Under His Roof

chapter thirty-two

The last month of high school went past Kimberly in a blur.

One day she was arriving back to school from the worst weekend of her life, and then what seemed like the next day she was arriving back from beach week with graduation only a few days away and that fateful weekend a distant memory.

She hadn't talked to Julian throughout the entire month even though he had reached out to her a few times back during the beginning weeks of it. Melitta had been the one to help her stay strong because Kimberly knew all too well that without the help of her best friend she wouldn't have been able to resist him for all that time. She knew that part of getting over someone healthily was distancing yourself, and so she knew that if she ever wanted to recover then that was what she would have to do.

And recover she did.

Obviously she still loved Julian, that wasn't up for debate. But even though she loved him, she knew that she was making the right decision, and the fact that she still loved him after everything that happened and all their time apart only made her understand with a clearer mind what he had meant when he told her he still loved Daphne.

Once you love someone, you can never not love them, you can only love them differently. You can try and mask it with hate, but it will always be there, and that's just the truth of it. Her love for Julian was still there, but it wasn't the same. It wasn't as painful to love him.

She liked to think that over the course of the month she had grown enough to forgive him, because when she thought about him now, it still hurt, but the resentment was gone. She hoped that he was doing well – not with Daphne of course, she hadn't recovered that much – but well nonetheless.

Throughout the perilous journey of her trying to get over him, she'll be the first to admit that she had done a few stupid things – one of them being making out with Cameron in the back of his car. Although that was something she assured him would never happen again...until it happened again two days later.

They eventually got caught by Aveline, who proceeded to tell their entire friend group that she saw two of their best friends making out behind the dorm building, and so that fizzled out pretty quickly. She and Cameron were still the best of friends, but they both felt like it wasn't worth it and so they just decided not to spend time alone anymore, that way there would be no temptation for anything to happen. Things went back to normal soon enough and so Kimberly was back to being alone which meant that she had to find another way to keep Julian off of her mind.

She ended up throwing herself into her schoolwork. Studying hard and doing all her papers and assignments thoroughly even though she didn't really have to. She had heard back at the beginning of May that she got off of the waitlist and was now accepted to Brown – her dream school – and so things for her were pretty much set in stone.

Still though, she did as well as she possibly could, and by the time beach week rolled around and she had no more school work to do, she realized she wasn't really thinking about Julian as much. She didn't need any more distractions because he wasn't on her mind in the same way he had been before. She found that when he did cross her mind, it still hurt, but she didn't want to be with him. Despite having healed, the wounds were still there, and lingering on him only made her more unstable, so instead she kept herself occupied with other things and found that when she did so, it was easier to come to terms with the way things were now and be content with it.

Entering into her last weekend at school, Kimberly thought a lot about how much things in her life were about to change. She would be up in Rhode Island, far away from everything she knew and loved, and she would finally be on her own, completely and utterly.