Dear Heart, I Hate You

Because my heart is stupid, something inside me whispered.

Stupid heart. I hate you.

“Can I trust you not to do anything dumb?” Tami asked as she held my phone just out of my reach.

“Yes,” I snapped as I reached for it, but she pulled it away.

She grinned as she handed it to me and I grabbed it, quickly scanning for any text message notifications. None appeared, not even from work.

I glanced at Tami and typed out a quick message.

Jules: Say something, Cal. Please. Anything is better than this silence.

Tami’s eyes grew huge. “Shit, what are you doing?”

I pressed Send on the message before anything could stop me, even myself. But when he didn’t respond, all I wanted to do was go back in time and take it back.

Damn it.

I had no self-control when it came to him and my lust for answers, especially when I’d been drinking. When I was sober, I could at least talk myself out of texting him, but drunk, all bets were off. It was as if I came unhinged and let control fly out the window.

But Cal had answers that I wanted. And drunk Jules was apparently relentless, and a little needy.

“Nothing,” I tried to lie.

“What the hell did yo

u just send him?”

I shook my head. “Don’t be mad. It was the last one.”

“The last one? Yeah, right.” She rolled her eyes.

“It was. I mean it,” I said, trying to convince her.

Cal had been silent for too long, too many days in a row. It was sad, how even when you expected the disappointment, it still hurt, still stung. It was a feeling I didn’t want to get used to.

I was such a sap, still holding on to a thread of hope, no matter how small that thread was. There was always a chance that he’d respond to a text after I’d sent one. But as minutes turned to hours, and hours turned to days, it was obvious that he never would.

How could he walk away so easily? How could he ignore me like I didn’t exist? And why did he want to? What happened? The questions compounded inside my mind as the answers never came. How was I supposed to get past this when I had no idea what went wrong?

It was all well and good to involve your heart in love again when things were going well. But holy hell, when things went bad . . . I found myself wishing I’d never even cracked open the door to peer outside. Life had been so much easier feeling nothing for a guy, although it was far less satisfying.

That was the trade-off—you could close your heart to love forever, but you’d miss out on all the good that came with giving and receiving love. You had to decide if it was worth the risk.

And was it?

I’d like to say that I’d made the choice, that I had consciously decided the risk was worth the impending pain, but the truth was that the choice was made for me. There was no other option when it came to Cal. I’d been all in since the day I first met him in that hotel lobby.

Who we loved wasn’t always a choice. Sometimes it was an irresistible pull, a gravitational force, something we couldn’t see or control that drew us toward another. Sure, we could try to fight it. But in the end, love always won because it didn’t fight fair. It had a secret weapon, a tool of sheer force to use against us—our heart.

And once that son of a bitch got involved, you could kiss away all options you thought might exist.

Brutal Silence

Jules

Each new morning, I woke up with a twisted sort of renewed positivity that restored my depleted hope from the night before. Would Cal be able to go another twenty-four hours without talking to me? That’s what my brain wondered, the question my heart always asked. I was convinced it would be an impossible task.