A Love So Tragic (25 page)

Peyton's number flashes on the screen, and I start to mute it but don't.

As soon as I pull the cell to my ear, I hear her crying, and my heart fucking pounds. 

“Nicolas?” I can barely make out my name between her sobs.

“Yeah...”

“I'm so...” she pauses to catch her breath. “I'm sorry. Isaac— his mom, she has...” She sniffs back tears and clears her throat. “She has cancer. About a month to live.” 

And my heart plummets to the fucking pit of my stomach.

“He got home. I went downstairs to tell him I was leaving. I had the papers...” She breaks down in tears. “I didn’t know what to do. You know I couldn't do that to him. With mother and all, I just...what kind of person could do that?” She pauses to catch her breath again. I remain silent, digesting what she's told me.

“As much as I love you, as much as this hurts,” she says. “I can't abandon him now. Losing your mother, it...I just...I can't do that. I'm not that cruel. I...”

“I understand,” I say. And I do, even though I wish I didn't. Situations. They always fuck me with Peyton.

We sit silently on the phone for several minutes. She's crying and I'm staring at the floor. 

“Nic, I don't know what to do,” she whispers. 

I scrub my hands over my face. “You're doing the right thing. You're doing the right thing, Peyton,” I repeat myself.

I hate myself for being the nice guy, for being the guy I've always been with her when I'm really
not
the nice guy. I want to be angry, and I am. I'm mad at myself because I know that I'm going to lose her again, and there's nothing to stop this. I couldn't make myself hate her when she hurt me—when I should have hated her. Look where that got me. This time, I'm losing her because she's doing what she should. How the hell am I ever going to get over that?

“Once everything's over...I'll come,” she says. “I've got the papers. I'll come.”

“Okay.” I know she won't.

“I'll call you...I love you, Nic.”

I swallow. “I love you too, Peyton.”

I hang up the phone, continuing to stare at the floor. You know when things are over. And this is over. Tragedy bonds people. She will be his strength because that's what she's good at. All those things Peyton thought only I could do, make her feel...he'll do that.

This hurts because I love her when I should have learned to hate her. You never fall in love with someone having the thought that one day you'll
need
to hate them, but you see, the consequence of loving someone more than they love you
is
hate. You have to learn to hate them or they will strip your soul fucking bare when they leave you.

18 months later

It’s been half a year, and although life has continued, there’s no story to tell because it doesn’t involve Nicolas.

Isaac's mom, Jane, died six weeks after her diagnosis. After the night I called to tell Nic why I couldn’t leave Isaac, we talked less and less. And it wasn’t because he was angry—Nic understood. It wasn’t because we realized we didn’t belong together because we do. We never really decided it was over, we just…drifted apart. We felt guilty, and it’s easier to ignore that you want something you can’t have when it’s pushed out of your mind. I couldn't expect Nic to wait on me, and as much as it hurt me to think of my life without him, I was no longer sure I would leave Isaac. Like I'd said a thousand times, I love Isaac, I'm just not
in love
with him. It's not that all-consuming fire I have with Nic, but sometimes I think a fire like that is destined to burn you at some point--actually, it already has.

Twice.

I watch the fan blade swirl, wondering how it makes everything look like it's smearing. The bed bangs against the wall and I try to make myself more comfortable under his weight.

“Shit,” Isaac says in a groan, thrusting harder into me. I slowly trail my fingers over his broad back, wiping away the sweat. He grabs my leg and pushes it up by my head as he sits back and adjust himself. I'm still staring at the fan when he stops. “What’s wrong? Does it feel good?”

“Yeah, it does.” I nod my head and smile.

“Could have fooled me...want me to do it harder?” he asks before slamming into me, pushing my thigh back until my muscles burn.

This is where I pretend I like it because I don't want to hurt his feelings. I close my eyes. I try to focus on the way he feels inside me, but part of me recoils at the thought. Never would I have believed that love is such a huge part of sex. But the thing is, when you have a one-night stand or are in a new relationship, there's passion, lust. And I always thought that's what Nic and I had—passion and lust, but the thing I've grown to realize, the thing that was shoved in my face when I was having my affair is that it wasn't passion and lust that made me feel that way. It was love. As ridiculous as that sounds, the way I loved Nic, well, that's a need that can put any passion to shame. Love is what made being with him so addictive.

And that's not here. Sex with Isaac is just sex.

When he finishes he rolls out of the bed and goes to the bathroom to take a shower, and I lie here, staring out of the window. A red bird perches on a limb, and I smile because Nic loved those. I still think of him every day, just like I do my mother and my father. If death doesn't kill love, nothing will, so I how can I expect to ever stop loving someone who’s still living? I've accepted that I will go the rest of my life in love with a man I'll never have.

“Baby?” Isaac is standing in the doorway, dressed. “I'm going to go over to Aiden's, I told him I'd help him put the crib together before Brianna got home. Want to come?”

“No. I'm just gonna do some stuff around here. Clean the kitchen up.”

He laughs. “The kitchen's clean....it's fine. I'll be back in a few hours.”

I listen to his footsteps fall down the steps, and then I get up and go to the office. These memories of Nic have nearly driven me crazy, and in a sad attempt to get Nic out of my head, I've continued to write down everything I can remember about loving him. I needed to do something with the heartache and love and passion, so I put it onto paper. After all, I've always thought that's what authors do: transfer their darkest, deepest, most passionate desires onto paper in a bid to free their soul of some chain. Surely no one is simply just that creative? There must be truth within every piece of fiction, which makes me wonder how truly sad Shakespeare must have been. My fingers furiously type over the keys as I write out the last conversation I can recall having with Nic.

“I love you...”
And right now, I'm staring at the blinking cursor because I'm at the end of mine and Nic's story, but it's so abrupt, I can't bring myself to type 'The End'.

I scroll back through, and starting at the beginning, I read.

Reading over your life like it's a novel, it gives you a new perspective, because even though I wrote this, I guess I admitted to things on these pages I wouldn't admit to myself. I see how stupid I was. How immature and selfish. And I hate my character. Hate her. I roll my eyes. I mumble that she's whiny. There's nothing redeemable about her. I can't deny how distant I was to Isaac when I thought he was the distant one. Throughout the course of this story, I realize something no one wants to realize: I'll never really be happy because I won’t allow myself that luxury.

Four hours later, here I am, back on the last word, and it doesn't feel right.

There are moments in life when you feel compelled to do certain things, and you have no idea why. This is one of those moments. Hitting print, I watch page after page spit out, and when it’s finished, I find a clip and bind the manuscript together. After the title page, I write a note to him. I'm not even sure why I'm sending this story to him. Possibly to show him I actually did something I wanted to do—write a book and only because of him. Or maybe I want to give him something he gave me—words that let him feel what he did to me, what I did to us, how we loved each other. But when I really think about it, deep down inside I believe I just want him to tell me how this story ends.

The Atlanta skyline glows in front of the dark clouds rolling off in the horizon. Thunder booms and the rain pelts harder over the windshield. It's been three months since my company transferred me back home, and I'd be lying if I said I hadn't thought about her a hundred times since moving back here. I've thought about her so many times over the past year—about what we did, about what kind of people we really are. And the questions I've asked myself time and time again:

Do I regret having an affair with her?

No.
 

If I could do it all over, would I stay away from her?

Hell no.

As shitty as that may sound, I can't feel bad about it because my affair with Peyton allowed me to forgive her. It kept me from marrying Lindsey, and Lindsey's happy with some lawyer that really loves her. That affair showed me what kind of person I am: one that makes mistakes. One that has weaknesses.

And yes, with time, that affair has been more than easy to justify to myself: Peyton was my first love. She wasn't some random girl. The emotions were already there and strong. She was familiar, she was nostalgia and memories and all those things that you look back on as you grow older and smile about. I told myself that I may have been fucking someone's wife, but that same guy fucked my life.

It wasn't hard for me to come up with a thousand reasons as to why my affair was entirely different than the affairs those
other
people have. But at the bottom of it all, I know it was wrong. I guess most people in an affair come up with an excuse. Who wants to think they were wrong? If you dig deep enough, eventually you'll find something that makes it right. More than anything, though, that affair with Peyton made me realize that I've hated my mother for a very selfish reason—because of what that divorce did to me, my brother and sister.

Whatever my mother's reasons were for cheating on my dad, I'm sure she felt justified. I'm sure she thought it was more right than wrong. I now understand that.

The rain is still pouring down when I park in front of the apartment complex. I make a mad sprint to the breezeway, but I'm still drenched by the time I get to my building. When I open the door, my foot hits a package in front of the threshold. I wipe the rain from my face and bend down to pick it up. There's no return address and a change of address sticker is slapped over my old New York apartment number.

My eyes remain trained on the parcel as I step inside and close the door.
Maybe it's something from one of the companies I drew up plans for.
The lip of the envelope is damp, and it basically disintegrates when I tear it back. Inside is a stack of papers, and when I dump the envelope upside down they fall onto the counter with a clunk. My eyes skim over what appears to be a title: “My Beautiful Tragedy” by PP Franks.

My brows pinch together. “Shit,” I mutter under my breath before swallowing and flipping to the first page. And there at the very top, is her girly handwriting.