Falling into Forever (Falling into You) - By Lauren Abrams Page 0,38
that wouldn’t have worked, either, because I wanted to look you in the eye, Jensen, to tell you what I really thought.”
“And that is?”
He starts to say something, but he abruptly changes his mind. “Ben was my best friend. Did you know that?”
I shake my head.
“Yeah. I didn’t think so. Do you want to know how I met Ben?”
I don’t, and I don’t really want to know.
He gives me a pointed look. “Normally, I would say that there’s no use dredging up painful memories, but I think you might just deserve a little bit of pain, so you’re going to listen to every word of this particular story.”
He has a point.
“It was probably what, five years ago? Imagine my surprise when a young and very beautiful Hallie Caldwell shows up on my doorstep in the raging August heat when she’s supposed to be in London with you. She wouldn’t say anything, and the only sign that something was wrong was the simple fact that she was too upset to go dancing with me. So, I asked. And she wouldn’t dare besmirch your name by saying a bad word about you. She tried to put a happy face on it, to say that she was just going back for her junior year and the two of you were figuring some things out, but nothing about it smelled right.”
What is he talking about? We had never talked about figuring things out. She said that she never wanted to see me again, that it was over, that she didn’t love me anymore. And I had said... “You need to get your own dreams, Hallie, instead of hanging around me like some stupid puppy dog. You need to figure out who you want to be in life, because I can tell you right now that I don’t need a nursemaid, or a mother, or another person trying to tell me how to live my life. You’ve spent enough time hanging on my coattails. I mean, really, don’t you think it’s time that you figured out how to have a life outside of me?”
Fucking photographic memory. I can even see the look on her face when I said those horrendous words, each of them hitting her like a ton of bricks. Why did she tell Sam that we were just trying to figure things out?
“So, she was obviously upset about something, but I barely got the chance to ask her about it before she ran off to Atlanta. It was pretty obvious that you had finally revealed your inner asshole. Let me tell you, I was shocked.”
He doesn’t sound shocked. I open my mouth to try to defend myself, but he continues to talk, so I promptly close it again
“I needed to see if she was all right. It’s funny, how everyone who knows her is always running around, trying to figure out if she’s all right. There’s something about that girl. I don’t know, man. And the funniest thing about all of it is that she’s never really needed anyone to make sure she was all right. She would be better off if we would just all leave her alone. But again, there’s something about that girl, man.”
I tense. Maybe he and Hallie…
“Get your mind out of the gutter. I’m a happily married man. Hallie and I are friends. We’ll always be friends. There’s never been anything else. There will never be anything else.”
My body relaxes.
“That’s more than I can say for you and her. So, anyways, she leaves, my inner caveman takes over, and I need to see that she’s not wasting away in some fucking dorm room somewhere, so I fly my ass to Atlanta. It’s worse than I ever could have possibly imagined. I mean, she’s a hot mess, all ratty hair and old sweatshirts and really bad poetry. I mean, Jesus Christ, she’s playing the Rent soundtrack on a loop. Of course, she’s still trying to say that nothing’s wrong and that she’ll be okay and that she just needs to make it to class. And all the while, she’s still getting straight As, because it’s just like Hallie to be crawling around like a little lost puppy while writing beautiful manifestos about Freud’s role in current psychiatric practice.”
I smile at that. Sam temporarily forgets that I’m the one he’s talking to and he actually smiles back before a frown crosses his face.
“I’ve never seen her like that, before or since. I could make her laugh and smile for a