“Because I talked about you…a lot.”
“Oh,” I say, taking a step back. “So she was jealous and you just dropped me? Not an explanation, not a…‘I’m sorry, Tea, I need some time.’ Just a vague phone call that said you thought it best if we stop speaking, and if and when you thought the time was right, you’d be in touch.”
What Derek doesn’t know is that his call that night sent me into labor. I was so distraught, I couldn’t breathe. I cried with such force, knowing that my person was no longer mine and I was truly on my own. Not even his wedding had made me feel so alone and destroyed.
“No, that’s not it. I mean, she was jealous, but because I had written stuff about you…about us…and she almost left me.”
I cover my chest with my arms as a feeling of emptiness fills me. “What could you have written about us? We never dated and we were never inappropriate.”
“I know that.”
No, I don’t think he does. “There’s nothing that ever crossed any lines, Derek. We were just friends.”
He closes his eyes, releasing a heavy breath. “It wasn’t like that. You and I…we were different. We were more than just anything.”
“Clearly not. You threw me away so easily. You were the only person in this world I ever could truly count on and you abandoned me. You took what should’ve been a night that I smile over because I had a baby and it became tainted with losing you.”
His hand grips the back of his neck and he paces. “I’m sorry I did that to you. I’m sorry the whole damn thing happened, but understand that I was faced with the choice of you or my wife. My pregnant wife who I was married to for only two months. I loved you both, and choosing almost killed me.”
I was a friend. Of course he chose her.
My life was such a mess and I didn’t know if what I felt at that time wasn’t desperation for someone to love me.
Keith sure as hell didn’t. But I believed Derek did.
I thought that even when he got married, he would still have room for me in his heart.
“Well, when you chose, it did kill me. I had no one, Derek. I had a new baby, no friends, living in this stupid town that I hated, and was in the middle of the worst experience of my life and you chose to completely cut me off.”
“It wasn’t that simple.”
I’m trying to be mature, but the broken girl inside of me is screaming to lash out. “I don’t care that it wasn’t simple for you, and maybe that makes me a bitch, but there’s nothing that Meghan could’ve possibly seen in that journal. Hell, I read it how many times?” I yell. “You wrote random shit, weird notes about your plans for the future and song lyrics. So, I’m so sorry your new wife found some lame-ass excuse to finally be rid of me.”
Because that’s what it was. She hated our friendship, even if she pretended otherwise. I mattered, maybe even more than she did at some points, and it bothered her. But she couldn’t understand the depth of our friendship.
He was the first person to see me as more than some immature girl who wanted to be popular.
I was selfish and stupid back then, but with Derek…I could be anything.
He believed in me, thought I was worth more, and gave me the courage to be better.
“I promise you, Teagan, it was not lame.”
“It doesn’t matter, does it? In the grand scheme of it all, you did what you did and I had to learn to live without you. I struggled, was depressed beyond words, almost lost Chastity in childbirth, and you weren’t there. I did it all alone.”
“I knew you could.”
“Please,” I huff. “I don’t need your praise. I needed your friendship. I needed you to be the one man, other than my father, to actually be there and not turn your back on me when things got rough. Do you have any idea what I went through with Keith?”
He shakes his head.
I don’t know whether to laugh or cry. All these years I’ve waited for this moment to call him out and I can’t even do it. I can’t tell him that it wasn’t about me doing it on my own, it was about doing it without him. I still can’t say the words: I was in love with you.
The fact is, it doesn’t change anything.
“I went through complete fucking hell. I watched someone I thought I knew become someone I couldn’t even recognize. All because of his new life. But what about my life, Derek? What about my needs? What about Chastity? None of that mattered because I was irrelevant in the grand scheme of things.”
The things I did in my youth were…stupid. If I could go back and talk to my nineteen-year-old self, I would bitchslap her. I would tie her hands to her books and force her eyes forward.
As an adult, I have the beautifully cruel gift of hindsight. I see the errors, and the way I made excuses for my poor choices. I gave Keith every possible opportunity to hurt me and then wasn’t even surprised when he took them.
I let my desire to be popular keep me from seeing that I was loved by the few people who mattered. Keith told me he loved me, that I would be on his arm like a queen in high school, but only if…
If I did this.
If I gave him that.
If I allowed him what he wanted.
Everything came with an…if.
“I’m sorry. I know it’s not enough for you and I know I let you down, but know that I didn’t want to do it.”
“I’m not even angry anymore,” I tell him as I start to walk because standing here, looking at him as regret fills his eyes, is too much for me.
There’s this part of me that has spent so much time loving Derek, longing for him, that I want to pull him into my arms and forgive it all. Then there’s the other side that’s hurt and disappointed. If he loved me, he would’ve fought for me. Regardless of her reading silly things written a million years ago in a journal.
“Then what are you?”
I turn my head toward him. “Used to it.”
Derek’s eyes close and the breath expels from his nose. “I thought about you, Tea. I wrestled with calling you every single day.”
“But, what? You couldn’t? You really thought Meghan was going to leave you?”
He takes a few steps closer, eliminating the distance between us. “Yes.”
“I’m trying to understand here. I’m doing my best to get what the hell could make it that easy for you. You didn’t even try after that. I was…am…angry and I hate this.”
“I hated it! I hated it and then I hated you for making me hate it.”
“Me?” I gasp. “What did I do to deserve your anger? I woke up one day and realized that you didn’t want to ever hear my voice again. You never wanted to see me, know anything about me, and I was to act as though you were dead! Dead, Derek! You told me to go on with my life as though you had died because that was what I was to you—dead! And I didn’t do anything wrong!”
“I know that!”
“Then please, tell me, what was my crime?”
Derek’s breathing is labored and he throws his hands in the air. “You made me fall in love with you!”
Time seems to cease around me. I feel the air stop moving, and I can’t hear anything other than the words he just said replaying in my head.