“I almost dropped out after the first semester.”

“What? Why?” This is new information. We’d had nightly phone calls back then. Sometimes we fell asleep talking, and I’d wake up in the morning to the sound of his breathing, or his alarm through the phone, and vice versa.

“Because I hated being away from you. Between studying and hockey, I had no time. There weren’t enough hours. I had trouble keeping up with classes. You weren’t there to keep me on track. But more than that, I just missed you. I thought about you all the time, the way you used to tap your lip with your pen when you were annoyed, how you used to get all grossed out when I’d try to kiss you after practice and I hadn’t showered yet, the way you’d unwrap the entire package of Life Savers so you could pick out the green-apple ones and save them for last. I missed being part of your life every day. I didn’t feel like I could do it without you, and I didn’t want to. I thought maybe I should put the scholarship on hold and take a year off, wait for you to graduate so we could do college together.”

“But then you were drafted to the farm team.”

“Yeah.” His head is bowed, shoulders curved forward, elbows resting on his knees.

“So you broke up with me instead.”

“I was fucking miserable, DJ.”

“Why break up, then? And why eradicate yourself from my life?” It’s a strange feeling, being here with him, but not really knowing him anymore—not the way I used to. All of our history still exists but with a wall built between then and now. I don’t know if it’s possible to break it down, or if I want to.

“It was only going to get harder. The being apart from you. Minnesota State was only a couple hours away and it was barely tolerable. I was going to move to the other end of the country. I didn’t want to put that much pressure on you.”

“What kind of pressure would you have put on me?” I don’t understand his logic. He’s also had eight years to rationalize this. Enough time to frame it in a way that makes sense to him.

“To make it work. To make us work. You can’t tell me the long distance wasn’t hard for you. I know it was. I heard the ache in your voice, Lilah, and I shared it. I kept watching all these relationships fail in my first year of college, and I kept thinking as long as we could get through the year we’d be fine, because then you’d be with me. But being drafted changed everything. Nothing about my career was certain, and I didn’t want to drag you along for that fucked-up ride.”

“You didn’t even give me a choice, though. I had no voice.” And maybe that’s the part that had eaten at me the most. We’d planned our paths together. We’d depended on each other for years. We’d made decisions based on a future that contained each other, and then all of a sudden I had no say.

He shifts until his knee touches mine. I want to sever the contact, but it’s as comforting as it is painful. “Would you have been okay with breaking up?”

“I didn’t have an opportunity to be okay with it.”

“I know you, Lilah. Or at least I did back then. You wouldn’t have given up on us like that if I’d presented you with a choice. You would’ve been determined to make it work. To prove all the statistics wrong, because that’s who you are—or were—and it’s one of many reasons why I loved you so fucking much.”

He runs his fingers over the back of my hand. Reflexively I flip it over and he twines them together, squeezing. “Training was intense. Far beyond anything else I’d ever experienced. Hours of practice almost every day, not a lot of downtime. And that was just the farm team. NHL training is even more consuming. Off-season is a few short months, and the rest of the time I would’ve been away. I didn’t want your focus split, or mine. You were in your last semester of high school, and I was being moved out to LA. It wasn’t logical to stay together, and I was trying to be logical, because God knows, nothing about the way I loved you was rational.”

The emotions that swirl and swell between us are so much different from the ones I experienced when he broke my heart all those years ago. He’d been so assured, so calm in his ending of things, so certain it was the right thing to do. Or at least that’s how I had perceived it. Now his voice is full of sharp regret. It’s in this picture he paints for me, in his broken expression and the waver in his voice, that my hurt over this is echoed in him.

“The worst part was that you did it over the phone,” I say.

He nods and lifts our clasped hands, brushing his lips over my knuckle. I shiver at the affection, at the shadow of memories. “I never could’ve followed through in person. I wouldn’t have been able to see the hurt I heard in your voice and stay away from you. That was really selfish of me. I was selfish about you. I always have been.”

“That doesn’t explain eight years of nothing.”

“I don’t think there’s a simple explanation that doesn’t make me look like an asshole.”

“Well, give it a try, and really, I don’t think you could elevate your asshole status by much, all considering.”

He laughs at this sliver of levity. “I tried after that to reach out. I called you, remember?”

“Yes.” Of course I did. He’d called a couple of times late at night, when I was on the verge of sleep—the conversations had been brief, painful. In the mornings I’d wondered if they had been a bad dream.

“I didn’t know how to be friends.”

“It felt like you were calling out of obligation and you couldn’t wait to get off the phone with me.”

“That’s because I couldn’t.”

When I try to yank my hand away, he holds it tighter. “I didn’t want you to be fine without me. I didn’t want to hear that you were moving on. I didn’t want you to be okay, because I wasn’t. I was a mess, and every time I called I made it worse for myself. I was playing like shit. It felt like I’d done it all for nothing, but as much as I didn’t want to stay away from you, I knew it was the right thing to do. It was painful, the not having any ties to you. I missed knowing what was going on in your life, if you found a better part-time job, one you actually liked, if you bought a car, if you’d moved into an apartment like you wanted to, like we’d planned to, or if all of that had changed.”

“If it was so hard, why stay out of my life altogether?”

He sighs. “For me it was all or nothing with you. I knew if I saw you, I’d want to get back together. Then I found out you were with Avery—I think it was a few months before you got engaged.”

“Wouldn’t that have been a safe time to make contact? When I was already with someone?”

Ethan’s laugh is almost bitter. “My dad told me not to.”

I’m shocked by this. Martin knew how hard losing Ethan had been for me. He’d been a huge source of support the entire time. “Why would he do that?”

“Because he knew I would fuck it up for you.”

“How?”

“Your happiness made me miserable, which is a horrible thing to say. I should’ve been glad that you’d found someone, but I wasn’t. Not even a little bit. That it was Avery didn’t help. He was always such a douche in high school, always talking about how awesome his car was and how awesome he was. He just seemed so shallow. And you had such light and so many dreams. You were going to get a full scholarship and go into medicine and be amazing. I just couldn’t understand how someone like him could make you happy. Seeing you together, knowing I’d let you go … I couldn’t be your friend.”