“He called a couple days after the whole thing with your dad on Christmas. I was devastated because I didn’t know what was going to happen with us and I couldn’t even talk to you. He just called to talk and he asked me to go out to eat with him. I didn’t even want to go, but I needed to get out of the house……so, I went.” I swallowed hard and continued. “He picked me up and we ate and came RIGHT back. He walked me to the door and then left. That’s it, I swear! I shouldn’t have gone knowing how you feel about me hanging out with him, but……I don’t know what I was thinking. You have to believe that it was nothing more than that.”
I waited for him to respond or even move, but he held his gaze and watched me shift uncomfortably in my seat. “We’ve been through so much.” He paused and shook his head in disbelief. “It would’ve been one thing if you came to me yourself and told me about it, but I had to find out like this. That makes it look like you’ve got something to hide, and I can’t shake the feeling that somewhere deep inside, you still love him.”
This couldn’t possibly get any worse. The words wouldn’t even register in my head when he said them. If his assumption had been true then I could have handled it, but he was so far off. My own stupid actions got me into this predicament and I couldn’t seem to dig my way out of it. After all that we’d gone through, was it really going to end like this? Over Antonio? I couldn’t let that happen. So, I did what any self-respecting woman in love would’ve done……….I begged.
“AJ please don’t do this to me.” I was starting to panic; my hands were clammy and shaking like crazy.
“Sam, I’m not doing this to hurt you,” he replied.
“Doing what AJ? What exactly are you doing?” I asked frantically, fearing the worst.
His eyes were red and I could see that they were starting to water a little. He shut them quickly and gazed out the driver’s side window and I could hardly breathe while I waited for him to answer my question. But when he finally did, I wished that he’s kept silent because he was doing the very thing I feared. A lump was stuck in my throat as I watched him sit quietly, thinking of how to word it. He parted his lips and stabbed me in the heart with his words. “I think the anvil just dropped,” he said softly, and then turned back toward the window, leaving me speechless.
*****
“Sam, honey, you can’t stay locked in here like this. It isn’t healthy. You’ve barely come out at all in almost a week,” my mother said from outside of the door. She sighed and jiggled the knob one last time before walking away frustrated. Life without AJ had proven to be nearly impossible. While it’s true that I still had breath left in my body, I was very much dead on the inside. The night he and I broke up, I cried nonstop. I ignored the back to back phone calls from Deanna knowing that she’d only ask questions and I didn’t feel like talking about it. My parents let me have my space for the first couple hours, but Mom’s maternal instinct got the best of her and she came to check on me. She sat beside me, cradled my head to her chest while I continued to sob in her arms. The next morning daddy got AJ’s number from my cell phone and called him. His intent was to inquire about what happened, but he didn’t get an answer.
I was like a zombie for the first two days, but by day three, depression had set in. The numbness that once protected me from feeling the sting of being without him subsided, leaving me with a bundle of exposed nerves that burned like they were on fire. I spent most of the day crying and running to the bathroom to throw up, but that evening I decided to try calling AJ. Maybe there was some way that I could change his mind. The phone rang four or five times and then went to his voicemail. I hung up and tried over and over again continuously for about ten minutes straight, but he wasn’t taking my calls. I hung up after that final time and ran back to the bathroom.