An hour later, Ryan and I are sitting on my couch watching a movie with a pizza box on the coffee table. We opted to stay in after our little romp in the sack and have spent a quiet evening together.
“When’s your flight leave tomorrow?” I ask as I shift so I’m leaning against Ryan. He moves so his arm is around my shoulders and he presses a kiss to the top of my head.
“Six,” he says. “So I’ll need to head to the airport around four.”
“Can I ride over with you?” I ask, wanting to see him off at the airport. Something I’ve never done before, but feel the need to do this time for some reason.
“Of course. I’d love it if you did.”
I let out a long breath, finally feeling like I can give him something more in return. He’s the one who gives in this relationship and I want to be able to reciprocate, but I feel like I’m constantly hiding something from him, lying to him because he still doesn’t know the story behind my book or Elliot.
“Hey, Ryan?” I say and he absentmindedly answers me with a quick, “huh”, his eyes glued to the television. “I want to tell you about what happened with Elliot and why I still struggle with it.”
Ryan sits up, shifting away from me, and I now have his attention. I’m not sure why I suddenly feel the need to share this story with him after all this time, but I think it might help both of us to hear it. While Ryan knows I wrote the book about my time with Elliot, he never read it and I never expected him to.
“Okay,” he says, but I can hear the uneasiness in his voice. All he knows at this point is for the last eight months he’s been competing with someone who doesn’t really exist, except for in my memory.
“I met Elliot when I was eighteen. It was about a year after my mom had died. Alice’s life was a mess and my dad sent me out to San Diego to help Alice get her shit together.” I derail from the story for a few seconds when I see Ryan widen his eyes.
“I know it doesn’t look like it now, but Alice was always a shit ass mess. Up until a year ago she couldn’t get her shit together for anything. But that’s beside the point.”
I’m rambling because I’m nervous. The problem with all of this is I’m still not certain why I continued searching for Elliot for twelve years. Trying to explain to someone about your situation when you don’t even understand it yourself is difficult.
“So Alice was living in San Diego and pretty much doing nothing. We went to a party and she left me there and that’s how I met Elliot. We started talking and by the time the next morning came, I found myself falling in love with him.”
I see Ryan clench his jaw and he folds his arms across his chest. I can see the annoyance in his eyes as I continue speaking.
His response is flat and his voice even when he asks, “How could you fall in love with someone you just met?” The tone in his voice screams he doesn’t understand how I could be so naïve and why Elliot is different from him.
“I don’t know. There was something between us that was far stronger than I had ever felt.” I choose my words wisely, trying to make Ryan see that what I felt is in the past. Admitting out loud that I still harbor feelings for Elliot makes sitting here with Ryan seem disingenuous. So I’ll lie to myself and I’ll lie to Ryan. “For a long time I felt an overwhelming need to find him, to see if what I felt was real.”
“It’s hard to compete with that,” Ryan says coldly.
“I’m not asking you to compete with him,” I respond, realizing maybe it was a bad idea to share all of this with him. It might have been better left unsaid with him wondering about it. But then again, I feel like that’s when most people jump to conclusions and worst-case scenarios. I want Ryan to know he’s more important than any memory I have, but it surely isn’t coming across that way.
“You might not be directly saying that, but everything up until this point has said it.” Ryan looks away from me and runs his hand through his hair. “Listen, Nora. I like you, but I can’t keep doing this with you.”
“I know,” I say interrupting him immediately. But he doesn’t let me speak, not that I have any idea how I should defend myself.
“Nora, I’m going home and I’m leaving tomorrow. I went into this knowing there was someone else and I thought I could deal with it, but recently it’s become an issue for both of us. We both need to figure out if this is what we really want.”
I can feel myself getting choked up. I don’t want to hurt Ryan, but I can see I am. I’m struggling to figure out if what I’m feeling is guilt for treating him so poorly or true feelings for Ryan.
“Ryan, please,” I plead as he gets up and heads toward the door. “Don’t leave like this. Let me explain,” I say, yet realizing the more I talk the more I’m digging myself into a hole.
“Nora, I’m going to say something I regret and I don’t want to do that. We need some space. I need some space.”
“Ryan, it isn’t about Elliot anymore. Can’t you see that? That’s why I wanted to tell you—”
Ryan cuts me short before I can continue. “That’s the problem, Nora. It is about Elliot. It has always been about Elliot. It’s you who likes to think it isn’t and it doesn’t matter how many times you say it, you’re not convincing anyone, including yourself.”
His words stop me dead. My voice is gone and any thought of correcting this is now gone too. I can deny it, I can hide it from myself, but in the end, it always comes back to Elliot. The only person I’m lying to is myself, but with each lie, with each denial of my feelings, I’m pushing Ryan further away.
“Bye, Nora,” he says, his voice detached and emotionless. His eyes linger on me for a few seconds before he opens the door and leaves.
I do nothing to stop him.
I hate myself for what I’ve become, for what I’ve done to Ryan and the way I’ve lived my life as if some miracle is going to happen and I’ll live happily ever after.
I stand staring at the door wondering if I just fucked up a perfectly good thing I had going with Ryan. If I’m being honest with myself, I know I did.
Falling back onto the couch, I reach for my phone and call Alice. I know I’m not going to get any sympathy from her, but I at least need to try to sort out all these feelings I have clouding my brain and making everything around me seem hazy.
“Hey, Nora,” Alice says before I can greet her.
“Ryan just left and I think he broke up with me,” I say without acknowledging her.
There’s silence on the other end and then Alice lets out a long sigh.
“Nora,” she starts and then pauses again.
“Can you at least say something?” I ask, frustrated with myself and taking it out on Alice.
“What did you expect to happen?” she asks and it’s like a knife in my stomach. No one likes to be told they’ve screwed up, but I clearly need to hear it.
I keep making the same mistakes, but I’ve done nothing to rectify the problem.
I’m the problem.
“I don’t know,” I say, but this is exactly what I expected to happen. Subconsciously I push people away. If I don’t let them get too close, I won’t get hurt. I won’t forget.