California Dreamin'

It hurt when you left...

It more than hurt when he left.

It almost destroyed me. It’s a time in my life I don’t like to think about. I don’t like to revisit the first few months after he left.

And I’m not going to do that now either.

“Why what?”

“Why I moved across the country for you. I’m too dumb to understand that, aren’t I? Why I chose to come to California, and even though I’m here, why it hurts when you hang up on me or when you refuse to see me. I’m too dumb to understand why, despite being mad at you for ignoring me, I can’t stop myself from worrying about you. About how all you ever do is work, how you’ve distanced yourself from everyone. Of course, I can’t understand any of that, can I? Because I’m just so fucking dumb.”

“Language. Watch it.” He grits his teeth, somehow angrier than before. Livid, even.

“I’m not a fucking kid,” I almost shriek. “Do you understand that, Dean? I just told you I moved across the country for you. That I uprooted my life so I could be close to you, and this is what you say to me?” I shake my head and cross my arms, hugging myself, protecting myself against him. “Just because you’re older doesn’t mean you get to boss me around like you’re my dad.”

I take a step back when he closes the distance between us. All I can see is the wide expanse of his carved chest, his massive shoulders in the crisp white shirt. My breath hitches when he bends down to look me in the eyes. Like a pathetic fool, I admire his long, curled lashes. Instead of turning away from him, I breathe deep, so I can capture his citrusy smell, like I’ll never get to do that again. I probably won’t.

“And just because you wear dresses that barely cover your ass, doesn’t mean you get to throw tantrums like a little girl.”

God.

God. He makes me so mad.

“You know what? Get out of my room.”

“Happily.” He straightens up. “I want you out there, at the table. In five minutes. Don’t keep me waiting.”

Fifteen years ago, a girl asked me to marry her.

I was seventeen and she was three. It was a joke. A story you tell over Christmas dinners or at family gatherings. A story you laugh over for some time and move on. I’m very well aware of that.

I’ve always been aware of that.

But for some strange reason, I haven’t been able to forget it. I haven’t been able to forget the hope shining in her eyes or the way her face crumpled when I told her she’d feel differently when she grew up. We bet on it, by hooking our pinkies together. And then she ran away because someone called her name and waved a gift wrapped in pink glitter paper. It was her birthday and Fallon loves pink.

For some strange reason, I don’t tell this story to anyone. I don’t share it over a meal or laugh at it like I thought I would. Or I should.

I keep it close to my chest like it means something. Like it was real. A three-year-old girl proposing to a seventeen-year-old boy.

I’m sick; I’m aware of that as well.

I call myself that every day. Every minute of every day, in fact. Especially when I hear her voice over the phone and heat grips every part of my body. It wraps itself around my limbs and doesn’t let go. Thoughts—wrong thoughts—and longings surface in my brain, my gut. My fucking heart.

Avoidance and throwing myself into my work are the only keys when it comes to Fallon and the things I feel for her.

It started as a strange protective instinct. I couldn’t see her sad. I couldn’t see her battle the bad days. It hurt something inside my chest when she’d come home from school crying. Saying she didn’t want to go. Saying she had no friends because it was so hard to keep up with them.

As she grew up, that protective instinct grew with her. But along the way, it took on an edgier turn. It became possessiveness. It became the need to hide her from the world and keep her for myself. Keep her smiles, her laughter, her heart for myself.

Nobody has made me feel even close to how Fallon does. Nobody has inspired my heart to beat or my soul to fucking sing, for lack of a better word.

She’s the one. An eighteen-year-old slip of a girl with silver hair and gray eyes.

And I can’t stop staring at her.

We’ve stopped for the night at a hotel. Tomorrow we’ll reach New York and that’s for the best. I can’t take it anymore. I can’t take us traveling together.

The moment she came up with the idea of a road trip, I knew it was going to be a disaster on my sanity. I imagined her in the seat beside me, the leather sticking to her soft, pale thighs. Her shifting, adjusting herself. Her sighs, her smell.