Playing With Her Heart (Caught Up In Love #4)(58)
Author: Lauren Blakely

Jill stops the video, but she still doesn’t look at me. “They’re happy,” she says in a barren voice. “He’s so happy with McKenna. And Reeve is with Sutton. And then, look at Kat. She’s so happy it’s like she has extra servings.”

She lifts her eyes to me, and I’m jolted. I’ve never seen her so heartbroken. Even in all the scenes she’s played where Ava is bereft, she has never looked this ruined. My heart pounds with the fear that I’ve lost her. That she’s completely slipping away. Still, I have to ask.

“Are you happy?” I brace myself for whatever she might answer. “Were you happy?”

She just shrugs, jutting up her shoulders. Then she tosses the phone on the cover of her bed and grips the letter tighter. “How can I be? I can’t be happy. I can’t be happy because of this. Don’t you understand? Don’t you get it? It’s not possible. I can’t have this,” she says, gesturing from her to me, the look in her beautiful eyes so immensely sad. This isn’t the woman I know. But this is the woman I fell in love with, and I want to do everything I can for her.

“Can’t have what, Jill?” I take a tentative step toward her bed, and when she doesn’t recoil, I take another step, then sit down on the corner of her bed.

“This. You. Us.” She says each word like she’s biting off something bitter.

“Why?”

“Because I’m damaged. Because I’m broken. Because nothing good can come from being with me,” she says, and now her voice is breaking, and tears well up in her eyes. She thrusts the note at me.

“Do you want me to read it?” I ask her, carefully.

“Yes.”

I unfold the note, well-worn over the years with tattered edges, and thinning paper. It’s a short note, on a sheet of lined notebook paper, written in blue ink with slanted, choppy handwriting.

Dear Jill,

I guess I always knew I loved you more. Somehow, I knew I loved you more than you’d ever love me. But I learned to live with it. I was OK with it just to be with this girl I was crazy about. And then you broke my f**king heart when you left me. You just ripped me apart and for no good reason. I don’t get it. I’ve tried everything to get you back, and all you do is tell me to leave you alone. You tell me to stop calling, stop talking to you. Well, you’ll get what you want now. You’ll get everything you ever wanted, and all I ever wanted was you. I can’t imagine being without you, but I am, so I’ll stop imagining.

I’m outta here.

Aaron

In an instant, I understand everything about her.

Jill

Nothing hurts anymore. Because I won’t let it. I can’t let it. I can’t stand feeling.

But then he lays the letter on the bed and looks at me with such care in his eyes.

“Jill,” he says, softly. “It’s not your fault.”

“IT. IS.” I shout at him. I push my hands into my hair, holding tight and hard to my scalp. “It is my fault. It’s there. In writing. In black and white. Letters don’t lie. I got this after the funeral. One day later in the mail. I had sat there in the cemetery, my brothers next to me, my parents there. We all knew him. He was my high school boyfriend, and he killed himself. Because of me.”

“It’s terrible, and it’s tragic, and I’m so sorry he made that choice, and I’m sorry for him, and for his family to have to live with that. But you didn’t cause it.”

“But I did! He said I did! I broke up with him three months before it happened. Because I didn’t love him,” I say, and hold my hands out wide, balling my fists in my frustration. With myself. “That was the problem. If I had loved him like he loved me, this would never have happened. But I didn’t feel the same things for him that he felt for me. And I ended it, but he kept coming round, and he got crazier and needier, telling me he couldn’t live without me, and he would track me down after school, and he would find me after cross country. And I kept pushing him away. I even met him down at the bridge in Prospect Park to ask him to please stop. But he wouldn’t. He kept showing up. And he started freaking me out so I went to tell his parents. I told them what he was doing, and the things he was saying, and how scared I was for him,” I say, and there are potholes in my voice as I recount the story, the day I will never forget from the very beginning.

Aaron had left me another note, and the tone had grown more desperate, ending with the line I don’t know what I have to do for you to love me again…

Those words had sent a ripple of fear through me when I found the slip of paper in my locker in the morning. My hands shook as I read the note, and my heart beat wildly out of control with worry, like a deer trying to cross a congested highway, not knowing which way to go. The bell had rung for first period, but I stayed frozen in place, my mind racing with what to do next. As the halls thinned, I turned on my heels and headed straight for the guidance counselor’s office. Because that’s what you’re taught to do. Say something. But she was out sick that day, so I tried another option. When he was at swim practice after school, I walked to his house, knocked with nervous fingers, took a terrified breath and then stepped inside when his parents answered the door.

I tried to explain what was going on. But I didn’t even truly know what was going on. Aaron had never threatened to take his life. He’d never hinted that he’d had enough of this world. But his behavior had grown so erratic, so confusing, that I had to let someone know about the notes, about the calls, about the desperate ways he kept trying to get my attention.

“I’m worried about him,” I said in a small voice as I picked at the worn cuticles on my hand. “I don’t know what’s going on, but he doesn’t seem like himself.”

His mom gave me a sympathetic smile, as if I were overreacting.

Now, I look at Davis, and he’s listening, patiently letting me tell the story. “And you know what they said when I told them that?”

He shakes his head. “No, what did they say?”

I take a deep breath, steeling myself. I’ve never said these words out loud. They’ve been buried so deep inside me I don’t know that I can exhume them because I’ve never told anyone what I said to Aaron’s parents. That I warned them. That I was terrified he was depressed and would do something to hurt himself. That he needed help. That he needed someone to talk to. “They said he was just a heartbroken teen.” I press my lips together trying to stem the tears that threaten to break. The lump in my throat. The stinging in my eyes. “That’s what they said. That he was just still wrecked over me. And that he’d be fine. And then, three days later, he took an overdose of pills.”