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My eyes widened. Delicious girl. I fisted the back of her hair and brandished her neck, planting my tongue at the base and licking all the way up to her jaw. It just seemed like the right thing to do. You know…to help with the show Kai was putting on. Besides, this was my neck. She needed to know that I was the last person who’d touched her. Her breath hitched as I tasted her, and she tripped backward into me. I took a few more bites from her skin before removing my hand from her hair and lacing my fingers through hers.
Mustering every bit of sense I had, I turned to Caroline to say what I decided would be the last words I ever spoke to her. “Look, Caroline. I did my best, okay? I wanted to be with you. I tried to make you feel loved. I didn’t do a very good job, and I am sorry for that. But it is not, nor has it ever been, my responsibility, nor that of anyone else, to fill the gaping black hole that is your self-esteem.”
And with that, we left. “Enjoy your gym freak” or something of the sort was shouted behind us.
Chapter 25
Jonah
I woke up thinking about Caroline for the first time in years. It took me a minute to realize why. I knew she was there last night, but I couldn’t remember any of the specifics. Sleep must’ve reset my brain entirely. My body, not so much. Not only was I in pain, but I was also practically fully dressed. I lifted my blanket to see the open button-down hanging off the sides of my stomach and the unzipped jeans that sat around my hips.
Fuck, my head hurt.
There was no movement from Kai’s edge of the room. Assuming she was still resting, I took the opportunity to lie in bed and stare at the ceiling for a few quiet moments, pulling my covers back over me. I replayed my last real interaction with Caroline, before last night, before the breakup, in my head.
Happy Valentine’s Day, I had texted her. She knew I didn’t care much for the holiday, and she claimed she didn’t either. Still, I didn’t feel there was any reason not to recognize it at all. She was my first real relationship. My first valentine.
She didn’t text back for an hour. Truthfully, I’d forgotten I even sent the message by the time I got a reply.
Nerd, she answered. We said we weren’t going to celebrate.
I chuckled at that. When things were good with Caroline, they were good. But when things were bad…
I know. But I still wanted to let you know I’m thinking about you. I wasn’t really. I was and I wasn’t. I couldn’t figure out if the issue was that I was just a distracted and distant person, or if I simply didn’t like her that much. She said she didn’t mind the way I was, she said she was okay with my personality. But by the end of it, I had this suspicion that she was so angry with me all the time because she thought my loser tendencies would allow her more control than they actually did. I don’t know. Maybe I was just being paranoid, but she really hated it when I put up boundaries.
Don’t go soft on me now. I chuckled again. How innocent I’d been. I’ll see you tomorrow when this silly holiday is over.
She didn’t want to hang out that day. She said she rejected the holiday so much that she boycotted it entirely by spending the whole day doing whatever she wanted alone. It sounded empowering. A little dramatic and self-righteous, but empowering. Plus it meant I could have the apartment to myself and work on music while Oli and June ran around town together, so I was more than happy to leave her to it and hear all about it the next day.
But I never got to hear all about it, because Caroline forgot to block Tiff from seeing her Instagram stories. She remembered me, of course, Kai, Oli, June, Noah, and even my parents. But she forgot Tiff. And we saw those stories. All of them.
It wasn’t the first time I’d suspected Caroline was keeping secrets from me. My effort dwindled every time she seemed to lie about her whereabouts, every time her phone chimed and she angled it away from me to respond. I wasn’t jealous or overbearing—quite the opposite, really—but she acted like I was. Sometimes just asking what her plans were for the day turned into an argument about my nosiness. I could never figure her out. When I wanted to be alone, she practically tugged on my arm for attention, and when I gave her attention, she didn’t really seem to care for it.
And it always went the same way. I’d leave her alone for a few hours, and then she’d text, apologizing for her behavior, saying she was unwell mentally. I knew that and I wanted to support that. I wasn’t well either, and I did my best.
Was my best any good? Maybe not. But it was all I could give. I tried and tried and tried, until I saw those stories she posted on Valentine’s Day.
Out to dinner alone, my ass.
I learned from Kai that love takes compromise, and that sometimes you need to understand that being with someone is making room for another person in your life. Something I’m not very good at. Something Kai, historically, had been too good at. Never would I let a person come in and take over my life entirely as she did.
And forgive me for saying it, but it’s true and she knows that.
But I did take a grain of that knowledge into my relationship with Caroline. I did make space for her. I did understand that a relationship might feel weird and new, and that I needed to open myself up to it. But for her to cheat? To wake up every day unsure if it would be a good day or a bad day for months just for her to make excuses to see someone else behind my back?
No, thanks.
I learned a lot from that relationship, but one lesson that stuck with me, one that I could never shake, was that taking a chance, as I’d done on Caroline, was a big fucking mistake. Romance, it seemed, only pried people apart. It showed their worst colors. I’d seen it with Kai, too. I’d seen how her relationship went down, down, much further than my own. I didn’t want that for myself. I didn’t want it for either of us.
I finally lifted myself up to see if Kai was awake. Her bed sheets were in the exact same position they were in last night when we left the house, slightly curled up in the corner from when she’d shoved them aside to come wrestle with me before we went out.
Meaning she slept with me after we got home…
Had I really been so drunk that I’d forgotten we fell asleep together? I was having an obscene amount of trouble piecing together the flashes in my mind, and nausea began creeping into my chest. When the door to our bedroom finally cracked open and she walked in with a tray, something hit me.
I stared at her blankly, digging into the deepest crevices of my brain to try and remember exactly what happened last night. I wasn’t sure, but I felt a heavy guilt, an anxiety, that I’d probably done something wrong. It was a feeling I usually got when I let myself drink and have fun, which is half the reason I almost never did it, but today it felt heavier.
What had I done and where did this pit in my stomach come from?
