CHAPTER 10 |

Dumb Kids & Dumber Mistakes

 

 

Everything changed when we were twenty.

Two years away at college had taken its toll. It was expected, and we had been strong, but no amount of fighting for each other could erase those miles. No amount of young love could make the time between us disappear. And nothing could have stopped freedom from making me question everything.

I wasn’t sure anymore that I wanted River Canyon as my permanent home, or if I even wanted a permanent home at all. I didn’t know what I wanted to do with my life, or what I wanted my life to be. All I knew was that I did want Patrick, but, what did I want from him? Did I want a marriage, kids, a three-car garage, and a Golden Retriever? Or did I want us to simply … be? Was it even him that I wanted, or the idea of him? The point was, I didn’t know, and after seventeen years of being inseparable, we had never once discussed any kind of future.

It felt silly, that we could be so much in love and never talk about such key elements to a relationship. But, I told myself, kids don’t think about that shit. Shit like that didn’t matter to kids; it didn’t matter to us.

Until it did.

It all came to an end over the phone. Of everything in our relationship, it was what I regretted. It was all my fault, and the amount of shame I felt for that phone call was half of the reason I stayed away for those ten years.

I was afraid he would cry; I had never seen him cry over the age of ten. I was afraid he would be angry; I hated when he was angry. I was afraid he would hate me; I couldn’t bear the idea of him hating me.

Simply put, I was afraid, and I took the coward’s way out. But it was so impersonal, so cold, so disrespectful to everything we were, but I think …

I think a part of me felt that I wouldn’t be able to do it, had I waited to see him in person.

Hell, maybe that was a sign that I shouldn’t have done it at all, but we all have 20/20 hindsight, don’t we?

“Do you want kids?” I hit him with the question out of nowhere one night in September. We had barely gotten through with our nightly greetings, and I was ambushing him about offspring.

“Of course I want kids.” He answered without hesitation, and then he faltered. “Why are you asking me this? Are you—”

He thought I was pregnant. I clapped a hand over my eyes. “Oh God, no, I’m not … I’m not pregnant,” I nervously laughed it off. “No, I was just thinking that, you know, we’ve never talked about this stuff before, and …”

“You wanted to know if we were on the same page.”   

“Yeah,” I said, instantly feeling that we weren’t. My heart was sinking, and the air felt stagnant.

“Well? Are we?”

“I don’t know if I want kids.”

“That’s okay.”

I laughed. “Patrick, you just told me that you definitely want kids. You didn’t even hesitate, and now, you’re telling me it’s fine to not have them?”

“Kinsey, we’re not havin’ kids now. We have plenty of time.”

“Yeah? Well, what if I never want them?”

“If the choice is you or kids I’ve never even met, I will always choose you.”

I shook my head. “Patrick, that’s ridiculous.”

But was it, really? It felt ridiculous at the time, but looking back, it was sweet. It was noble. It was him, and his love for me, and I see now that there was absolutely nothing ridiculous about that.

“Why is it ridiculous?” He was breathing hard. He was getting defensive, one step away from angry.

“Because …” My eyes flitted around my dorm room, scanning the painted brick walls for an answer that couldn’t be found. “It just is.”

He grunted a laugh. “Okay, Kinsey. Sure. Whatever you say.”

“What if I never want to get married?” I shoved the question through the phone, my only retort to his obnoxious dismissal.

“Oh, now you never want to marry me?”

“I don’t know, Patrick! That’s what I’m saying! Jesus, we’re twenty fucking years old! Why do I have to decide right now what I’m going to do with my life?”

“Wait, wait, wait. Back up a second. Why are you yellin’? Why are you even mad at me right now? I didn’t say anything, Kinsey. You brought this up.”

I weighed my options: to give him the truth, or give him a lie. “Because this, scares me.” Truth. “I love being on my own right now, Patrick. Like I really love it.”

“I know you do.” His voice was quiet, strained. He was upset. “And I knew you would.”

“Don’t hate me.”

“I could never hate you.”

I took a deep breath, blowing the air against the phone. I closed my eyes, pictured his face. Opened my mouth, tasted his tongue.

“I think …”

“Don’t do it, Kinsey.”

“Patrick, I want a break.”

“Don’t give me that shite. Just say you want to break up.”

I squeezed my eyes shut, pushing the words out one by one. “I want to break up.”

Dead air filled the space between his phone and mine. I needed to fill it, to hear anything but the breaking of my heart.

God, I didn’t know it could hurt so bad.

“I just …” I took a deep breath, remembering the smell of his Old Spice deodorant. “I just feel like our lives have been decided for us. I want to choose for a while.”

“And y’don’t choose me?” His voice cracked with the strain of his heart busting open.

“It’s not that. It’s—”

“That’s exactly what it is, Kinsey, because if it wasn’t, y’wouldn’t be doin’ this!” His breath hit the phone in quivering gasps. “Are you seein’ someone else?”

“What? God, why would you even think I could do that?”

“Well, I don’t know, Kinsey. I didn’t think you could do this, and I’m just over here, wonderin’ if I know you at all anymore.”

My vision clouded with tears and memories, my breath held in my tightened lungs. The heart that once belonged to him was lying on the floor, bloodied and battered from six minutes of conversation that I never could’ve seen coming. Was that what college did to people? Was it worth it?

I wanted to know what he was thinking, what he was doing, but after what had been said between us, what I had done, I wasn’t sure I had the right to ask.

Then, he spoke. “So, this is it?”

I hesitated at first, and then, I told myself that the hard part was over. That was a lie, of course, but it’s what I had to do to tell him that, yes, we were done. To give myself options. To give myself freedom. To give myself the chance to truly decide what it was I wanted.

 

❧

 

Six months later, I went home for Easter. I hadn’t heard from Patrick since that night. Not even during Christmas, when I had come home. Didn’t dare to catch a glimpse of him, didn’t dare to knock on his door, didn’t dare listen to the panicked screams coming from the dying organ in my chest.

God, I missed him. I found that the single life wasn’t for me. I found that other guys were assholes, more of an asshole than Patrick and his tickling fingers. I found that none of them knew how to kiss me the way I liked, and I didn’t have the patience to teach them. I found that a broken heart was worse than the thought of children, and I found that I would always choose him. Hands down, it would always be Patrick Kinney.

I had decided I was going to ask him to take me back. I told myself that he would; he was Patrick, and he loved me. But still, I was nervous, as though he would be a different person after only six months of separation.

Six months—it had felt like an eternity, but it wasn’t a long time, in the grand scheme of it all. How much could’ve possibly changed?

Well, everything, apparently.

“Kinsey McKenna! Will y’look at this here, Collin! Kinsey is back from school!”

Patrick’s dad waved at me from the couch, tipping his head. “Nice to see ya, Kinsey. You’ve been sorely missed around here. Right, boys?”

The seventeen-year-old twins, Ryan and Sean, flanked their father, shooting me half-hearted waves in the dismissive teenage way I remembered all too well.

Then, Mrs. Kinney threw her arms around me, pulling me into a hug that pushed tears from my eyes. She heard my sniffles against her ear, and she stepped back, holding my shoulders.

“Oh, m’dear, ‘tis been a tough time, hasn’t it? But y’know, I believe the Lord has a plan, and—”

“Mam.” Patrick appeared behind his mother, staring at her through warning eyes. My heart jumped at the sight of him; not with love, but with surprise—he did look different. Six months had made him older, and tired. Something had changed. Something had shifted in his universe, and it had pulled him away.

“Oh, Paddy, I was just about t’get ya.”

“Can y’leave us alone, Mam?”

I clenched my sweater in my fists, my mind catapulting every gut wrenching possibility at my heart.

“Oh, right, of course.”

Mrs. Kinney looked to me with sad eyes, longing eyes, and then, turned away, nodding her head as she walked toward the back of the house. Patrick motioned with a jerk of his chin for me to step back outside, and with hesitation, I complied.

Closing the door, he gestured toward a bench on the porch. “Sit down.”

He was so commanding, a harsh bite to his voice, and I did as I was told. Patrick sat beside me, and didn’t touch me, didn’t even look at me. All I wanted was for him to read my thoughts. To know that I wanted him to hold me, to kiss me, to lie and tell me everything was all right. But instead, he leaned forward, planting his elbows against his knees, and his hands rounded to the back of his head. Pulling, grasping at his hair. The silence was thick and deadly, choking me with every passing second, and I took it upon myself to make the first move, just to remind myself that I possessed the ability to breathe.

“Patrick, I—”

“I slept with Christine.”

My back straightened at the sound of her name. My mouth went dry, my tongue stuck to my palate, the way it does when gorging on peanut butter. My stomach flipped, and I was afraid I would heave, potentially losing the Easter breakfast I had eaten only hours before. I remembered the ham my mom was cooking—how could I eat anything knowing my boyfriend had his dick inside that long-forgotten bitch?

And then, with a brutal twist of my heart, I remembered he wasn’t my boyfriend. We had broken up, and he had done nothing wrong, except move on from me when I hadn’t even begun to stop crying myself to sleep.

“I, um …” I swallowed at the threats from my scrambled eggs, my jaw slack. “It’s o-okay. We can, um, work—”

“She’s pregnant.”

As though I hadn’t heard him correctly, or perhaps he hadn’t intended to say that word and it was just a slip of the ol’ Irish tongue, I asked him to repeat himself.

“Oh, Jesus, y’heard me, Kinsey. She’s pregnant.”

My response was to clap a hand over my mouth; to prevent a scream or the uprising of vomit, I don’t know which. But, either way, my efforts were proven futile when I involuntarily thrust myself forward and threw up on my shoes.

One of Patrick’s hands had come to lay against my back, rubbing gently as I heaved, while the other held his forehead. He kept his eyes pinched shut, and I was at least grateful for that when I sat up to wipe my sleeve over my mouth. I couldn’t look in those eyes after what he had just told me, after what he had done.

I shrugged his hand off my back, the hand that had touched her. I wanted to run away from him, but my feet were frozen to the spot as my brain struggled, sputtering along, trying to process it all.

“I came here to tell you I had chosen you,” I said, finding my voice and my tears. “I wa-wanted to fix things.”

“Jesus, Kinsey, I can’t do this right now,” he said, shielding his face with his hands.  

“I tried to date a couple guys at school, and I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t get through a single date without thinking about you.” A bubble of heartbreak emerged from my gut, and I sobbed in a blubbery mess. “I fucked up when I broke up with you, I-I know that, but you had already chosen me when you fucked her. How could you do that? I could barely look someone else in the eye, and you fucked her. How could you do that when you’re supposed to love me?”

Patrick sat there, motionless. The only sound he made was the muffled sniffling from behind his hands. He couldn’t let me see him cry. He was too cool, too tough for that.

Stubborn Irish bastard.

There wasn’t any point in staying. There was no fixing things, no taking things back. The damage was done, our mistakes had been made, and on shaky legs, I stood up. I sucked in a deep breath, wishing I could control the tremors that surged through my body, and on my exhale, I looked back at him. Face still hidden, shoulders moving softly.

“Bye, Patrick,” I whispered, and walked away, fists clenched at my sides, my tongue dry and sticking to the roof of my mouth.

I walked next door to my parents’ house. I threw my soiled shoes away, sat through a silent shattered-heart Easter dinner, and I ran away, and didn’t look back.

Not until my father had his heart attack.

Not until I didn’t have a choice, and I didn’t stand a chance.