28. The Past Isn’t So Far Behind Us

28

THE PAST ISN’T SO FAR BEHIND US

brISTOL

C hristmas is a rough time for me. Everything reminds me of Summit, even when I don’t want to think about her. Since she passed, I’ve only celebrated it in moderation with the guys. They know how hard the month of December is for me, so they keep the festivities to a minimum, or they spend the holidays with their families. I’ve told them time and again that they don’t have to dampen their excitement for my sake, but they’re just good guys, you know?

This is the first time that Christmas hasn’t felt like a funeral, and that’s all thanks to Lila. I’ve been so busy soaking up the love from this new relationship that I haven’t had time to wallow in the past. I know it sounds cheesy, but it doesn’t feel like I’m merely surviving the holidays anymore. It feels like I can finally start new traditions—like I can let go of the grief and look back on Summit’s memory with gratitude rather than a foreboding sense of sorrow.

While I’m helping my parents with dinner preparations, a familiar ping emanates from my pocket, and the screen of my phone blinks to life with an incoming text from Lila.

LILA: Can you come upstairs ?

I’m not sure why Lila needs me to come upstairs, but anything’s better than shucking corn. I get up from the table, try to stride across the room and up the stairs without looking too relieved, and finally nudge the door open. I’m not sure what I was expecting, but I wasn’t prepared to see her holding Summit’s engagement ring in her palm like one unbalanced scale.

“What is this?” she asks, the betrayal in her tone falling hard and heavy like a bomb from the hemorrhaging sky.

No, no, no. This wasn’t—this isn’t how it was supposed to happen. I was going to tell her.

I shuffle through fear, self-directed anger, guilt…and I hate it when I land on the knee-buckling latter. I’m so wired with disbelief that I don’t console her as I threaten to demolish the metaphorically thin ice beneath both our feet. “Lila, I can explain?—”

“Explain what, exactly? Why you kept your ex-fiancée’s engagement ring? Or how you kept it a secret from me?” she growls, shelving whatever shock she felt in the moment and trading it for a fury that won’t run out.

“I swear, I wanted to tell you?—”

“God, I’m so fucking stupid. You—you told me yourself that you didn’t want to hurt me again! And I…oh, my God, I’m the idiot who believed you.”

“That was all true! I should’ve come clean about it when I told you about Summit, okay? I kept trying to find the right moment to tell you, but then we were finally in a good place, and I didn’t want to ruin that. I didn’t want to upset you.”

“Great going, Bristol. Truly. Don’t use me as a scapegoat for your fucking oversight. You knew I’d be upset. You weren’t trying to be the good guy. You were being selfish, hanging on to something that clearly wasn’t real between us. ”

I recoil slightly, my breath vacating me in a disbelieving burst. “How could you say that?”

“Say what? The truth?” she thunders, the blue of her eyes turning a woolly grey akin to the icy slush outside. “You’ve been clinging to your past the entire time we were together. I can’t—I can’t believe you! I don’t even know how much of our relationship was genuine.”

“All of it!”

“How can you say that when Summit was the third wheel. Or was I the third wheel?”

I don’t guard my tongue when I lash out, even though I should. I’m the one in the wrong here, not her. “Of course you weren’t! I’ve been more honest with you about my feelings than you have been with yours,” I snap. “You never let the fact that I was almost engaged go. You could never just…just believe me when I reassured you time and again that you were the only person I wanted.”

“You’re right. I couldn’t believe you. You were going to marry this woman, Bristol. You were in love with this woman. And she was taken from you in the worst possible way, without allowing you closure.”

I don’t allow her an interval of response time before stomping over and facing her head-on. “ Past tense, Lila. And the ring— fuck , you just jumped to conclusions without even trying to talk this through. There’s a reason it’s up here in Big Bear. There’s a reason it isn’t back in Riverside with me. The fact that you were so quick to accuse me of faking my feelings for you means that you never believed them in the first place.”

Lila and I have had arguments before, sure, but something about this one seems different. It seems…irreversible. I don’t know how to explain it, but it’s just this gut feeling I have. My stomach upturns and bile rushes my throat, my conviction cr umbling like a delicate piece of marzipan. Her gaze is a firebrand as it sears into my pathetic layer of armor, and she squares her shoulders, looking far more intimidating than any foe I’ve ever faced before. Her indignation is a spark wheel in complete darkness, rolling, rolling, and rolling until the lighter catches aflame.

But I don’t do the wise thing and concede. I don’t do the right thing and concede.

“Summit’s a part of my past, Lila. I can’t just get rid of her,” I confess quietly, my vision winking in and out of bleary clarity.

I’m not sure how I expected Lila to respond, but I’m caught off guard when moisture wells in her eyes. Her lower lip trembles—dented in the middle where she must’ve been biting it—and her entire posture shrinks, bled dry of the dominance that she wielded like a loaded gun.

“I know that, but I’m not her , Bristol. I’ll never be her.” Her voice cracks, and her cheeks are now caked in tears that continue to fall at an impossibly fast rate. She’s shaking, retreating backward, trying to evade my line of sight. I wish I could say this is the first time I’ve seen her like this, but it’s not.

My own face is wet before I realize I’m crying. “I want you .”

“Do you?” She sniffles, features pinched with a hurt that I can never imagine, eyes retelling a story that I never wanted to reexperience. “Because it feels like I’m competing with a ghost. I feel like you’re always comparing me to her.”

I thought we had fixed things. I thought I had made things better when I got her to open up to me about her insecurities, but I guess I was wrong.

“I…” My sense of reasoning here is clearly misguided, and it supersedes the emotion that’s caught my heart in a riptide. I’ve been in two relationships now and still don’t understand when to prioritize feelings over rationality.

“I don’t compare you to her” is all I say. A stupid, pathetic response. A response designed to fix things rather than to hear her out.

“I can’t keep doing this with you. I can’t keep… competing …for your love.”

“What are you talking about? I feel like I’m the one still chasing after you! I feel like you’re not ready for things to be serious between us. You always find a problem in things that aren’t perfect. News flash, Lila, our relationship will never be perfect. I’m the one who’s competing against some impossible standard.”

“What standard, Bristol? We’re not even on the same playing field! All I’ve done is beg you to want me.”

“And I do! I fucking do! But you refuse to believe me!” I scream as vertigo causes the room to spin and sucks every last morsel of energy out of my body. I feel like I can’t breathe. I can’t…my heart can’t take this pain anymore.

Her tears are quiet as they track down her face. Her chest doesn’t spasm with hiccups or sobs—she doesn’t even bother with wiping the residue off her pale skin. Her fight is… gone . She just stands in front of me, baring her bloody heart to me on her sleeve after I’ve done nothing but rip it apart with my bare hands. I wish she was yelling at me, hitting me, doing anything to punish me…but her silence is what lands the killing blow.

“How can I believe you when you wouldn’t even be with me if she were still alive?”

I can’t believe she just said that. Is she serious right now? She always loves to place the blame on me when she’s clearly the one creating problems out of nothing. How could she even insinuate something like that? She’s not being fair.

Silence becomes a failsafe for my guilt, and it becomes a crutch for Lila’s sadness. But it’s not comforting. We don’t sit and bask in each other’s company like we used to. We’re strangers again—strangers who’ve outlived the expiration date of their failed relationship. A relationship that was doomed from the start.

My jaw steels tight. “You’re the one comparing yourself to her. Not me. Don’t put that shit on me,” I argue, trying to wrangle the last bit of tranquility I have left before succumbing to the current of rage humming underneath my skin.

A cold, painfully distant veneer greets me, and she withholds the closeness I’ve started to take for granted. “What else am I supposed to think? You say that she’s just a memory from your past, yet you still hold on to her like she’ll magically come back to you—like you’ll magically resume the life you’ve always wanted with her. Love shouldn’t be this fucking hard, Bristol!”

“You think this is hard? Hard is losing someone you love. Hard is blaming yourself every day for letting down the one person that you were supposed to protect in this world. You don’t know the first thing about hard.”

The look of betrayal on Lila’s face makes my stomach heave. Her jaw falls open to say something, but no words materialize. She’s a second away from losing that vise grip on her emotions—a second away from grabbing her things and marching right out the door into the unending snow. She’s a second away from reconsidering this whole relationship altogether. I don’t want to give her the chance to run. I don’t want to give her the chance to break my heart, so I beat her to it, taking the coward’s way out like I always do.

I stumble backward, pawing at the wetness on my cheeks, giving in to my flight response after my fight’s been stretched thin. Everything’s hitting me all at once. There’s nowhere I can run where my mistakes don’t play in an endless loop. There’s nowhere I can hide where guilt doesn’t follow me.

The sickening taste of sulfur froths in my mouth. “I can’t do this right now, and there’s nothing I can say that will make you think any differently. ”

I storm toward the door before she can stop me, refusing to look back because once I get a glimpse of the future that I’ve just compromised, I won’t be able to leave. With my back to her, the dam in my eyes suffers an earth-shattering crack, and the tears rush out with a force that I’ve never experienced before.

“Of course you’re going to give up,” Lila says, her voice a register just above inaudible, thick with so much grief that I can choke on it from here. “You always walk away when things get tough.”