Why the hell did I make Travis leave?

He made me feel so good. He made my body and my heart feel things I haven’t felt in so long.

Things I’ve only ever felt for him. Things I felt when I was younger, when he was the first boy I felt them for.

But maybe letting him in was a mistake. He had a key to my house, but that doesn’t mean I should have let him in.

Protect your heart, love, my dad’s always told me.

Right now, I’m being reckless.

But part of me wishes I hadn’t given him the ring back.

Shit.

I watch Travis as he walks away, between our two yards. They say fences make good neighbors, but he’s a good neighbor without that boundary between our homes.

I go over to my desk and grab my phone. I need to cancel my date with Colin. I can still feel Travis’ touch on my shoulders.

I can’t go out with Colin.

It wouldn’t be fair. To anyone.

I can’t imagine Colin is particularly happy about me cancelling at the last minute, but he takes it fine and tells me he’ll see me at work on Monday.

I turn my light off and flop onto my bed face-down, closing my eyes.

Could I have saved Travis? Should I have lied and said he was with me all night the night everything happened? Would it have mattered?

Why would he have confessed to something he didn’t do?

I have the house to myself tonight. Mom and Dad are out with a few other couples, at a dinner with people they went to high school with.

The only person I’m still really friends with from highschool is Sarah. Grabbing my phone, I text her to tell her I’m coming over tomorrow morning with bagels.

It’s still early, but I lay back and close my eyes. My phone interrupts me slipping off to slumber, and it’s a text from Travis.

Goodnight, it says simply.

I don’t want to dream of him. I want him right next to me, by my side. I want to fall asleep in his arms, because that’s what feels so good.

But I don’t know if I can.

I keep thinking back to the ring he gave me. I wish I’d given it back sooner. I wish I still had it, though, at the same time.

I close my eyes. I try to go back to the night of his 18th birthday. But I can’t. The dream is over. It ended the night he lied to me. The night he lied to my dad. To everyone.

But I don’t know if I can turn away from him.

* * *

“Is it too early to start drinking?”

Sarah calls down to me from her terrace as I get out of my car with a bag of piping hot bagels. She holds up two glasses of frothy orange juice spiked with a little bit of champagne and takes a sip from one of them.

When I get up to her apartment, I remember how much I want to move out of my parents’ place. But something’s still stopping me. It’s the way my room feels, it’s the way I’m able to look across the lawn and see something in Travis’ window even when I know he’s not there.

“I’m out here!” Sarah motions for me to join her. Her place is lovely; it’s in a small apartment complex on the main drag near the train station. There’s a lot of young professionals here and it’s in a good location if you want to go to the city for a show or a nice dinner.

My favorite part of it is the view. I step out onto the terrace and take in the serene skyscape of the rolling hills dotted with the trees of early autumn and the river gently rolling against the rocky banks butting up against the train tracks.

“Nice morning,” I say, gathering my sweater up around me and putting the bag of bagels down on the low glass table. I take a seat and grab one of the hot coffee mugs she has waiting for me.

“I don’t know how you’re able to leave your house without coffee first,” she says, shrugging the straps of her nightgown up on her shoulders.

“I’m not an addict like you.” I laugh and sip the hot liquid slowly, blowing softly before every sip.

We chat for a few minutes about work. She’s an engineering lecturer at the technical university the next county over. She doesn’t look like an engineer, though. If you’d see her on the street you’d think she was a model or a billionaire’s girlfriend.

“You have lots of paperwork to fill out, I heard.” Sarah moves away from the banister at the edge of the terrace and slips down into a chair, putting her legs up on the edge of the railing.

I want to tell her what happened with Travis last night. I want to tell her so badly; I need to. But the words don’t come. Because as much as I want to tell her we’re back together and it’s like nothing happened, that just isn’t the truth.

We aren’t back together. Everything is not okay. I still don’t know if last night was a mistake, but all I know is that I dreamed about him. He’s filled my waking thoughts for the past year, and last night, he filled my dreams too.

I’m screwed.

“What are you hiding?” Sarah looks over at me and takes a sip of her mimosa. “How was your date with Colin last night?”

I exhale heavily and grab a bagel from the bag, shaking my head. A soft breeze comes off the Hudson River and a light chill goes through my spine. Winter is almost here. I can feel it in my bones before I feel it on my skin. It’s like Travis in that way. I can feel it inside me, plates moving deep inside, before I even know what’s happening. He gets into my bones. He feels good there. He reminds me of something bigger than myself.

“I didn’t go on the date with Colin,” I confess quickly. I swallow a bite of my bagel and Sarah chuckles lightly, pushing her long blonde hair away from her face with her slender fingers.

“You know it’s rude to cancel so last-minute, right?”

She’s scolding me, but she’s right. And even though she’s scolding me, she’s also playing around.

“I know it’s rude. That’s why I don’t do it very often.”

“You could have avoided all of this if you’d just said no in the first place.”

I take another sip of my coffee and put my mug down on the table.

“I know,” I say plainly. “He’s just very persistent, and I thought maybe I’d try going out with him as a friend, you know? It was just a movie.”

“It wasn’t even a movie,” she replies. “It was almost a movie. It was a movie before you cancelled.”

“Right.”

“And why did you do it?”

I narrow my eyes and focus on the trees swaying across the river. Everything looks calm, like the trees don’t know they’re about to lose all of their leaves for the winter. They don’t know they’re about to be stripped bare. It’s kind of sad, and a small dolor hits me in the chest.

I look down at my hands and swallow thickly, shaking my head.

“Travis texted me.”

A silence descends over our breakfast, and all I can hear is the slow, steady rumble of the river and the clanking of glass against the coffee table as Sarah puts her drink down.

“Why does that have anything to do with Colin?” Her words are patient. She already knows the answer. She already knows what I’m not saying. But that’s why she’s a good friend. She asks me questions so I can figure things out for myself, not because she wants to figure me out. It’s so I can do the hard work for myself.

Sometimes I need that little nudge.

She’s right.

“Sarah.” I take a deep breath and sigh. The air smells like dirt and fresh, sparkling lumber being set ablaze in a wood-burning fireplace and keeping someone warm. “I don’t know what’s wrong with me. All he’s done is lie. And that’s when he actually talks to me. Do you know that he never called me once when he was in jail?”

Tear prick at the corners of my eyes and I fight them back, swallowing past the lump forming in my throat. We never spoke about him when he was in jail.

“Every word out of his mouth is a lie. I don’t know what to believe. He made me doubt everything.”

Sarah scoots her chair over to me until our knees touch. It’s like our way of holding hands when one of us needs it.

“You have to talk to him. And you have to give him time.” She looks out over the Hudson as the wind plays with her long hair, before looking over to me, her lips pulled down slightly at the corners. But her eyes are shimmering with a bit of something else. I can almost swear it’s...mischief. “Do you still have feelings for him?”

I do still have feelings for him. But it’s not just affection anymore.

Now it’s anger, and resentment, and regret. And worst of all, it’s confusion and disbelief.

I nod slowly and wipe the corners of my eyes with my fingertips. For some reason, a smile tugs at the corners of my mouth.

“Yeah,” I say. “Yeah, I do.”

Sarah looks out over the river and the trees and pats my knee, saying nothing. We just sit in silence and take in the view, and I start to contemplate how the hell I’m going to move forward.

How the hell I’m going to be able to do this.

Get over him, move on from him. That would be the easier option, I think. I could move down to the city like I’ve always wanted to. I could move to Boston like I’ve always considered. Everything would be easy compared to the little thing that’s still tugging my heart back to him.

The hard part is going to be letting him back in.