My best friend tried to backtrack, but I didn’t allow it. I encouraged her to go. After all, it had been seventeen days since we hung out with them… since that last day at the beach.
Mase would call at night and Brady would push his way into the frame, but Chase never did more than linger in the background, and for that I was grateful.
Cam went to see them that night and though I didn’t ask her to, I know she lied to my brother when she showed up without me. She had to have or he would have been on my doorstep within the hour.
But that was the middle of the month, and now August is almost over.
Her patience is running thin and it’s understandable. I came here to live it up with my best friend, and she was left to do it all without me, while trying to pull me out of my cyclical state of drowning in my sorrows.
It’s not that I don’t want to go, because I do, and I’ve talked myself up to it more times that I can count, but I can never pull the trigger. It’s frustrating, but I physically can’t stomach the thought of seeing him, and it would be naive to assume he wouldn’t be nearby. He definitely would be, probably with a gang of girls flocked around him, as they always have been.
My heart can’t take it.
I can’t take it. Not yet.
Cam said I needed to get out, to get my mind off things, but how can I do that when he’s always around?
It was torturous enough forcing myself to keep our tradition of studying on the bleachers while they practiced, but I had to show some sort of normalcy or my brother would flip out and demand answers. He has no idea how to approach things on a normal level; he goes all in in an instant and that’s the last thing I need, so a couple days a week, Cam and I park our asses in the stadium seats to do homework while the boys work in the heat below us. It’s something that started as a way for us to stay ‘safe’ under their watchful eyes, and it turned into something they looked forward to. Every good run or new play, they’d look up with grins, knowing they’d get one in return from one of us.
We never did get much homework done there.
A small smile graces my lips, but a twist low in my stomach steals it away, and I grow angry with myself because of it.
I’m so sick of being sad.
The good thing about carrying the tradition on here, if there is one, is the boys have to go into the locker rooms afterward to. In high school, they brought their bags home at the end of the day, so it was from the field to the car. Here though, I can slip out before I’m forced to face them, cutting out the possibility of Chase’s awkward glances that would lead me to do something embarrassing.
Other than those days at fifty yards away, I’ve seen Chase once since we arrived. It was during our mandated Sunday dinners together—a pre-condition from our parents when they agreed to house us in the higher-end, studio-style dorms.
They started the first week of school, and while I sucked up the pain his distant eyes caused, I couldn’t make it past the first ten minutes, so I lied. I said I had a stomachache and locked myself in my room the rest of the night. I thought Brady would bust my door down because, not a minute after they all walked in, he began giving me what we like to call The Brady Eye, the one that says I know something, but I won’t call you on it just yet. Bless his heart.
The week that followed I said my study group wouldn’t budge on the time and I couldn’t miss it. I wasn’t even in a study group, but I’ve been searching for one ever since.
The only reason I didn’t get shit for it is likely because I’ve been smart about my absence, finding times I know the others are in class to meet with my brother for lunch or homework sessions then. Same with Brady. Some days I’ll meet one at the coffee shop, or we’ll meet each other outside of our classrooms and chat during the small breaks before the next one.
But never more than one at a time, because that would lead to them realizing, one corner of their tringle is missing. I can’t have that. Not yet.
It’s hard when you realize you simply aren’t enough for someone and it’s even harder when everyone you’re connected to is connected to that person as well.
While it’s not every day anymore, I still sometimes quietly cry myself to sleep at night. I know it’s irrational, some might say dramatic, to cry over someone who was never really yours to begin with, but as cliché as it sounds, my heart aches like he was.
Or maybe it’s the fact that reality forced my hand that night as those waves rolled up over my feet, stealing more than just the sand from under me. Everything I thought I might one day have washed out to sea.