You Make Me (Blurred Lines #1)(27)
Author: Erin McCarthy

“Don’t! Please don’t.” The whole future, gone. Just like that. Everything I had ever wanted. Gone. It couldn’t be possible. He couldn’t do this to me. I grabbed his arm, desperate.

He shook me off, walking faster. “Just stop! I can’t. Just stop.”

Doors were opening and curious heads poking out, including Aubrey’s.

“What the hell?” She looked at us, alarmed.

Humiliation and anger forced me to rein it in and come back swinging. If he was going to dump me then I wasn’t about to take the full blame. It wasn’t smart, but it was survival, and that was one thing I knew how to do. Survive. So I screamed at his retreating back, “Fine! Just walk away then! I’m sure you can find a nice blonde in Bangor to sit on your lap and grope your junk tonight, so enjoy your freedom.”

He paused and for a minute I thought he was going to turn around and apologize. Say this was all a mistake. But he didn’t. He started walking again and I leaned on my doorframe, crying, while arms came at me from sorority sisters, offering murmurs of comfort and exclamations about what a prick he was. Aubrey asked me what had happened but I barely heard her. I felt like I was going to pass out, and all I wanted was to lie back down and cry.

So that’s what I did.

Then when everyone left me alone, to sob by myself, I picked up my phone and sent a text.

Chapter Eleven

When Aubrey knocked a few hours later, I was packing a bag for a few days away. I couldn’t afford to miss class, but my sanity couldn’t handle staying in the house with all those prying eyes and ears.

“Where are you going?” she asked. “Heath’s?”

That offended me. “No! Of course not. I haven’t talked to him. I’m going to see my foster sister back home for a few days.” I couldn’t face Heath or find comfort with him. He would want Ethan and I split up and he wouldn’t appreciate my pain. Tiffany would.

“Oh. Sorry.” She looked contrite as she sat down on my bed.

I shrugged. “I’m sure you’re angry with me too, like Ethan is. I wasn’t trying to be deceptive, Aub. The past is just really hard to talk about. My family is a hot mess.”

“I understand that. But you could have just said, ‘hey, they’re whacky, I don’t really want to talk about it, but my brother is a mother effer.’ I would have respected that. But you didn’t tell us anything.”

I crammed clothes in my bag. My head was throbbing and my heart was aching. I felt swollen and numb. “When you spend your whole life being that girl that everyone knows and everyone talks about, when you get to be anonymous, it’s addictive. That’s my only excuse. I wanted to be seen and judged on me, just me, as a person, and then it just didn’t seem to matter anymore. I didn’t want to lose what I had gained.”

“But lying so you wouldn’t lose everything, you lost everything.” She had tears in her eyes.

I paused. “Have I lost you too, as a friend? I understand if I have. I do. I don’t want that to be what happens, but I do totally understand. You’ve been a best friend and a sister to me.” But my voice broke and I couldn’t continue. “All I ever wanted was to be a decent person and to love and be loved. Was that so much to ask for, honestly?”

She shook her head, but she sounded angry. “Don’t be melodramatic. I love you, too, Caitlyn. I don’t want our friendship ruined. But I feel like we need to have a bunch of conversations all over again. And when you get back you’d better f**king be honest with me or I can’t be in your life. It’s already hard enough because you broke my brother’s heart. You know me. I’m sarcastic and I have a huge wall in front of my emotions. But I can be hurt too, and this hurt. It really hurt.”

“I don’t know what to say other than that I’m sorry. I hope you can forgive me. I don’t…” I took a deep breath. “I don’t know how to have friendships I guess. Growing up, I never really had real friends. And when you have dozens of angry foster siblings coming through your life you learn to protect yourself. You don’t share.”

“I guess I can see that,” she conceded. “But at some point you have to learn to trust the people who love you.” Aubrey wiped at the corner of her eye. “Ethan is… destroyed. There’s no other word for it.”

My own vision blurred. I had cried more in the last two weeks than in the last four years. “He broke up with me. I begged him to stay.”

“He uh, wants the ring back.” Aubrey picked at imaginary lint on her jeans.

“Are you shitting me?” Oh, my God. Why didn’t he just drive the knife deeper into my heart with a mallet? “Like right now? He couldn’t have waited a week?”

“He’s just reacting. He’s hurting.”

“Well, so am I!” I wasn’t sure when I had become such a villain. Ethan had asked me to cut Heath out of my life and I had. Was this really about my stupid brother? I didn’t think it was hard to understand that if your alcoholic brother makes a scene at your father’s funeral you don’t really want to talk to him.

But if I begged, if I went to Ethan and convinced him to stay with me, then I would always be afraid. I would wait for the day he decided to leave anyway and it would never, ever be the way it had been. I would get clingy and needy and weird, just like he had after Heath had gotten to Orono, and like I had pulled away from him, he would pull away from me. That easy place of mutual comfort where we just enjoyed other each and felt safe and secure was gone. Forever.

So I tugged the ring off in a hard, angry jerk, like a Band-aid. It was going to hurt no matter what, might as well make it quick. I’d gotten used to the weight and my finger felt light, naked, without it. I winced as I looked down at my bare finger. I’d been happy, truly happy, with Ethan, but a year was just a tease. Just when I’d thought maybe it could be forever, it was gone. I held the ring out to Aubrey.

She looked stricken. “I’m sorry, boo.”

“Yeah. Well. I hope he can return it.” I meant it. I had no idea how much he’d paid for it, but I didn’t want him in debt because of me.

When she took the ring from me, I had a Gollum moment. I wanted to snatch it back and clutch it to me greedily. My precious. But instead, I swallowed hard, nausea suddenly crawling up my throat.

“I have to catch the bus,” I managed to say. “I have to go.” It wasn’t like they ran every ten minutes.