Alone With Ross

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Caspian's POV

"What are you doing here?" I blinked at his harsh tone. My cheeks flushing with embarrassment.

What am I doing here? Did you think things would just go back to normal?

What's normal anyways?

"Well, I'm on break, thought it'd be nice to get my award then go to Indianapolis for a few days." I shrugged my shoulders, feeling uncomfortable under his scrutinizing stare, all the while my hands were aching to reach over and make contact with him.

Ross finally lifted his head from the steering wheel, looking away from me and out the window. I felt his uneasiness waving off of him.

"Your hair is long." I said pathetically, and he seemed to think so too because he just scoffed.

"It tends to grow over a year." He said lowly and I looked towards my lap, grumbling to myself. He sighed looking down as well. "You've changed."

Yeah no kidding.

"You pierced your nose." He stated and my hand went up to touch it like a reflex.

"Yeah, I forget it's there sometimes. It was just an impulse decision. I've been making a lot of those this year." A cloud passed over the sun, casting a shadow. I saw Ross' shoulders slump, and I looked over at him only to be shocked at the sight of his glossy eyes.

"This sucks." He spat out, my chest burned as his composer broke to pieces, and in the next second his face was buried in his hands. "I can't do this, I can't just sit here acting like I'm okay, because I'm fucking not." He hiccuped, and my hands twitched, resisting the urge to comfort him.

"So I'm just going to get it out in the open okay? Before I kick you out of this damn car and drive away." I bit my lip to contain my back talk, as he caught his breath. "We ended on the shittiest note ever, after that phone call, of, whatever the fuck that was we haven't spoken since. And it had taken me a solid two months to actually face the music of the reality that you weren't going to magically appear at the front door, begging for a do over. It took me two months of reading your shitty classic literature to realize that you were gone and you weren't going to come back."

"It was pathetic really, after realizing I had spent another two months trying to get over you, but to no avail, I just embraced the fact that I am doomed to love you for the entirety of my life."

Doomed. I almost wanted to roll my eyes about how melodramatic he was being.

"So as you can see I am absolutely torn at the fact that you're here, in my car of all places." He laughed sadly.

"Why are you torn?" I finally spoke.

"Because now that you're here my heart wants to hate you with every fiber of my being for breaking it, and at the same time I just want to lock the car doors and go 70 down the highway never stopping so you're stuck with me." He smirked at the end, giving me a glimpse of the Ross I had spent every day thinking about, but his smile dropped as if it had never graced his lips in the first place.

As I took in what he said, I myself was becoming angry.

"Listen, I get you're hurt and all, but that isn't my fault. I didn't force you to go see April, I didn't force you to get back together with her, so I don't know-"

"Wait,wait,wait, what the hell did you just say?" His face was contorted in confusion. "Me and April aren't back together where on earth would you get that idea?"

I sat there frozen like an idiot as I scrambled to explain. "I-I just, I just assumed-"

"We've been separated for almost a year but you're still shit at lying." He joked.

"Alright, so um, when you had found her, you messaged me telling me that you had found her." He nodded in remembrance. "And you may have accidentally called me, and I heard your conversation."

He sat, chewing on the insides of my cheeks, a habit I used to have and he used to try to make me stop, he shifted a bit. "Well, then you should know I didn't get back together with her." He scratched the back of his neck. "I was actually kinda rude to her."

My shoulders slumped. "Your phone died."

"Well then what was the last thing you heard? If you remember?" He seemed less tense now as I was mentally curling in on myself.

Of course I remember, I couldn't get the damn words out of my head.

"You were talking about how easy it was to love her, and something about how you can't remember a time when you didn't love her, a-and-" My eyes watered. "Then your phone died."

"Oh Cass." His hand reached out for mine, and I was thankful to finally have made contact with him. "You thought I loved her?"

"How could I not? You didn't hear it from my end."

"No because I was on my end, and if you could've heard the rest of that conversation you would've heard how I was saying that I remember the exact second that I fell in love with you." My stomach clenched, I felt like I was going to be sick.

"No offense Caspian, but you're really stupid."

My head snapped towards him. "Excuse me? Who just got an award for Summa Cum Laude?" I waved the certificate at him, and he took his hand off of mine to slap it away.

"Nope, you're pretty stupid." A faint smile rested on his lips as he looked down at his lap again. "After all that we've been through, the good and the bad, after all the things we had said, how could you doubt even for a second that I could love someone else? What happened to I promise to love you till the day I die?"

I felt like a complete idiot. He's right I am stupid. And here I was thinking I was going to get closer, that I was going to walk out of this life forever and officially start a new one.

Now here I am, discombobulated, and more in love with him than I was when I left.

"What happened was, I was trying to get over you." I said quietly, the guilt was eating me alive, if I don't tell him soon I'm never going to be able to get out of this car.

"Yeah, I tried to get over you too, but I can't, and I'm alright with that." He shrugged.

Not for long, come on just say it.

"Well I'm not, Ross. I've been seeing someone."

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Uuuuuuuuummmmmmmmmmmm yeah