocating.

“Because I keep waiting for you to slip between my fingers,” he said, eyes earnest. He touched my hair. “You bleached it.”

“A few months ago.” We’d last seen each other at Christmas, five months earlier.

We were both silent for a moment before he led me to the table he was occupying.

“I still can’t believe you’re here,” he said as he slid back into his seat. This was wrong. He shouldn’t be surprised his girlfriend of almost six years was actually here. And his girlfriend of almost six years should feel elation.

There was a mirror of who we should be, but our reflections didn’t match.

I smiled back at him. I loved Colin in a way, but not in a way that put me at risk. It was safer that way, kissing his lips but keeping my heart miles from his grasp.

I wasn’t a good person. I never claimed to be. But spreading my lips in a lie that didn’t sit comfortably into my cheeks was the only way I knew to make him happy.

“How was the drive?”

This didn’t just feel wrong; it was wrong. These were questions you asked an acquaintance as you established a dialogue. But I didn’t want to change us. I liked the ice that had formed in the cracks between us.

“It was fine.”

“What do you want?” Colin asked, hurriedly standing and pulling out his wallet.

I wanted to stop lying, I told myself. Ultimately, I knew it was selfish to stay with Colin and not feel the love for him that I should. I was constantly at war with myself, to stay in the shallow end of my love for him or to stop lying and let him go.

But I suspected he kept me too, at arm’s-length, and so I didn’t let the guilt swallow me whole.

“Green tea,” I said, watching him walk away like he couldn’t wait to escape our new-but-old dynamic.

Ellie hadn’t died yesterday. She’d died three years ago. But I still remembered the feel of her hand in mine like it was yesterday. And I still remembered the way he’d been gone when I’d needed him. I felt his absence stronger than his presence.

I’d spent the first week after she died in bed with the covers over my head. The next week, after my mother had booted my ass out of her home, I’d wrapped my lips around the top of a bottle of cheap bourbon and smoked through four packs of cigarettes in a stale motel room off of the highway. One night, I wandered on the roof.

My therapist had said, “Trista, I cannot help you fight the enemy if you don’t tell me who they are.”

In the end, I’d pressed the tip of my cigarette to my skin, daring myself to handle that pain before seeing what happened if I just … tripped over the side of the building … and I couldn’t. I’d told my therapist this and she’d told me that it was because the parts of me that hurt needed healing, not killing. It was my last session with her.

When my money had run out for booze, cigarettes, and the motel, I’d found myself on Grandpa’s doorstep. After the first month, the resentment I held for Colin was as real and tangible as a permanent compression on my chest.

And yet, I hadn’t yelled or kicked or sobbed like I’d wanted to. I hadn’t broken things off with Colin either. It wasn’t rational, but I reminded myself that Ellie had loved Colin, loved him for me. So much had changed in my life that the only constant had been Colin, even if we were about as emotionally connected as a fish to a bird.

And over time, I began to realize that my disconnect was a gift in a way. Colin couldn’t hurt me. I was already hurting.

I watched as he started up a conversation with the barista and felt a strange kind of comfort from seeing him so animated with her. Colin had said a couple very basic sentences to me and now he was fully engaged in a conversation about hiking with the barista. It was so very Colin.

I was never constant in my desires—wavering back and forth between running away from Colin and from staying put. In the end, staying put always won because it was safe.

Safe, safe, safe. I should tattoo the word over my heart, as my mother had with an ex-boyfriend’s name.

When he returned with our drinks, he set a piece of cheesecake in front of me.

I stared at it for a moment before looking at him.

“You love cheesecake,” he said easily, as if reminding me of the things I enjoyed was part of his job.

I placed my fingers on the edge of the plate, ready to push it from me and toward him.
Ellie loved cheesecake.
She’d loved it so much she’d dressed as a slice of cheesecake for junior year Halloween. It was a piece she left me with—Ellie and her cheesecake. And Colin had given me a literal piece of it, not realizing how tied to grief it was.

With my fingers poised on the plate, I looked at Colin. He was already peeling the wrapper from his muffin, oblivious to the turbulence within me.

I nearly told him Ellie loved cheesecake, but saying it in the past tense aloud was something I didn’t want to commit to. So instead, I picked up the fork and dug into the slice, placing it on my tongue and letting it dissolve.

I didn’t hate cheesecake; it was just another dessert. But I’d never claimed to love it. And the fact that Colin had purchased it for me thinking it was me who loved it made me think,
at least he’s trying.

After two bites, I couldn’t do it anymore. I pushed the plate to Colin and he raised his eyebrows. “Not hungry?”

I was full of feelings. “No. Eat it.”

I looked out the window as he ate, regretting coming to Colorado. My face warmed from the stress of that moment and I pressed my tongue hard against the roof of my mouth as I tried to suppress the tears.

“What is it?”

I shook my head, refused to look at him.

“Come on, Trista.”

I turned my head, looked at his now empty plate. “Can we go for a walk?”

His eyes changed once I said that. There was a distinct shift in their color, as if he’d dimmed the light behind them.

“Sure.”

I grasped the cup of tea, holding it tight, as we walked out the front door and along the sidewalk. Just past the café there was a man-made lake, and we stopped at the railing over it.

“What’s wrong?”

I closed my eyes and let the sun warm my face. “You say that like it’s one thing.”

“It’s more?”

I opened my eyes and turned to him. “Yes.” His face was emotionless, as if he’d just put up a wall to keep me from hurting him. The fact that he thought I could was a surprise.

“Start with the smallest thing.”

“Why the smallest?”

“Easier to handle.” He shrugged. Colin was afraid, I knew. Small things could be big, too.

I thought of everything that was wrong. How could I put the way I felt into words? “I don’t even know, Colin. I don’t know how to do this.”

The words rushed from my mouth before I could anchor them to my throat. It was the most honest I’d been with Colin, and I ached from the lies I’d told him until this moment.

“Do what?”

I pointed to him and then to me. “Us. How do we do you and me?”

“We just love each other.”

I swallowed. “Maybe love isn’t enough. God, Colin. We haven’t seen each other in five months and I don’t know about you, but I wasn’t all that sad about it.” The words kept tumbling from my lips. I could let him go—I’d still be safe. But if I let him go, who would I be? I’d lost Ellie, my home and, on occasion, my mind. If I lost Colin, I’d lose myself completely.

I curled my hands around the railing, squeezed, and said the truth. “I should be sad. I should be missing you so much that coming here would be a relief. But it isn’t.”

He made a noise and his pain echoed in me. It was a terrible truth, but I didn’t want to lie about it. I looked at him and he blinked, turning. He looked out at the sun and I watched as it reflected off his hair. “What does it feel like?”

“It feels like two strangers meeting except they share this horrible, traumatic memory and they don’t know how to deal with it.”

It was exactly how I felt. Ellie’s death had stained us, and it wasn’t until that moment that I realized I wanted to live with the stain and he did not. He wanted to move on, and I was firmly stuck in yesterday.

“I don’t know how to deal with it,” he said softly. “I never have. But Ellie would have wanted us to figure it out.”

I hated, hated, hated that he said that. I wanted to take my fists and hit his chest with his
would haves
. He had no right to guess her future wants; no one did. “Don’t say that.” I’d directed all my aching at the projection of my voice but it had poured from my mouth with insignificance. “You don’t know that. You don’t get to say that.”

We were both silent as we stared out over the water, the sounds of the night coming in around us. I waited for him to say something profound and healing. And he didn’t.

“I should go back to Wyoming.”

Finally, he spoke. “Why? There’s nothing there for you.”

“And there is, here?” I turned to look at him and he mirrored my movements.

“There is.” He said it with eyes so honest that I felt guilt for even bringing it up. What had we lost between us? What had brought us together only to disintegrate years later?

“Why did we stay together? After all of it, I mean. Why didn’t we break up?” In asking this, I was asking why he hadn’t broken up with me—because whatever my long list of faults in our relationship were, his distance was on him.

“You’re really asking?” For the first time, he looked hurt, vulnerable.

I nodded. “I don’t know why.”

He rubbed his head. “Because I love you.”

I didn’t need to ask myself if I loved him, because I knew I did. But the love I felt was residual of a much greater kind of love.

“I know you, Trista. I know what you need.”

He thought I loved cheesecake. He was surprised I’d come after saying I would. He didn’t know me, not as he claimed. But could I deny him this time to figure out why he was staying with me? I wasn’t sure. We were both lying to each other, and our secrets weren’t meant to be shared.

He sighed. “Look, I don’t know what I need to say to convince you to stay, to give me—us—a shot at fixing whatever broke between us. But I love you. I do. It’s been a long time since I’ve been as happy as I was when you walked into the café.”

The brick in my stomach rolled around in guilt. Because I couldn’t echo his feelings.

He turned from the railing, facing me. “And that means something to me. I’m not about to toss six years of us into this fucking lake because you’re not sure why we stayed together.”