Who I Am With You (Imagination #10) - Staci Stallings Page 0,172

slightly hurt by it.

“You.”

Her enthusiasm dipped. “Me? What does that mean?”

He grinned. “I’m just thinking I should find a way to warn Jimmy Dublouski. He ain’t gonna have a prayer against you now.”

“So what’re you going to say to them?” Greg asked as he drove. He couldn’t believe she was going through with this, and moreover, he couldn’t believe he had agreed to go along.

She shrugged. “Not sure yet.”

Well, that was comforting.

“Mom said she’ll have lunch ready when we get there,” she said as if that made any difference whatsoever.

Greg nodded, stretched out his legs, and settled in for the Interstate part of the drive. “So how was the movie the other night?”

“The one you slept through?” she asked, teasing.

“Versus the one you slept through?”

“Touché.” She laughed. “It was good.” For a breath she said no more, and then, “Dating is weird, isn’t it?”

“How do you mean?”

“I don’t know. Meeting up with people you don’t even really know and trying to get them to like you? It’s like interviewing someone while they’re interviewing you for a job you’re both trying to get at the other person’s company at the same time.”

“Wow. That’s kind of cynical.”

“Is it though? Is it really?” For a second she put her gaze down on her hands before relocating it back out the window. “Man, I have twisted myself into a pretzel for everybody else.”

“Everybody else?” he asked. “Like who?”

“Everybody,” she said as if that should clear things up. “It’s like everything I did was about making someone else happy. Chris is a prime example. Do you know he never paid me a single cent for rent?”

“And this surprises you?”

“Well, yeah, kind of. But more than that, I never even asked him to. I just took it for granted that I was supposed to be responsible for that while he went off and did whatever he pleased. He could come in or not, be there or not, and I was just supposed to roll with it. But heaven forbid if I was out five minutes later than I was supposed to be.”

Greg’s breathing had gone shallow. He knew she needed to talk about it, but he wasn’t sure he was strong enough to hear it.

“I went where he wanted to go, and I didn’t go if he didn’t want to. Even the wedding that time, I had to lie my butt off about it, hoping he wouldn’t find out what I was really doing. And what I was doing wasn’t even bad. It was normal. People are supposed to go to weddings and celebrate with their friends. People are supposed to have their own thoughts and their own feelings and their own dreams. That’s normal. Yet he somehow convinced me that normal was a bad thing, and I believed him. I went along with it because I knew what would happen if I didn’t. What I can’t figure out is why I didn’t leave. I mean, that’s so not me. Or it never was. That’s not who I used to be, not when I was growing up anyway. You knew me. Was I like that?”

“No,” he said softly.

“Right. I didn’t think so. But I keep thinking about that whole emotionally exhausted thing,” she continued. “I was so tired all the time. It was impossible to stay awake during class, and yet, I was awake all night. I never rested, not really. It’s like I was wired on anxiety and fear.”

“For good reason,” he said in her defense.

“Yes, but not really. It wasn’t a good reason. It was because I was afraid I was going to fail the interview. I didn’t want to lose him so much that I almost lost myself… literally.”

She really didn’t have to remind him of that fact. He remembered it all very well.

“But then I think about Quinlen, last fall, remember him?”

Oh, yeah, I remember. “Yeah. I do.”

“It was the same thing with him,” she said. “Not the hitting and the physical violence part, but I was doing the same thing—trying to be what he wanted me to be. It wasn’t even that I was trying to be something I was not with him. I was just doing, doing doing all the time, hoping he wouldn’t figure out that wasn’t who I was. Once again, I didn’t want to fail the interview. It’s like I was so stretched away from who I was, but rather than seeing that as a bad thing, I thought my ‘being’ was what was wrong with all