Oh man, I wanted to scrub my face off. “Zac, I’ll come back, okay? We aren’t going to lose touch. We aren’t going to go our separate ways and not see each other again for ten more years. I cross my heart, old man. I’m just going up there for Thanksgiving, and I’m going to stay a while after that to look at places and stuff.”
He wasn’t listening, or if he was, he wasn’t paying attention because he said, “Why are you tryin’ to leave so fast?”
“I’m not.”
“Tell me what I did then. Tell me why you wanna go. You said you’d stay, and you never go back on your word, so I wanna know why you’re tryin’ to do it now.”
Go back on my word?
“Tell me on Mama Lupe’s soul,” he demanded.
That time, I couldn’t hold my hands back from rubbing my face. I wanted to cry. “Because there’s no point in me staying here. There’s no difference between me leaving now or in a few weeks.”
“Why do you have to leave in a few weeks? Why can’t you stay here?”
“I already told you why I moved to Houston in the first place. There’s no reason for me to still be here.”
His throat bobbed again. “I want you here, kiddo. Is that a good enough reason? I like havin’ you here. You think your sister or Boog like havin’ you around more than me? ’Cause they don’t. I’m sure they don’t.”
I held my breath as my nose burned. There was no getting out of this. I knew there wasn’t. I had done this. It was my fault. “Oh, Zac, please don’t make me do this. I told you I’ll come back. We’ll always be friends. I’ll see you as much as I can, as much as you have time for, even if we live in different places.”
“I wanna know why you won’t stay,” he said, like the stubborn ass he was, and I knew I wasn’t going to get out of this.
He wanted it. The truth. And he wasn’t going to fucking let it go.
“I don’t want to,” I told him honestly, clenching my fist closed afterward when I felt that it was shaking a little. I had to lift my hand and brush the knuckle under my eye when it started to tickle, and I was more surprised to see it come back wet.
His frown got even bigger. “If it’s makin’ you tear up, I wanna know even more, darlin’.”
“I don’t want to lose you.”
“Lose me?” He looked stunned. “Now you’re assumin’ you’re gonna lose me? What the hell is goin’ on? We go from me askin’ you to lunch to you bein’ all closed off and then sayin’ you wanna move somewhere else even though I’m standin’ here tellin’ you to stay with me, and now you’re implyin’ you’re gonna lose me? What the hell happened? What am I missin’?”
How the hell had this gotten so out of control? I wanted to cry. I wanted to bury my head in the sand and pretend like none of this was happening, but that wasn’t going to be reality. “Look, I’m feeling overwhelmed, and I don’t mean to take it out on you. I just think it would be for the best, and I’m not going to change my mind.”
“Why?” he asked, his voice rough then. “You said you liked Houston. You said you like bein’ around me.”
“Oh my God, can you please just drop this? Can you please just say, ‘I totally understand, Peewee. I want you to do whatever will make you happy….’”
“I want you to be happy, kiddo,” he said with a tremendous frown that was eating me up by the second. “But I don’t get why that can’t be here.”
He was going to kill me. “Because you don’t need me here.”
“Who the hell said that?”
I was seconds away from crying. “No, you don’t.”
“Yes. I do,” he insisted. “You were snugglin’ on the couch with me the other day, and now you don’t even want to be in the same city.”
Lifting my hand, I rubbed my forehead, taking in his perplexed face. His confused eyes. And I had no idea what to do with them. “If you want someone to snuggle with, you’ve got a thousand girls in your contact list who would love to do it, Zac. If you want a best friend, you don’t need me here. You’ve done that with Boogie for the last fifteen years. If I