Chapter forty-five: Back To You
O L I V I A
I played with the band on my finger. It felt heavier than I remembered, courtesy of the real stones that now constituted it. I knew Kai was awake. And I knew he knew I was awake, too. But neither of us moved. We stayed put.
I wished it was as romantic as sounded but it was not.
We were hiding. We were a ticking bomb, counting down the seconds till we had to face reality which could possibly destroy us. A reality where we knew we had to talk. Spill our ugly secrets and face the music.
Our high was over.
Love had brought us together, but how the conversation would go today would determine if we stayed together.
The fact that I had an empty stomach did not help my nervousness. It was getting more and more difficult to breathe with every second that passed because the weight of what we were supposed to do that day was pressing down on me so hard.
"Kai," I murmured, unable to hold it in.
"Please, not now," he begged.
I whimpered internally.
"We have to," I stated.
He groaned into my neck. "Can't we do it later?"
"You said something along those lines before, and that lead to us splitting again," I told him, sounding braver than I felt. "Let's just get this over with."
"Livvy . . . "
I sighed. "I need this, Kai."
He paused for a moment and I felt it as he exhaled against my shoulder.
He squeezed me from behind. "Okay."
"Sit up?" I suggested.
He let me go after placing a kiss below my ear. I forced the kaleidoscope in me to calm down and we both sat up, facing each other grimly.
We stared wordlessly at one another. I took that time to gather my thoughts an arrange them.
"Where do we start?" He asked after a while.
"Where it all began. The party," I replied confidently. "What happened?"
He scrunched up his nose and I hurried to add.
"I trust you, Kai. I do," I assured him. "But that doesn't mean blind trust or that I don't deserve to know the truth. I think you should tell me what happened so we can talk this out."
"This is harder than I thought," he voiced.
"We need this. You know it."
"I do," he breathed. He didn't continue.
"You can tell me anything," I reminded him gently. "Take your time, but know you can."
"I know," he fussed. "It's just . . . ugh, it's so stupid. I'm embarrassed to say it out loud, even to you."
I bit my lip uncertainly, my fingers tracing the outline of the stones on the ring for comfort.
"What if I told you I knew what?" I said slowly.
His eyes widened and his ears tinged pink.
I took his hand in mine. "Kai, it's fine."
"No, it's not," he said, breaking his gaze away from mine.
I pursed my lips. His dam broke.
"I wanted to make you jealous because I was insecure," he rushed out. "I thought you didn't love me anymore. I thought that if you would look at me giving attention to someone else, you would realize what you would be missing if you lost me." He cringed. "We weren't spending time together anymore and you didn't sneak out to meet me anymore either." He shook his head in regret. "I thought you didn't want me. I felt the need to make sure you didn't leave. I let someone talk me into thinking it was okay to kiss someone else to make you jealous. How naive I was."
I didn't have a single idea he was going through all that emotional turmoil alone. Some girlfriend I was.
"Why didn't you say anything?" I asked. He didn't reply. I sighed. I felt the need to explain my side. "Kai, I didn't do all of that anymore because I felt secure in our relationship." I urged him to meet my eyes. I needed him to know that I meant it. His brown orbs connected with mine, a pool of turbulent remorse. "I knew you loved me and I was sure I was in love with you. I wasn't afraid of losing you. It was more than a crush. We had been dating for three years, babe. I felt that we didn't have to spend every second together like those jocks and their new girlfriends did. We had a better relationship than that. We had love."
"I get that now," he fretted. His eyes shined as he looked away again. "I just wish I'd known that then so that I wouldn't have fucked up six years of our lives."
"Better late than never, hun?" I joked lightly. He didn't crack even a small smile and I hastened to take it back, "Sorry."
He remained silent, staring at our hands in his lap.
"I love you," I said softly.
He squeezed my hand reassuringly. "I love you too, mon amour."
We sat in silence for a while, soaking up this information.
"What about when you came to my house that day?" I broke it. "Why didn't you tell me all of this?"
"I was . . . ashamed of all this," he worded. "I felt as if I didn't deserve you . . . " he trailed off. I didn't speak, sensing he had more to say. I tried not to protest when he extracted his hand from mine slowly and ran it through his hair. "I've always valued trust in a relationship. After love, that's what I hold as the most important. I believe that it's the glue that keeps everything together.
"When you ran away like that that day . . . the way I saw your heart break . . . It was too much. When I came to your house the next morning and you still seemed to believe that I had cheated on you . . . which technically I had. But . . . urgh."
He shook his head and took a deep breath before he continued.
" . . . I thought that I had lost your trust, or perhaps I had failed to ever gain it in the first place. And, I don't know, I just couldn't put you through a relationship with me like that where you would constantly worry. How could you possibly be happy if every time you would see me with another girl you would be worried about our relationship? I knew I was insecure. And I would be in a college six hours away for four years. That would be just . . . cruel. To the both of us."
I closed my eyes. I couldn't believe it. All this because we couldn't understand each other. Our misunderstandings. Our lack of communication. One thought the other didn't love them anymore and the other thought that their partner was a cheater. How idiotic.
My fingers found their way back to the ring. It felt as natural as breathing. As if there had never been a tan line there that I would stare at in haunting sorrow. As if it never felt light and incomplete. As if the tan line never slowly faded away, taking more and more of me away with it every day.
I felt his hands on my face, brushing away the wetness my brain had otherwise refused to register. I leaned into his touch almost as a reflex.
"And that's why you walked away this time, too," I mumbled hoarsely, connecting the dots. "You thought I didn't trust you and yo-"
I couldn't continue. My mind couldn't stop thinking about how I might possibly have had to spend my entire life without him had Josh not opened his mouth. A lifetime full of loneliness. A lifetime of trying to heal and fill Kai's absence. A lifetime of trying to find my way without him.
It hurt much more than I thought it would and the hollow in my chest grew.
I barely heard the rustling of the sheets as he moved.
"Hey," he said gently, breaking me out of my thoughts. "I'm here. You're here. We're together."
Breathe in, breathe out.
"How could you?" I choked out. "Why?"
"I'm so sorry," he whispered, hugging me. He wiped away the new tears that escaped and kissed my forehead. I worked to get my breathing back to normal.
"A lifetime without you," I muttered. "Even the thought . . . it's dark, Kaison."
He hugged me tighter. "I know."
"Just because I want to know what happened, it does not mean I don't trust you," I said miserably. "It just means I want reassurance. I want to make sure that my trust is not misplaced."
He nodded, swallowing. "I'm trying to understand that."
"Kaison, it's very rare when someone can trust another person so blindly," I told him. "It's rare and, frankly, to me it's stupid. Love is blind, and that's a beautiful sentiment. But if we have a heart, we have a brain to go with it, too. And the brain wants to know."
He hummed to tell me he was listening as I pushed down the lump in my throat.
"I can't guarantee not feeling hurt when I see some other girl put her hands on you," I said candidly. "Because to me, the first thought will always be 'why isn't he pushing her off?' or 'why is he letting her do it?' It's how I'm wired. I feel a bit too much, and I feel weird. And unlike most people, my emotions get diverted to hurt and self-pity instead of anger or an eerie calm. And that leads me to ask you questions. That doesn't mean I don't trust you or don't love you. Because I do. More than anyone else. I just need reassurance."
He kissed the side of my head and I opened my eyes.
"Okay?" I asked, placing a hand on his chest. His heart beat under my palm steadily.
He smiled softly. His eyes were red and moist. "Yeah."
I nodded slightly, putting my head against his shoulder. I nestled close to him.
"I'll try to work on that," he said after a while. "It won't be easy, but I am sure I can do it."
"I'll help you," I returned. "I will work on keeping my anxiety in check. I'm sure that I too if I work on it, can change my primary response to a situation."
"Thank you," he whispered.
"Shut up."
I felt him smile against my hair.
"And we will talk," he added. "We will not assume."
"Yeah," I agreed quickly. "That is the biggest takeaway from today's conversation. We need to communicate more."
"No kidding," he muttered.
"I mean, here I thought you were cheating on me." I shuddered.
"And here I thought you didn't love me!" He exclaimed.
We chuckled lowly.
"Is it a bad time to ask what happened the last time?" I asked when it died.
"Nope," he popped the 'p'. "Chelsea was drunk. She called me and I felt obligated to get her home."
I frowned. "Obligated . . . ?"
"I used her to try and get over you," he said distastefully. "She knew that. She was trying to do something similar. But it damaged her more than it damaged me. I think she ended up developing feelings for me. Feelings I didn't return. I felt guilty."
"And that's why you've been letting her fuck around," I gaped. "That's so you, it's annoying."
He groaned. "I know."
"Kai, she knew what she was getting into when she," I swallowed the bile, "Hooked up with you. You don't have to feel guilty and obligated to serve her her entire life. It's over. If anything, she owes you for not suing her for all the crap she has put you through."
"I told her that last night," he said. "Well, minus the latter part."
"Umhmm?"
"Yeah," he sighed. "She crashed in the guest room. She, uh, also told me she loves me."
I stiffened. catching feelings is one thing and claiming that you love someone is another. "Hun."
"Don't worry. I've made it clear that I don't want her calling me again."
"I'm . . . not worried," I said cautiously.
He chuckled. "Okay."
"So, she's gone forever?" I asked hopefully.
"I think so," he answered. He paused as I sighed and celebrated that win. "Angeline told me something you might want to know."
I perked up at the mention of his publicist. "What?"
"Chelsea was the one tipping off the paparazzi," he told me.
My mind went blank for a hot second. "What?" I repeated.
He sighed deeply. "Angeline and I were talking," he began, "And we both came to the conclusion that the attention we were getting was uncanny. How the cameramen would know exactly where we were and when was not right. I have dealt with these people before, Livvy, but they've never been this big of a problem. All the time we were together, someone was tipping them off.
"And our prime suspect was Chelsea. She was the one who had the most motives. And the way the stories were always in the same tone that she had told everyone over the years seemed to be a huge indication as well.
"We knew she wouldn't tell the truth if we asked her so Angeline hired a PI to do some digging. It took him a while, but he confirmed what we had been suspecting: Chelsea was hiring people to take our -- her and mine -- pictures publicly in compromising positions as well as yours and mine when we weren't ready to go public, and then paying them to recite her narrative." He shook his head slightly. "She knew how fragile our relationship was because well, we had regrettably had some heart-to-hearts back when we were briefly hooking up. I basically gave her the ammunition she needed to blow us up."
"It's not your fault," I denied. "You told what you did in good faith. You could have no idea that she would do this."
He ran a hand through his hair with an air of defeat. "I am a disaster."
"No," I corrected him, "Some of your decisions were disastrous."
"I'm really sorry that I messed everything up for us," he apologized.
"I know," I sighed.
I couldn't bring myself to say 'I forgive you' cause I couldn't. Not just like that. I was ready to give him a chance, but it would take time to get to a place where I could truly forgive him for the havoc he had wrecked in our lives. They say time heals all wounds. Hopefully, they would heal mine too. Or maybe his love will.
"Do you want to stay home all day and do nothing?" I asked him.
"Yeah," he agreed. "And we could read that book we started weeks ago."
"And maybe cook something together this evening?" I asked.
"We can watch a movie!" He added. "Or binge-watch a series."
"We can go out for a midnight drive too!"
The clicheness of the day we were planning made us both crack up.
"We're such idiots," he remarked, laughing.
"Two idiots in love." I chuckled.
He grinned back. "Yeah. And I will marry you one day, okay?"
I blushed. "I can't wait."
I guess we're staying together after all.
"You know what happens to two idiots in love?" I asked him softly.
"Hmm?" He humored me.
I tipped my chin up to kiss him and he bent down to meet me halfway. We put our foreheads together when we pulled apart, staring at each other with eyes full of affection. We were finally content.
"They live happily ever after," I mumbled.
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * *
A/N: There you have it guys. The last chapter of Back To You. I hope you guys liked the journey. You've been pretty silent so I have no idea what you think. I would love it if you changed your mind about that and lemme know ;-)
The epilogue will be out soon so keep an eye out. Also, let me know if you guys want bonus chapters about any particular incidents that you would like to read about. I will do my best to deliver.
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