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“Remind me why I called you again.”
“Oh sorry, were you looking to commiserate?”
“Guess not.” I sigh. “I’m fucking done Tara. I can’t do this again.”
“I know.” Her voice is gentle over the phone. “I’m so sorry about this. I’m sorry this is where you’re at.”
“I know you are.” But I don’t want an apology from her.
“Logan,” she says slowly. “San Diego is not cursed. I think you look at it as your place of failure. You look at it as the place you fucked up because your heart wasn’t in it. But that doesn’t make you a failure. It makes you human. And it wasn’t our first time there, either. It’s like you blocked out how many times we went throughout the years, and how many times we won.”
We went almost every year that we were partners.
“It’s okay to step away from things, but you seem to be harboring the most guilt about it. Yes, Julie brought something back to you with dance. She livened you up, that’s for sure. But that doesn’t have anything to do with dance and whether you keep going or not. Even if you don’t do San Diego, you’ve still got her, don’t you?”
“I don’t know.” But I think about her words to me once, how it didn’t matter what happened, I would still have her. How she didn’t hold up her end of the bargain, and how I expected her to when I should have known better.
“Really?” She doesn’t sound convinced. “I’d bet that she’s scared and probably overwhelmed. But she’s not looking to get rid of you. Give her a minute.”
My sigh on the line must echo its annoyance.
“I know I said before I didn’t want you to give it up, but maybe that was my own sadness talking. I don’t know. I think … you’re allowed to let this go. Not that you need my approval anyway,” she adds. “You can let this go. It was an era of your life and now it can be over.”
Why have I held onto San Diego so much? I gave the bare minimum when I competed, and I assumed I would scrape by fine. But when I didn’t, all it did was confirm that it was time for me to go. And maybe it felt like I was being pushed out.
But I pushed myself out.
“Let me know when you make it to Arizona, okay?”
She exhales loudly on the phone. “I will.”
“Thanks, Tara,” I mumble, and I can almost feel the smile on the other line. With that, I hang up.
***
“What are you stilldoing up?” Gavin asks when he gets in late from work and finds me on the couch with a mostly eaten pizza pie. Fuck, how the tables have turned.
“Julie bailed on San Diego.”
“Oh, shit,” he says, surprised. “You okay?” He drops his keys on the table and undoes his tie. The apartment immediately smells like a fryer, that distinct restaurant smell that somehow gets plastered onto his clothes, embedded in the fibers.
“Not really.”
“You … want to talk about it?” He shuffles closer to the couch.
“Not really.”
“Want to watch a new documentary?”
“You know, I always felt like I had let you down. When I didn’t even place last year, I thought, Gavin helped me with this. He made sure I could keep taking those classes and I failed him.”
He furrows his brows. “Is that what you think?”
“You’ve always been my biggest fan. I know that. And that’s always made fucking up harder with you around. And failing at something I was once so good at? That fucking sucked.”
“But you know I was proud of you no matter what,” he reminds me.
“Doesn’t make it any easier.”
