Can You Keep A Secret?

Chapter Seventy-Eight

       

-Stacey's POV-

            "I don't think that this is going to work out," I said, hating myself with every word that came out of my mouth.

            "What do you mean?" Brooklyn asked, but I couldn't bring myself to repeat it again. This left him scrambling for words to fill the silence. "You're not...You don't...You don't mean that, do you?"

            "I'm afraid that I do," I said, hugging my legs up close against my chest. This is for the best. This is for the best. This is for the best.

            "But...why?" He asked again, his voice breaking. I bit down on my lip, hard enough to draw blood, so that I wouldn't start crying. I had never had a problem with being heartless when I needed to before, but there was just something about him that brought my walls down. He was good, he was pure, he was the best of the best – And he didn't deserve to be involved in any way with the scum of the earth like me.

            He mistook my contemplative silence as another lack of an answer, and he began speaking again, much faster this time – "Please, don't do this. Whatever it is that I did, I can work to fix it, I promise. I would, I would do anything, anything that you want, I just, I just...Anything. Please," He begged, and I dug my nails into my thigh as I forced the next words out.

            "You didn't do anything, and there's nothing that you could do...It's not you, it's me." With a lack of anything better to say, I pulled out the most cliché line in the book.

            "I don't understand," he said, and he sounded one step away from straight up sobbing over the phone.

            "I'm sorry," I said quietly, hanging up before I could cause any more damage. He tried to call back almost right away, but I let it ring, before reaching my limit too rapidly and turning the ringer off entirely, and burying my phone into the junk drawer, pushing it far enough down that I couldn't see it anymore.

            I felt radioactive, like everything that I touched eventually became infected and died. I wanted to call him back and tell him that I had never meant to hurt him, that this entire thing was imply to save him from more pain in the long run I wanted to tell him that he was the most amazing guy that I've ever met, and that, in some alternate universe, maybe we could've worked out.

            I wanted to tell him to stay away from people like me, while simultaneously wanting to drop everything and go to him. I wanted to wipe the tears out of his eyes and kiss him until he forgot that the whole thing had ever happened. I wanted to ask him to keep on loving like that – To not take me as a good example. Wanted him to know that someday, a heart like his would land him with the girl of his dreams, a nice girl, one that would appreciate and not take advantage of him, one that he could spend the rest of his life with. I wanted to wish him luck in finding her.

            But I couldn't do any of these things – I had to cut him off completely and try to start again. This time, I had to play careful, because, more than anything, I wished that I hadn't played him into this game in the first place. Asked if he was okay at the restaurant that day, helped him get the milkshake out of his hair, and left it at that, simply walked away...But, no. I'd wanted it all, and, in trying to get it, I had lost everything.