I was never the one friends fixed up and I knew better than to expect it. I was never the right guy. I was the wrong guy, the douche waffle guy, the egotistical guy, the guy who glared at everyone, the guy who growled instead of speaking. I was the fucking worst. I was the guy who flirted with unavailable women. I was the guy who hadn't cracked a smile in years. I was the guy who found everything annoying and loved hating things for no good reason. I was the worst guy and I got that. I understood the situation thoroughly.
With that rosy reality in mind, I seriously considered leaving the island early. I would've done that if I didn't think Sara would've interpreted that as an attack on the time I'd promised her. She needed to figure out what she wanted from me—if anything, but please, god, let it be something—and I needed to grant her that time without impatiently stomping around her. I needed her to take that time and realize she was as ready as she needed to be.
Not that I even understood the issue of being ready. Hell, she'd been ready since the day she ripped my shirt open. I'd bet anything she was still finding those buttons around her bedroom. That perfect little tyrant knew exactly what she wanted. She just had to climb out of her head long enough to let herself want it.
It was cold and wet when I landed in Boston on Sunday.
I hated myself for it, but I couldn't suppress the twinge of disappointment that came from walking through the terminal and not finding Sara waiting there for me.
I hated myself a little more when I stomped up the stairs to my apartment and slammed the door as hard as I could, only to stare at that door for a solid ten minutes in hopes of her coming up to say hello.
I really hated myself the next morning when I glanced out the window and spotted her chaos bun crossing the street toward the hospital.
Coming to the airport was a reach and assuming she was awake when I got in last night was poor form, but she would've waited for me in the foyer this morning if she wanted to see me.
She didn't want to see me and there was nothing I could do about it. That was the problem inherent in sending her off with an ultimatum. I should've known better.
And I did. I knew better. I knew no one ever chose me.
Chapter 30
Sebastian
I always knew I was headed for some kind of whole-life implosion, but I never expected a screech owl plastic surgeon would press the detonator.
I knew it would be bad though I hadn't anticipated quite this much destruction. I didn't think I'd go to bed feeling like a pitted cherry and wake up with the exact same through-and-through wound the next day—and I didn't think it was possible to experience that for days on end.
The unfortunate truth was that I couldn't avoid Sara, not in any practical sense, and trying to avoid her only made this worse as I never stopped thinking about her. It was bad enough with wondering what her t-shirt said today and whether it was a crouton day or she was back on the trail mix, but now I had to watch from the third floor landing while she wrapped a scarf around her neck and buttoned her coat before leaving the building. I had to listen from around a corner while she rounded with her residents and I had to take my life into my hands every time I ventured into a stairwell.
I didn't like to devote a lot of time to flipping through the implosions of my past, but I knew this one was the worst of them.
We had the whole deadbeat dad thing and that had been pretty awful, though in all fairness to my mother, I wasn't the one who got fucked all the way over in that situation. She took the brunt of that bullshit, but it definitely left me with the knowledge that the people meant to love you couldn't be relied upon to do that. They'd leave, and life would be really shitty and you'd always wonder what you did wrong, even when you knew there was nothing valuable to be found by mining that cave.
We had some run-of-the-mill heartbreak in college, then again in med school, and once more as an intern, and those had seemed significant at the time, but now resembled obviously poor choices that ended in dramatic if not inevitable ways. Nonetheless, I'd devoted a load of energy to convincing myself that opening up to another person was a terrible idea, and those breakups stood as my incontrovertible proof. The risk outweighed the reward. It was a fool's errand to go looking for love. I'd proven it.
And then we had my time here in Boston where it was easier to be a wrecking ball who systematically flirted with an unavailable colleague—and literally everyone else who crossed my sight line—than acknowledge the fact I was lonely as hell, and making some uncomfortable eye contact with the possibility that this was it for me. That I was meant to be on my own. That things wouldn't magically work out and I wouldn't grow out of my bullshit. That college cheerleading, the quest for one good avocado, and tagging along with Hartshorn and Acevedo and their families was all I had. It was all I'd get.
I hated thinking it wasn't enough because it was a lot more than most people had to their name, but it just felt so fucking wrong. Like I'd missed a turn somewhere and now I was barreling down a whole different turnpike and heading in the opposite direction, but there were no exits, no getting off. And even if I did manage to turn this shitshow around, where would I go? Sara didn't want me the way I wanted her. She didn't want me when I was an asshole and she didn't want me when I'd presented her with all the things I'd never dared to share with anyone else.
I was too old to pick myself up and try again. I didn't care if forty was the new whatever the fuck. I couldn't do this again. I couldn't wait around for another person to show me that I was right, the people meant to love me couldn't do that for more than a minute. I couldn't arrange my existence on a silver platter again only for someone to look it over and choose to walk away.
Like I said, I'd proven this point.
Chapter 31
Sara
One of the things I'd learned in the past few years of getting my shit on track and not allowing myself to self-destruct was that kids who grew up in chaotic homes were often highly sensitive to the smallest shifts in tone, behavior, energy. They learned how to protect themselves by picking up on subtle changes that often led to bad situations. They knew the pattern.
I'd known all of my parents' patterns. I knew when someone was going to start an argument, when someone was going to storm out of the house, when I'd need to close myself away in my bedroom and stay quiet. The piece I hadn't noticed—probably because I was busy patrolling two grown adults who were hooked on the drama of fighting with each other—was that I didn't have anywhere to put the adrenaline that came with all that vigilance. I didn't see that binging and then purging was an attempt to calm myself down after listening to another blowout from the people who were supposed to be in charge. I didn't recognize my ritualized food and activity tracking as one tiny, hollow attempt at dragging some order into my life. I didn't notice that my frantic, obsessive attention to schoolwork and college admissions was a desperate desire to find an area where I could earn a steady stream of validation and approval.
And I wasn't aware that it was worth identifying as a really bad situation until I was in my early thirties and my body was breaking down because I'd convinced myself I could outrun, outwork, outperfect a whole lot of family garbage. The kind of garbage that didn't stop when I moved out because that stuff knew no limits, no boundaries. The kind of garbage that shaped me—a double board-certified surgeon who was really fucking good at her job—into someone who lost her shit at the idea of meeting my father for a meal. Someone whose first instinct was to gallop in the other direction when a good man offered his love.