Three Years, Five Months and Eleven Days

Chapter Thirty-Two

Oh my god. I've actually finished. I kept on re-editing this chapter, not wanting to be finished, but I can't any more. I literally just read it through and cried, which is generally a sign that my work here is done. 

I want to dedicate this final and very special chapter to WelaraJumper for being the best of my small band of readers, but I would also like to sincerely thank, from the bottom of my heart, anyone who has been reading this.

If you enjoyed it, please go check out the rest of the trilogy to find out what becomes of Debby, Michael and Beth :D

As ever, please comment.

And so ends my first proper story on Wattpad. Here's to it not being my last.

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     I spent that evening mostly in shock. Beth had kissed me. That definitely was something big. As I thought about it, it became clearer and clearer that this wasn’t just a one-time thing.

     Beth was gay.

     And as far as I could tell she had been for a while. This explained her lack of interest in guys over the last three years; this explained why nothing had ever happened with a guy after that one time she’d had sex. This explained why Rob had been so sceptical at the beginning of the summer, when I had told him that Michael and Beth were together. This was why Michael had just laughed at me when I told him that I had thought he was with Beth.

     How could I have been so ignorant?

     Now that I knew, I saw clues jotted through our past, but I had never thought that they meant this. It seemed ridiculous that no one had ever mentioned it directly and that I hadn’t figured it out, but that was how it was apparently.

     It changed my view of things completely. I didn’t feel differently towards Beth and her liking girls shouldn’t change our relationship at all. Her liking me would. It’s just like knowing that one of your friends who is a guy has a crush on you: you can try being friends if you don’t like him back, but the thought will always be at the back of your mind. He feels more strongly about me, than I do about him.

      But that is when it’s just a small crush; something you can brush off and hope will pass soon enough. Beth wouldn’t have kissed me if it were that. She wouldn’t have just “a crush” like that. It just doesn’t work. She would only have risked our friendship if she were truly, irrevocably in love with me. You can’t just brush off feelings like that.

     She probably thought that I might retaliate. How could she have thought that? Of course I loved her, but I had never had any doubt in my life as to my sexual orientation, and even if I had, the way I felt about Michael would have been enough to send any thoughts of girls fleeing from my mind. She knew I loved Michael, so why had she risked everything for a kiss?

     The image of her face, crumpled with hurt, tears pricking her eyes after she had kissed me, gave me an answer. She was crushed. Even though she was still beautiful, the last month had not been easy. I had no idea what she had spent her days doing in London, but she was mentally preparing herself for her father’s death the whole time. Then just before he died I had told her I hated her. To have these bombshells thrown at her and for her to still be sane was incredible.

     But it had left her desperate. She had been clinging to a hope, a hope that I might return the feelings that she had been harbouring for god knows how long, and her despair had pushed her to finding out.