I wish I could tell you that things got better.
I wish I could tell you that nothing changed between us.
I wish I could tell you a lot of things.
But I couldn’t.
I can’t.
I never regretted the decision to give Dylan my virginity. I never regretted meeting him or being with him, I never regretted anything that ever happened between us, not for one second.
No regrets.
I loved him.
I love him.
The night we made love it changed so many things that I never expected to change. That I didn’t even think would be possible, and that I sure as hell never contemplated for one damn second.
That it could change everything.
Every smile.
Every laugh.
Every touch.
Every. Single. I. Love. You.
For the first time in my life I realized what it was like to truly give yourself to someone. To open your heart to the possibility of love and happiness and everything that comes along with it.
All of the stuff that filled the spaces in between.
The good.
The bad.
The love…
It had been a few days since we made love and I was still riding the high feeling of bliss. Late one night when I was alone, an unfamiliar sound woke me from a dead sleep. I followed the noise down the stairs and found my mom crying to the point she couldn’t breathe.
“Mom?” I called out as if I were a child, standing in the archway that led into the dining room.
She immediately wiped her face, trying to hide the evidence of her meltdown. It was no use her mascara ran everywhere causing black streaks down her face. Nothing could take away the vision of the strong woman crumbling to pieces before my very own eyes.
“I’m fine, honey, go back to bed,” she spoke in between sobs.
“What are you doing home? Shouldn’t you be at the hospital?”
She shook her head. “Aubrey, go to your room please. I’m fine.”
“I’m not leaving until you tell me what’s going on.” I stepped closer, not backing down.
It was then that I noticed the open bottle of wine on the table. My mother never drank and it was blatantly obvious that she was drunk.
“Is dad… is dad okay?” I asked, with tears filling my own eyes, my mind running wild.
She immediately broke down, uncontrollably bawling. Her body shaking and shuddering so hard, I rushed to her side, bending down and closing her in with my arms, holding on for dear life. She shook even harder. I found it hard to breathe from the force of her crying. I would never forget what it felt like to try to hold my mother together while she fell apart in my arms.
“Shhh… it’s okay, Mom. Feel me… follow my voice. It’s going to be okay,” I reassured her with the same soothing tone Dylan had used on me the day I told him the truth. Gently, I stroked her hair, rocking us back and forth, desperately wanting to give her any comfort that I could.
“No! It’s not, Aubrey, it’s never going to be okay! I’m so sorry. I’m so sorry that I ruined everything! It’s all my fault!” she wallowed against me.
“It’s fine, Mom, just try to calm down please.” I begged and pleaded with her.
“I can’t! Please forgive me! I’m begging you to please forgive me!”
“Of course I will,” I replied with tears falling down my face. I couldn’t hold them in any longer. “What’s going on? You’re scaring me. Please tell me what’s going on?”
“I wish I could take it all back. I wish I could go back in time and make it all better but I can’t. I will never be able to. He left me and he’s never coming back. There’s nothing I can do about it anymore.”
“Dad? Mom he left—”
“I held him back, Aubrey! He wanted to do so much with his life and I just held him back to fulfill my dreams and to do what I wanted. I never let him have a choice. Not once. It was always about me. I was selfish, Aubrey. I loved him so much and he sacrificed everything for me. I could see it in his eyes. He wanted more out of life, out of what I could give him, but I didn’t care. I made him choose me!” she uncontrollably wept.
“We were so fucking young. I didn’t know any better. I thought our love could make it through anything, but I was wrong. He gave up everything for me, but he said he wanted to. He made me believe he did. I should have known. I just never thought it would ever get to this point.”
“Mom, I—”
“He resented me, Aubrey. When I realized it, I tried to make it better. Why do you think he went back to school? I thought if he did something he loved, it would fix things, but it only became worse. Our dynamic changed. I wasn’t the provider anymore and I didn’t know how to share that with him. I felt like in his eyes I wasn’t doing a good job, like I failed at that too. It was just too much to handle. All we did was fight all the time. I didn’t know how to make it better, I didn’t know how to be a wife or a mother, I didn’t know anything anymore.”
I pulled away from her, needing to look into her eyes. She looked so broken, so alone, even though I was right there with her.
“Mom, you didn’t do—”
They say that everything happens for a reason. That your life could change in an instance, in one moment in time and you never even see it coming. There was no preparing for it. No battle to be won. I thought this was my moment.
I couldn’t have been more wrong.
“I did, Aubrey. I failed at everything. I’m still failing. I was at the hospital working my shift and I got served with papers today. Your father wants a divorce. It’s over.”
That night changed everything for me.
There was no going back.
Only moving forward.
I held my mom in my arms until she passed out from the exhaustion of her tears. I stayed there all night with her mourning the cost of her mistakes. I finally put her to bed when the sun came up. I never told Dylan that my father wanted a divorce. My mom and I never discussed that night again either. There was no point, the damage was done.
For both of our lives.
Summer went flying by. I blinked and we were almost through Dylan’s senior year of high school, my junior year. He had applied to several colleges all around the states and got accepted to most of them. He asked me my opinion on every last one, what I thought, what I wanted, where he should go, what was best for us. It was constant, over and over again. Every month became every week and soon it was a daily question. Each time he asked me my heart broke a little more, screaming at me to tell him what I needed.
The truth.
Except I never did.
I never could.
I smiled and told him that he had to choose for himself, that I couldn’t make the decision for him. Which only led to us arguing, a lot. We fought more than we should about the little things because we couldn’t fight about the big things. I couldn’t confront the elephant in the room.
That he was leaving me.
Like my dad did to my mom.
Like my dad did to me.
I wasn't going to make the same mistakes as my mom. I wasn’t going to hold him back, even if I wanted to and ask him to stay…
Would he?
I was afraid to find out the answer. He may not leave today, or tomorrow, but someday he would and the vicious cycle would repeat itself.
I know you’re asking yourself why I couldn’t just tell him that. Why I couldn’t just open my mouth and be honest with him. Tell him what I felt, every last insecurity that was buried deep within my bones, harboring to the point of pain, what was really going on.
See, love is a beautiful thing.
It builds you up so high until you reach the end and there’s nowhere else to go, but down. I was only seventeen, but felt much older. Mature beyond my years. It had always been that way for me, having to grow up fast and mostly alone. You don’t realize how much of your childhood affects the person you become, the person you are. How memories shape your life, your feelings, and most importantly your love.
The struggle between the things we could change but didn’t want too, versus the things we could change but didn’t know how too.
I was terrified if I told him what I needed, he would leave me anyways. Except the inevitable would take much longer, like a ticking time bomb located in the center of my heart just waiting to go off and leave me broken. Days, months, years of getting closer and closer to him, building a life with him, for what? Eventually that love he had for me, for us, would turn into resentment for holding him back, not letting him accomplish his dreams and goals. Our love would die like a plant that I spent years and years showering with tender love and care.
I couldn’t do it.
I’d rather him leave me now.
Then hate me later.
I would become my mother.
There was no way in hell I could go through that again. Once was enough. Twice would be unbearable. I also couldn’t just walk away from him. I would love him until he left me because either way.
I would lose.
"What are you doing?" he asked, laughing as I straddled his lap on my bed with my phone in my hand.
We had just finished making love. We were doing that a lot more now. It was the only time my mind stopped spinning and I allowed myself to just feel.
To be with him.
I was wearing my bra and panties and he was only in his boxer briefs.
"Taking a picture of you," I said, looking adoringly in his eyes.
The eyes I wanted to remember.
"Why?" he asked, gripping my waist, rubbing his thumbs back and forth along my lower stomach.
"Just in case," I simply stated with a tone I barely recognized.
He noticed it immediately. There was very little that Dylan didn’t notice and he often called me out on it, which led to us fighting. I squealed when he unexpectedly flipped me over instead, caging me in with his body and locking my arms above my head like he knew I loved.
He hovered above me and looked deep into my eyes and rasped, "Try to leave."
Everything fucking changed.
The irony was not lost on me.
I went from having meaningless sex with every girl, to making love to the one girl that meant everything to me and it still went to shit. I couldn't catch a break. If I knew sex would have changed things between us I would have never been intimate with her. I was eighteen and about to graduate from high school. All I wanted to hear her say was that four letter word.
Stay.
We fought. We argued a lot.
Over nothing.
Over everything.
I pushed her and pushed her and pushed her and yet I still couldn’t say what I truly needed to. The truth. “Ask me to stay. Please, just fucking ask me to stay.”
Pride was a very powerful thing, especially for a man like me.
“So, I hear Lucas and Jacob got accepted into Ohio State,” Aubrey coaxed as we sat on a blanket at the beach. She was pressed under the nook of my arm, her head lying on my shoulder, snuggled in just the way she loved.
“Mmm hmm,” I simply replied, trying to avoid another argument with her.
“When were you going to tell me that you got accepted, too?”
“Since when do you care where I go?” I retorted back at her.
She tried to pull away from me, but I held her tighter.
“Can we just sit here and enjoy the evening, Bree?”
I started to call her Bree more often, suga’ and darlin’ were few and far between. She didn’t say anything, but she didn’t have to.
“Do you want me to go to Ohio State?”
“I want you to go wherever you want. I’ve told you—”
“No shit, I have it fucking memorized now,” I snapped.
She sighed and I glanced at her. “I’m sorry, okay?” I kissed the top of her head.
“I figured you wanted to be with your boys, Dylan. That’s all. I mean you’ve never left this town. Ohio State seems like a great opportunity for you to explore.”
“Explore what exactly? What do you think I’m missin’ out on that I need to see, Bree?”
She shrugged only pissing me off further. She did that a lot, started an argument and would never finish it, leaving me to feel like the asshole for wanting to.
“What is going on in that beautiful mind of yours?”
She peeked up at me with defeat already appearing in her eyes.
“What do you want to do with your life, Dylan? You graduate in a few months and you’ve already missed several deadlines from your college acceptance letters. What are you waiting for?”
“Maybe I want to stay here. Would that be so bad?” I finally admitted.
“That’s not what you want,” she bit in a tone I didn’t appreciate.
I roughly pulled my arm away, missing her warmth immediately.
“Jesus Christ, Bree, enough with the vague responses. I’m sick of this shit.”
She stood, hovering above me. I placed my arms on my knees, looking out at the water.
“Just go! Go to Ohio State! That’s what you want. Don’t stay here for me! You know you don’t want to.”
Her bare feet kicked around the sand nervously, as her eyes looked everywhere but at me.
I snidely nodded. “It’s fucking funny how you seem so damn sure of what I want, but you have not a clue what you want.”
“What’s that supposed to mean?” she yelled back, throwing her hands in the air.
“Nothing, fucking forget it.”
My blood started to boil. I couldn't take much more of this conversation with her.
“What? Now I’m not worth an argument? Where’s my asshole boyfriend, Dylan, huh? When did he get replaced with such a goddamn pussy?”
I stood so fast she never saw it coming, getting right in her face. She folded her arms over her chest, arched an eyebrow in a challenging gesture.
“If you fuck with the bull, sweetheart, you’ll get the horns. Want to try that again?” I warned, taking another step into her personal space.
“For fucks sake, just go to Ohio State, Dylan. Go be with your boys. Leave me here. We can do the long distance thing and see what happens, okay? That’s what I want. That's what you need,” she answered in a neutral tone, shocking the shit out of me.
The force of her words, causing me to step back. “Is that right?” I gritted out.
“Yes, that's right, McGraw." She dug her finger into my chest, pushing me backward.
My head jerked back, stunned and I blurted out for the first time, “Promise?” out of nowhere.
She held her head higher, knowing if she said the following it would be the end. The decision would be made with or without my consent. She took a step toward me, her intense gaze never leaving mine and then whispered,
“Always.”