Chapter Twenty
Veronica
I pulled into Tiffany's driveway, parking behind her car. I sucked down what remained of my iced tea, making the ice rattle against the sides of the wet cup. I had passed on grabbing something to eat on the way here because Tiff and I were getting lunch a little later. The iced tea sloshing in my stomach would hold me over till then. Wasn't that how digestion worked?
I got out and knocked at the door. She answered quickly since she had been expecting me.
"Ready to leave?" I asked immediately.
"What? No, you just got here. Sit," she invited me in. She walked to the living room while I took a detour to the kitchen. I tossed my to-go cup and reflexively opened the fridge.
"I'm starving, what's the holdup?" I shouted. She walked into the kitchen and leaned against the doorframe.
"You think you can have a date with my brother and then not tell me everything?" she asked, smirking.
"What's there to tell? I already said it was good," I said lightly. "Can I have this applesauce?"
"Go ahead," she said. I gratefully ripped the lid off the container and started looking for a spoon to eat it with.
"So?" she said. I shoveled cold applesauce into my mouth innocently.
"So what?" I played dumb. "The date was good. The kind of good I don't think you want to hear about as his sister. I told you already."
"You guys don't talk outside of dates? You haven't called him? He hasn't called you?" she asked. I shrugged.
"We're just starting up again. Besides, we used to go out; this isn't a new relationship where we can't stand to be apart for longer than a night."
"It could be, though. Don't you want that?"
"Tiff, I say this with love," I started, eating some more applesauce, "but have you ever thought that maybe being this interested in your brother's love life might not be all the way normal?"
"You're my best friend, and it's your love life, too. Why? Did something happen?"
"No, nothing happened... At least it... I hope it's nothing."
"I knew something was up. What happened?"
"Can we still sit?" I asked. We made our way back to the living room. She had been leafing through one of the left books we had gotten together at the store the other day, and she moved it to make room for me on the couch.
"Okay, spill."
"Like I said, I don’t think it's a thing."
"But?"
"But last night, he showed up at my apartment. I was happy to see him, of course, after that amazing date we had had. He came because he wanted to talk to me. I was scared. Like, what was it he couldn't say over the phone?"
"What was it?"
"You know that he's trying to play football again, right?"
"Yeah, and?"
"And, he talked to his old coach about it. He said he could get him into a combine next month."
"That's great news. What's wrong with that? How long will he even be gone?"
"It'll last a week, but that’s not what I'm afraid of, Tiff."
"Then what?"
"We both know how good he is. That place will be crawling with scouts; it's practically a guarantee that he catches someone's eye. Fast forward to when he finds out they want to offer him a contract, but he and I are together." I paused.
"You can't think-"
"It happened once before. He was protecting me, remember? What if the team that wants him is based in California, and he for some reason feels like he would rather dump me again than just tell me that?"
"He learned his lesson the last time he did that, Vee."
"It hasn't been long enough for me to believe that's true," I admitted.
"Doesn’t he get any credit for trying to fix things?" she asked. I shot her a dirty look, eating more applesauce. "I'm just saying. He's back and trying to make up for what he did. I think that counts for something."
"That trust took almost three years to build and he broke it in one afternoon. Has it even been a month that we've been talking again? I can't afford to feel safe doing it with him again so soon."
"Have you told him how it felt?" she asked.
"Sort of, here and there."
"Then he knows he hurt you, and honestly, Vee, that's the last thing he wants to do again."
"How do you know?" The applesauce was all gone and now felt like it was bubbling in the bit of my stomach
"Because of everything he's been doing since he got here. He's done nothing but try to fix things. That looks and sounds like he's serious to me."
Once again, I was confused about whose side Tiffany was on. I wanted it to be mine. Did the fact that I didn't want him to dump me again because of some shitty reason mean she actually was on my side? I just couldn't have the faith in him that she had. It wasn't her fault that she had it; it was sort of expected. I envied her for it, but I knew better than her.
"I don't want to regret letting him back in," I grumbled, licking the already clean spoon that I had been eating my applesauce with. A laugh suddenly fought its way up out through my chest.
"What's funny?" Tiff asked.
"I never used to feel this way, isn't that weird? Since we met, Roman has always had football and the army – two things that could have taken him away at any second from me. I never felt insecure about it. I always knew that they were there and that in two seconds flat, outta nowhere, he might have to leave, but I was never scared."
"Not even a little?"
I thought back. It wasn't even the football that had been the problem, it had been the army. I had always thought that when the time came, we'd talk about football. We had been in the same graduating class, which meant that if he did have to travel for a team, I was in a position where I could go with him and that was a step we could see taking together.
We had met and built our relationship on campus grounds, but I never felt like that was what defined it. I never felt like graduation day would be the day we said goodbye and went our separate ways. Call me stupid for believing that what we had would be able to last and mean something in the real world. It had been that big, that serious, and that real…to me anyway.
The army on the other hand... That one had scared me. I knew that when and if the time came, then I'd have to watch him go. I hadn't had a real plan for what I would do, besides write him and try to talk to him as much as I could. All I had known was that it made me nervous and would be miserable, but I knew I would have found a way around that.
So many people had their loved ones deployed and for so many of those people, they managed to make the army and its demands part of their lives. I thought that I could do it, too, if it came down to me needing to. For Roman? I had been willing to do just about anything. I hadn’t cared about needing to make changes and adjustments because that was what being with him meant and I wanted to be with him more than I could even express.
Too bad I was wrong for believing that even if we weren't together physically, I could have relied on the fact that my love and support was being received and reciprocated from wherever he would be.
"I thought that I had no reason to worry. I could be scared of the danger, or the distance, or the loneliness, but I never had to be scared that we would stop being us once we were no longer in the same place," I said, shrugging.
"Could you wrangle up some of that trust right now?"
I could try. I didn't say it out loud.
"That needs to be earned."
"He can't try to earn anything back if you're not giving him a chance," she said. "I was with you when it happened last year, so I'm not insensitive to that. I just want you to remember this hasn't been a fun ride for him, either. He wanted to keep you last time, but made a mistake. Let him talk to you. Once you're both over what happened, then you can stop being so scared."
I didn't know why Tiffany caring for her brother made me so upset. She was in an awkward position, but the girl code trumped the genetic one, didn't it? Maybe it was because it made me jealous that she and I weren't in the same position. She could speak so confidently about Roman, all this great stuff that she knew he would never do. I used to be in that place, too, and I didn't know when I would ever be able to go back.
We headed out to lunch. Tiff wanted Italian, and I could already feel that big plate of pasta sitting in my stomach like a rock. The applesauce snack had taken the edge off my hunger, but now my gut felt like it was burning. I felt anxious and a little sick. I was grateful that I had Tiffany who was always ready to talk, but I wasn't that happy about what we tended to talk about most of the time, especially lately.
Was this making Roman as nervous? What was I thinking, of course not. It was just like last time. It was still his life that was taking him away from me somehow, and it was still just me who had to find a way to deal. He was, once again, the one who would make the decision about what would happen whether he talked to me about it first or not.
"Didn't you have Beckett for Western Civilization?" Tiffany asked me from across the table. She was slicing her fork through an unctuous, cheesy slice of lasagna. I had thought about getting the same, but I didn't get away with food like that the same way she could. It was a lot more of a balancing act for me. I'd have to move up a dress size if I ate the way she did for a week.
"Yeah. Why?" I asked, eating a soft, drenched crouton. Soup was all I could imagine stomaching with the way I had been feeling since leaving Tiff's place.
"He was the one you said you got weird vibes from?" she continued. I froze with my spoon halfway to my mouth.
"What did he do?"
"It's just these comments he makes sometimes," she said lightly. "He's a good teacher, and he doesn't seem like the predatory type, but I don't know how he gets away with being that flirty with his female students."
I laughed a little. College wasn't high school; everyone there was an adult, students and faculty. Sometimes wires crossed. Professor Beckett was in at least his fifties and looked like he had lived every minute of those fifty plus years. He wore a wedding ring, so there was that; with the tweed jackets and thick glasses he wore, too, he came off goofier than anything else. He’d make the comments so flippantly, like this one time I had been in an admittedly lower cut top than usual and when he had greeted me when I came into the classroom, he asked whether all that was for him.
"Has he said anything to you?"
"He pointed out how nice it was to see my beautiful smile this beautiful morning when I went to his office today," she said. That didn't sound that bad, if maybe he was her dad and she was eight years old instead of twenty-one. He was so geeky, maybe that was why he hadn’t gotten hit with any sexual harassment complaints.
She asked me for tips on how I reviewed the course content when I took his class. For me, it had helped to study with a friend. Since we had had the class together, that friend at the time had happened to be Roman. He was so good at popping up right when I least wanted him to.
Not bringing him up was a challenge, but I didn't want him to be the subject of all the conversations the two of us had together. I never even used to think about him as often as this when we were together. It was embarrassing. Tiffany was asking me whether I had any of my old notes from that class, and I was wondering what would happen if Roman did so well at the combine that someone recruited him into a team.
He was a good player, I had watched him. He was the reason I knew anything at all about football – enough to know it wasn't a secret that he was on his way to the pros before his football career was interrupted by his deployment.
Because there was part of me that had never stopped loving him or being his friend, I wanted that for him, so much – but what would it mean for us? I could support his ambition. I remembered that being one of the things that I admired most about him, it still was, but how the hell was I supposed to support something that would take him away from me again?
Did he know he was doing two opposite things at the same time? Why was he trying to be with me and get into a team that would force him to leave me all at once? Did he even realize that was what he was doing? If he did, what was his next move? He had said yesterday that he wanted to talk about it, but now I didn't know I really wanted to hear it.
Tiffany and I split up after lunch, and I went straight home after running a couple errands. All my thoughts had been bringing me back to the same conclusion: don't do it again. Don't let him do it to you again. Stop it because it's going to happen again.
I typed a text message, meaning to send it to him before I deleted it. He deserved more than a text, I'd give him that. What kind of bitch blows someone off with a text? I didn't even want to reschedule, I just wanted to cancel. I tried again, scrolling down to his name in my contact list. I had the slight hope that he wasn't using the same number anymore, but it quickly faded when I remembered just how much I needed to talk to him.
I laughed a little to myself, realizing this was the first time that I was calling his number after a year. It sucked that the first time I was calling was to cancel on him. This time, it was me, not him. If he was another guy, I wouldn't care that he was a soldier and could disappear at any second, or that he was going to the combine where it was very likely that he would get picked up by a team based somewhere that wasn't here.
This was Roman, though. I’d had elaborate fantasies of a life that we could have together. I hadn't just loved him, I had loved our relationship, too. I had loved that the two of us knew each other so well and how solid I thought the two of us were as a couple. Honestly, I loved how much other people seemed to admire our partnership, too. I had felt so secure in what the two of us had and then he had just dropped me one day with no warning.
Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice...and I deserve it that time. I didn't deserve it the first time, and I didn't now. I didn't want to be in a position where I gave him that power again. I used to love that I could be so vulnerable with him, but things were different now. I couldn't count on him for support. When he was gone again, guess who would be alone? Who wouldn't have any help picking up the pieces again and who would be the one thinking back, wondering why she didn't protect her neck?
"Hello?" I said when he picked up.
"Babe, hey. I was just thinking about you."
It slipped off his tongue so easily. He always called me that, but right then it disarmed me a little. Our date and the night we spent together had been so easy and natural until the doubt had crept in and I started to feel guarded again. We were talking now. He was being honest with me about what he wanted and that I was one of those things.
"No, you weren't," I said to him.
"I swear," he said back. "What's up?"
"It's about dinner," I said.
"What about it?" he asked. I took a deep breath. I should have prepared better to talk about this. I didn't want to get emotional. I wanted to say what I had to say without crying. Taking control of what happened between us should have made me feel better, but it wasn't. I didn't want to stop seeing him again, but the risk wasn't worth going through a repeat of last year's summer when he dumped me. I wanted to think the right thing, but I didn't know that it was. All I did know was it was what I had to do – right or not.
"I can't make it tomorrow night."
"Why not?" Another deep breath. An easy way out of this would be to say that something had come up, but I didn't want to say that to him. He deserved the truth.
"I just can't-" I stopped, finding the right words. "I just don't think it's a good idea for us to do that again." He sighed.
"I know it's going to take time for us to get to a place where you trust me again, but, babe, we won't get there at all if we aren't spending time together." His voice was really kind, and I knew what he was saying was right. That didn't change that I was still freaking out.
"I know that, Roman. That's a lot easier said than done."
"Have we been moving too fast?" he asked. We had already slept together again. I shook my head remembering how amazing it had felt, then the rush of uncertainty and fear that had come right after.
"It's not that. I just don't want to do it, okay?"
"No, Ron. That's not okay. Is this about what I said to you yesterday?" he asked. Yes, that with the fact that you dumped me the last time things got tricky. I didn't need him to always choose me. I just needed to know that I was important enough for him to at least consider me in the decision.
"It's more than just that, Roman," I sighed.
"Then let me see you so we can talk about it." I shut my eyes. No, Roman. Just no. I don't know if I can trust you not to do what you did to me, and I don't want to risk it.
"No, Roman," I said quietly.
"Ron, please. Whatever it is, we can't run from it. I can't take no for an answer."
I was quiet, wondering why the hell I had thought it was a good idea to try to fight him on this. I knew what I felt, but what he did was still sort of in the dark for me. He had said he didn't want me to regret trusting him, but didn't he realize the risk I'd have to take getting there in the first place?
"Seven thirty, I'll be at your door," he went on since I hadn't said anything back. "I'm not fucking up again, Ron. I said I would talk to you and we'd figure it out. That's what we're going to do."
He was being remarkably patient with me, even if he wasn't giving me what I wanted. I didn't like the feeling of giving myself over to him again, putting my trust in the fact that he wouldn't hurt me. I didn't like it, but I missed it at the same time. I hadn't been able to feel safe being vulnerable with another guy since, not in this way.
"Fine," I said weakly.
"Thank you, babe," he said. "You won't regret this."
I already did. I looked at the phone until the backlight went out. At least this time, I'd be ready.