Dangerous Love//Shawn Mendes

Chapter 59

I made it to my car and braced my arms on the steering wheel, trying desperately to free the image from my mind. No matter what I did, I couldn't make it go away, the sight of them together like that, I couldn't un see it. There was a deep pain in my chest as I replayed it all, the way his hips shifted against her, the way he had whispered raspily in her ear, his hands gripping her waist.

The image of them tore away at the one part of our relationship that I had been holding on to. Shawn had done the wrong thing, he had broken my trust, he had failed me, ruined me. I would never forgive him, he knew that. But he had also loved me. We had had the kind of love that only existed in fairytales, a whirlwind of electricity and fire. Naively, I had never thought he would be capable of feeling that way for someone else, of the intimacy, the intensity that we had shared. And yet there he was, doing exactly what he had done with me, with her. I was questioning everything, how he could replace me so seamlessly, whether what we had shared was really as special to him as it was to me.

I wiped my eyes and turned the key in the ignition, driving home as fast as I could. The only thing on my mind was that letter from Shawn, the one I had never opened; I had to know what it said. Even though I was with Will, and I was happy, the sight of Shawn with another girl felt like I was physically being stabbed in the chest. I went to the wardrobe and, despite myself, tugged his jumper over my head, which after all this time still smelled like him. I sat down on the bed and hugged my knees to my chest, wiping my eyes before opening the envelope.

Eleanor,

I'm writing this because I need to be honest, not only with you, but with myself. It's been a long time since I did that, because I guess the memories hurt too much. I have no idea if you'll ever read this, but I hope if you've opened this letter that you'll give me the chance to tell you the full story. I can't promise that it will be what you want to hear, but I can promise that it is the truth; the whole truth. I need you to know what really happened, and I need you to know how I feel about you. If you ever change your mind, I'll always be right here no matter what. Regardless, I just need you to know that what we had was real.

I guess I should start with Canada; there is a lot I haven't told you about what happened there; for a long time I didn't want to remember. But this is important, and you need to know who I was before.

I mentioned once to you that I had a best friend in Canada who died of cancer, but what I couldn't bring myself to tell you was that Caitlin wasn't my friend; she was my girlfriend. I find it so hard to think about her because she's gone, and when people die you never really want to think about the bad times. You want to remember them for all the good things they did, the happiness they brought you, but I can't run from the truth anymore. The first thing that you should know is that my relationship with her was not like ours was; it was messy, it was dysfunctional, it wasn't real love. We met senior year of high school, she was new to town and beautiful. At first our relationship was everything a high school relationship should be, and from the outside it was perfect. But we weren't perfect, we were far from it. We would fight every other day, and even when we weren't fighting, it was like walking on eggshells. The smallest things would set us off into an argument, and even though people used to tell us that we looked 'so in love', I know now that it wasn't love, not really.

Then came Caitlin's diagnosis. She didn't tell me at first. We were in the middle of one of the worst arguments we'd ever had and I told her I was done, and I meant it. But as I was on my way out the door, she dropped it on me, just like that. 'I have cancer.' And how do you leave someone when they've just told you something like that? You just don't. I walked back in the door and I told her I was sorry and that I took it all back, and I meant it. I wanted to be there for her, I wanted our relationship to be better, and I promised myself I'd never let us fight like that again, for her sake. But having cancer doesn't change you, it only changes the situation. We fought more often than we had before she got sick, and somehow everything was my fault. I felt like I couldn't do anything right and every time something went wrong, she would blame me, and I would believe her. But you can't build a relationship off of guilt and compensation, and as she got more and more sick, more cracks started to show. I wanted to be there for her, and I couldn't see the way she was manipulating me, even as her cancer reached the terminal stage. At one point my mom told me she was concerned about us, and I immediately snapped at her. I told her she didn't know us, she didn't know what we had, but she did, she knew it wasn't healthy.