High School Sweetheart

"I don’t need that," she protests, but I shake my head.

"Yes, you do," I reply, and she doesn’t argue. She plants herself down on the bottom of the bleachers and I join her. We’re sitting so close our knees are almost touching.

"You remember the first game you played here?" she asks me.

"I remember you cheering for me," I reply. It’s the truth. Most of what I remember from my time in Sweetheart revolves around her. Much as I wish it didn’t. She smiles, and I wonder if she thinks I’m kidding her.

"Would you have done it differently?" she asks me suddenly. I look over at her.

"What do you mean?"

"If you had known how much it was going to hurt when you left," she explains. "Would you have done it differently, do you think?”

"I would never have passed up the chance to love you," I reply bluntly. She tugs my jacket a little tighter around her shoulders. "Would you?" I ask her. "Would you have done it differently? If you had known what was going to happen?”

"I don’t know," she confesses. "It depends why you left in the first place. That’s what I don’t understand. And that’s what’s been driving me crazy all these years."

I look at her, deep into her eyes. There are a few lights on in the parking lot across the field, and they are enough to light up her face. I can see so many questions in there, so many questions that I have failed to answer. I don’t even know where I am meant to start.

So I decide that I’ll try starting with the truth.

I take a deep breath and reach out for her hand. I half expect her to pull it away, but she doesn’t. She eyes me, curious, waiting.

"I wasn’t meant to get attached to this place," I admit. "I...when I came here, it was because my father wanted me to have a year of normal life. Something that I could hang onto after I went back to him, and after I became a part of the family business for good."

"The family business?" she asks. I nod. I have avoided talking to her about this side of things as much as I could, but it looks as though there is no way for me to avoid it now.

"My father," I reply. "He runs – he runs a cartel."

I let the words hang in the air between us, waiting for her to react. She stares at me.

"Then how the hell did you end up in Sweetheart?” she blurts out.

"My father sent me here, from Boulder," I explain. "One last year of normality before he took me on for good. I wanted to get down to business with him, but at the same time, I knew that before I did, I needed to know what everyone else got to experience."

"So you were always going to leave?" she asks softly. I nod.

"I didn’t want to tell you anything," I confess. "I knew that you wouldn’t let me go, and there was no way that I was going to let what I was involved in get in the way of you living your life. You had a whole plan in front of you, I didn’t want to mess that up..."

"So you just left?" she demands. I can see some of the anger there again, the hurt. I wish that I could take it from her, carry it for her instead, but I know it’s not that easy.

"I had to go back," I reply. "They would have come looking for me, and I couldn’t bring that to your door. Or to Sweetheart. I was always going to leave, but I didn’t intend to leave you behind, too."

I can still remember, all too vividly, the day that I left. After prom. When I had packed up my stuff and left without a word to the woman that I loved, and I returned to Boulder. I had struggled so long and so hard with that choice, but it was the only one that would keep her safe. She wouldn’t want to be caught up in my world. She should never be subjected to it.

I had cried on the plane back to my father. I never let myself cry – not since then, not before. But the thought of her back here, thinking that I had left her, that I had abandoned her to her life here, was more than I could take.

"You went back to that?" she asks me. She sounds shocked. I suppose I should take that as a compliment – she doesn’t think that I could be capable of anything like that.

But in truth, she doesn’t have any idea just what I am capable of. And I know that she will never be able to understand it. I don’t want her to. I want her to know this new version of me – and I know that I will not be able to let go of her until I am sure that she does.