I squeezed my eyes shut. I felt like there was a ticking time bomb on my lap. One wrong move and I would’ve lost everything that mattered. I had to lay it all on the line. I made sure to keep my voice clear but soft, so Hannah was the only one who could hear me. I started spewing things out that I never thought I’d dredge up to another living person.
“When my dad left my mom, like when he walked out on our family, it didn’t faze her at all. She acted as if it was no loss to any of us. ‘Good riddance’ or whatever.” My brain told me to shut up, but my heart needed me to keep going. “She used to tell me and my brothers all the time-never get too attached to anyone or anything. Never need something so much that you won’t be able to function anymore if you lose it.”
I raised my head. She was looking at me. She looked like she was really listening, like she was really hearing me. Which made it easier for me to continue. “Hannah, if I lost you… If you left me-” I bit my lower lip. I couldn’t even remember the last time I cried (probably more than a decade ago), but despite being in public, I was barely holding back my tears. “I wouldn’t know what to do.”
“Ellie…” She looked so torn. I was being selfish. In response to her telling me what she needed, I told her what I needed. I would’ve done absolutely anything else for her, anything other than letting her go. “I don’t know what you want me to say to that.”
“I just want a chance.” I hoped my eyes were helping convey everything my words were struggling to express.
“A chance?” She squinted at me, confused.
“A chance to really be with you. For us to be together-together.” She tilted her head to one side. Incredulity colored her entire face. “I’ve never wanted to be with anyone, I never thought I would. But I know I want to be with you,” I finally confessed what I should’ve said to her a long, long time ago. “I’m sorry it took me so long to realize how much I care about you.”
The fieriness of her sudden anger surprised me. Clearly, what I was asking her for made her mad. If we were alone, I knew she would’ve been shouting. Although she kept her voice low, her words were infused with rage.
“Do you know how fucked up this is?” I was going to answer ‘yeah,’ but she didn’t let me. She had something to say and she was going to say it. “I tell you I love you, you say nothing. Then you blow up my phone for weeks, then you show up at my place drunk, accusing me of having someone in my apartment,” she recounted and embarrassment seared my skin. “Then you come back the next day, telling me I’m confused about being in love with you? Now you’re here, telling me you want to be with me… Seriously, what’s this game you’re playing?”
“It’s not a game.”
“I wasn’t confused about my feelings for you, Ellie, they were my feelings,” she stressed sharply. “They weren’t yours to explain away.” She glared at me and for the nth time, I cursed myself and my stupid mouth. “But right now, I am confused, so fucking confused. What are you trying to do here? Why are you such a head-fuck?”
“You don’t know how badly I wish I could take back what I said, it was so stupid,” I acknowledged. All the callous words I’d uttered were going to haunt me for the rest of my life. “I was so stupid.”
“I’m trying my best to move on. Why are you making it so hard for me?” She cast her gaze down to the wooden table. “You keep messing with me and I really need you to stop. You have no idea how difficult this whole thing has been.”
Oh, but I did-I really, really did.
“Listen to me,” I begged. “I’m really not messing with you.” I hated myself for hurting her. I knew I didn’t deserve her, but I wasn’t going to give her up without a fight. “I know I’m asking for a lot, but I need you to give me a chance.” She still wasn’t looking at me. “I’ll understand if you can’t… But Hannah, I’m begging you, please don’t end this before it even starts.”
“I got really hurt and we weren’t even together…” She said softly, lifting her head again. “I know you didn’t mean to and I really should’ve said something sooner, but you’re still the one who hurt me. I don’t know what to do here.”
“I’m so sorry,” I apologized again. I wished there was a better word than ‘sorry.’ It was so inadequate, so incapable of showing the depth of my remorse for what had happened. “Give me a shot to treat you the way I should’ve all along… Please don’t leave me.” I was being the most vulnerable I’d ever been with anyone and though I was painfully uncomfortable, there was no other choice.
“I don’t know. What if cutting our losses is the best thing for us right now?”
“Hannah, I wouldn’t be cutting my losses.” My voice was trembling. “Losing you would be the worst thing for me. I know it.”
“This is so fucked up…” She mumbled out as she stared at me. I knew she was silently debating with herself, weighing the pros against the cons of giving me what I was asking for. As always, I wished I could read her mind. “How would we even..?” She trailed off, still studying my face.
“Well, I was thinking we could start by going on dates, like real ones. Honestly, whatever you want to do, we can do, just as long as you’re with me.”
“Like the ones you go on with Miss A, Miss B and Miss C?” She questioned and I raised my eyebrows in confusion.
“Who?”
“The girls.” She looked away. “The ones you meet on the apps or wherever it is you pick them up from now.”
What she was asking finally dawned on me. She thought I was still seeing other women. It took me a second to understand because it’d been so long since my last one-night stand. I’d stopped messing around with randoms as soon as she and I started sleeping together. There was no point. Compared to being with her, even the best random fuck wouldn’t have been good enough.
“No, nothing like my dates with Miss A, Miss B and Miss C…” I copied the names she used. I barely stopped myself from smiling at how adorable she was. “Our dates will be so much better, I promise.” She eyed me doubtfully. “And from now on, you don’t need to think about me being with anyone else. I just want to be with you.”
“You want me now because..?” She challenged. “Because you can’t have me anymore?”
“No.” I shook my head. “Look, I was an idiot for not figuring things out sooner. I hate that it took losing everything we had to knock some sense in me, but it’s not too late… Right?” I sent her an entreating look. “Please tell me it’s not too late.”
“Ellie…”
“One chance.” I was basically groveling, but I didn’t care how pathetic I looked. “Everything will be so much better this time around.”
“Okay,” she sighed out. Her pained expression as she said the word made it clear to me that agreeing to my request was an incredibly difficult choice for her to make. Despite her hesitance, I felt the vice-like grip on my heart loosen. She was giving us a chance. “We can try.”
. . .
I parked my car in front of Hannah’s building and shot her a quick text. I was picking her up for our first date. Her new place was a twenty-minute drive away. Which was way, way too far for my liking. Like almost everything else Hannah-related, I’d taken for granted how accessible she used to be, how close.
“Hi,” she mumbled out as she strapped herself in the passenger seat. I leaned over the center console to place a quick peck on her cheek. Her skin was always so warm, kissing any part of her never failed to leave tingles on my lips.
I frowned at her expression when I was back on my side. She looked uncomfortable. “Sorry,” I apologized.
“It’s okay.”
The drive to the restaurant was full of inquisitive questions and long rambling stories. Sadly, the questions and stories were all coming from me. Every answer or reply Hannah gave in return seemed to adhere to a strict two-word limit. There were a lot of ‘yeah-s,’ ‘kind of-s,’ ‘nope-s,’ ‘I know-s’ and ‘it’s okay-s’ (the worst one).
With how little she was saying, it was like she was in police custody and we were in the middle of an interrogation, not a date. I wouldn’t have been surprised if she suddenly pleaded the fifth. I kept glancing at her as I drove. I wanted to know what she was thinking so badly.
The dinner itself didn’t fare much better. She was still tightlipped. I was trying my best not to let it get to me, but I’d exhausted all of my go-to small talk topics, bar politics. Ultimately, I decided to just bite the bullet and lay all my cards on the table again.
“Hannah…” I reached for her hand. She stiffened but didn’t pull away. “I know it’s gonna take time until things are good again, but I need you to be here with me, too. This won’t work if we’re not on the same page.”
“We aren’t on the same page though.” She took a few sips of her wine with her free hand. Finally, she let herself look at me for more than five seconds. “You and I want completely different things.”
“That’s not true, I told you I want to be with you,” I reiterated.
“For now-but you’ll change your mind,” she argued. Even if I knew for a fact that I had no plans to change my mind, the look on her face told me that she wholeheartedly believed what she was saying. “Or I don’t know, you’ll get bored. You’ll want more, something else.”
“I won’t, I-”
“You will,” she interrupted me. “People don’t just change overnight. You say you want me, you say you want to be with me… But you’re not wired the same way as I am.” She raised an eyebrow. “You want me now, but at some point, you’re gonna realize this whole thing is a mistake, you’re gonna realize what I want is not for you. And then you’re gonna leave.”
I gaped at her. Similar to me, she’d obviously given us a lot of thought. But unlike me, her views on our relationship were far more somber, far more bleak, far more grim. It appeared that we’d switched lenses, I was now the one wearing rose-colored glasses, while she was sporting a pair of doom and gloom specs. Her new negativity was all my fault.