I didn’t bother changing into nicer clothes. Making myself look nice for him wasn’t exactly top on my daily list of priorities, so instead I just read over my list about twenty times before shoving it in a desk drawer and moving downstairs to wait. I knew that he would speed across town and that he couldn’t wait to come over here to make things better. However, it wouldn’t be so easy as a cute smile and a kiss. I was way too deeply hurt by his actions to just forgive him after some brief explanation. Zac was a good guy, but a guy nonetheless. Guys weren’t usually too keen with taking the blame, or at least that was what I had surmised from my past experience.
Forty-five minutes passed before I heard the doorbell ring. The sound seemed to echo through the entire empty house and it felt like it was closing in on me. I didn’t want to go answer the door. I didn’t want to fight any more. I didn’t want him to see me cry, which I knew I was going to do. But most of all, I didn’t want to forgive him easily, something I knew I was incredibly close to doing. When I threw open the door, I almost just cried out “It’s fine, I forgive you!” just to feel his strong arms wrap around me to make me feel safe. Instead, the cold air hit me like a brick wall and I found myself staring at a version of my boyfriend who looked as shitty as I felt.
He hadn’t shaved and looked like he had literally climbed out of bed, thrown on the closest clothes and gotten in his car. We were quite the pair, standing there looking at each other waiting for me to invite him over the threshold without so much as a hello. We both seemed to know that an exchange of greetings was unnecessary and would only serve to delay the important conversation that needed to take place.
I wordlessly led him down the hall and took a seat at the kitchen table, signifying that he should do the same. He took off his coat and hung it over the back of his chair before sitting down across from me. I didn’t offer him a drink or some lunch or anything else that I would have normally done when a visitor arrived. Instead, I just sat there and looked at him, waiting for him to talk. I wasn’t about to be the one to start this conversation.
“Ever since you left, I’ve been trying to figure out what to say to you… still haven’t come up with anything good…” he said.
“Obviously,” I said despite myself, again hardly recognizing the voice coming from my own mouth. Saying something like that was so unlike me, but I guessed that I had just never been in a situation like this before and therefore could have no way of anticipating my own reaction.
“Um… I guess I’ll just start at the beginning then,” he responded, clearing his throat before speaking again, “I played football from about the age of nine on in lots of different leagues, both through school and through the community. My junior high coach put me as quarterback in eighth grade and I played it all the way through, well, last year. I was a little bigger than quarterbacks usually are, but I was fast and knew the game backwards and forwards. Football was all I knew. It was all my dad and I ever talked about, it was all I would watch on TV… or at least that’s what I let people think. To everyone besides my brothers and my mom, I was Quarterback Zac who lead my high school team to the state championship twice.
“I got sucked in with that crowd; going to parties, being an asshole to the ‘non-popular’ kids in school. I never liked it, but I went along with it because I was greatly enjoying the attention and the fact that I was infinitely more popular than both of my brothers had ever been in high school. I was a stupid, hot-headed teenager and I let the stupid high school attention go to my head.
“It wasn’t until a party one of my teammates had got busted and we all got slapped with drinking tickets and banned from a game that I finally got my head out of my ass. I had been so belligerently drunk that I hadn’t even been able to stand up for the sobriety line test. It was ridiculous. I didn’t even really like drinking then because I always wound up doing something, or someone, stupid while I was hammered.
“My dad pretended to be mad in front of my mom but secretly just gave me a soft punch to the shoulder as if he had been there before as soon as she left the room. The whole thing just made me sick to my stomach and I went upstairs to talk to Taylor. He told me that he didn’t understand why I had to be such a pain in the ass all of the time because he was sure that none of my so-called friends experienced any guilt for their actions. I told him that I agreed, and he told me that I really needed to think about that. He was right, of course, because Taylor just has a way of being annoyingly right about everything, but I didn’t want to admit it quite yet.
“So, instead I just kept dating the stupid girls who were pretty and had nice bodies but were completely lacking any sort of brains or personality whatsoever. I wanted something more, but couldn’t quite put my finger on it, and instead worked my way through girlfriends every few weeks. None of them seemed to hold my interest for very long. My friends said I was just too horny for my own good, but that wasn’t it; there was something that I was looking for that I just wasn’t finding with the ‘popular’ girls at our high school, but I sure didn’t know what it was.
“At the end of sophomore year of college, I broke up with Cassie and realized that I just couldn’t take it anymore. It was like I finally realized that I was sick to death of wasting my time, so I stopped dating until I could figure it out. Then, last fall I screwed up my ACL in the middle of a game. Meaghan was one of the cheerleaders on the field at the time, but she took care of me. She went with me to the hospital and stayed with me, just talking. I thought that maybe she was different, that maybe she really liked me. I told her things that the other girls I had dated hadn’t wanted to hear about. She asked me questions about myself and I asked her ones back. It was more than just something psychical because it couldn’t be, not while I was laid up in a hospital bed. Or so I thought. Once I was back at school and done going to psychical therapy, in started the questions about when I could play again and whether I’d take her to parties with the football team. She didn’t want anything different than the other girls had wanted. She just went about it in a different way.
“Then, I had a bad leg, a ruined football career, and a completely jaded outlook on women in general. When I went home for Christmas that year, Taylor brought home his girlfriend, Sara. She was funny and smart and she actually had conversations with people. My parents loved her and the look on Taylor’s face when he looked at her was just priceless. She wasn’t a fakey, overdone girl like the ones I’d dated my whole life. She was pretty in a real way, in a different way than I had ever noticed in girls before.
“It freaked me out, thinking about Taylor’s girlfriend like that, so I just kind of blocked it all out. But, I found myself going and talking to the coach and quitting the football team for good when break was over and I made the decision to live by myself this year. My roommates at the time were some of my teammates and they couldn’t get over the fact that I had quit the team. I realized then how much I liked having time to myself because they pretty much ignored me from then on out and it was just fine by me. The more I became distanced from the team, the more I realized what I had let myself become when I was around them.
“I’m not trying to say that all guys on football teams are assholes, but that’s what I became when I was a part of one. Being a part of a football team was not the best thing for me, as a person, to do with my life, but it was a tough pill to swallow since it was all I knew… had ever known.
“My mom was always someone that I was myself with. There’s no need to put up a cocky façade with the woman who gave birth to you… she knows better than all of that. And, my brothers had never really seemed to mind that they watched me transform from lunk-head jock to their normal brother Zac. No one asked me to change, I just did it on my own. I took the better part of last spring just hanging out by myself, reading and watching movies. My grades went up and I started paying attention to things I had never even noticed before.
“I finally realized what I had liked so much about Taylor’s girlfriend. She was real, and she didn’t care or ever talk about the fact that I was on the football team. Hell, I’m not even sure she knew about it. I was sure that Taylor didn’t spend all of his time telling his girlfriend about his little brother’s successes. When she was around, I could just be me.
“So, um, since I had started to actually give a shit about school and found that I could get good grades if I tried, I found myself spending more time in the library this fall, looking for what I was missing. And that’s how I found you,” he said, finally stopping his seemingly epic monologue. I just looked at him for a second, willing all of the information to seep in before shaking my head.
“Okay, but that still doesn’t explain why you didn’t tell me any of this, Zac… why you felt that you couldn’t trust me with this information.”
“You didn’t know who I was! I saw the way you looked at me, not to be creepy, and for awhile I just assumed that it was because you recognized me, but when you came over to my table, I knew that you had no idea. You were looking at me because you liked the looks of Zac, not Quarterback Zac.” My mouth dropped open as everything started to fall into place, but I snapped it shut before narrowing my eyes at him.
“So, you started to come to the library to ‘find what you were missing’… and you found me,” I tried, speaking aloud as I tried to process.
“Yeah,” he said with a smile, thinking that he had just cleared his own guilty name.
“So I was some kind of fucking social experiment put into action?!” I demanded and I could feel my face turning red. His eyes opened wide in shock, clearly unprepared for that reaction.
“What?! No! Where did you-”
“No! You were in the library because you knew that it was where you’d find some clueless girl who was ‘pretty in a real way’, which means ugly for your information, who you could play to see if someone who knew nothing of your past would actually fall for you,” I said.
“But-”
“And you were really looking for a girl according to Taylor’s taste. Are you telling me that I should be dating Taylor instead of you? Is he the person you’re being?”
“No! I’m being me, I’m being Zac!”
“Who is Zac?!” I screamed, and a thick silence settled over us like volcanic ash falling after an eruption. We both took a minute to calm ourselves and to collect our thoughts before he spoke.
“Esme,” he said, speaking my name for the first time since he’d arrived, “I didn’t tell you about all of that because it’s not a part of me any more. It’s not a part of my life that I’m proud of and I didn’t want to have to dump all of that crap and all of my past relationships on you the day we met.”
“I’m not talking about the day we met, Zac! I didn’t tell you every single thing about me the day that we met! We haven’t been dating that long, so I don’t expect to know a ton about you for quite some time, Zac. But honestly, I can not stand being lied to. Omitting pieces of information at the beginning of a relationship is normal until you feel the other person out enough to know if it’s going to last long enough to get into your baggage. But, I flat out asked you if you had dated anyone at Harper and you said no! WHY?” I demanded.
“I don’t know,” he said, his voice barely audible.
“And I’m sorry, but I can’t understand why you wouldn’t want to share your past accomplishments with me. I can understand not wanting to tell me about your previous dickish behavior right away, but not telling me that you took your team to state twice and had gotten MVP trophies? Now that I’ll never understand. I’m really proud of you for all of that, Zac, even if you don’t want to play anymore. Football was a huge part of your life for a long time, and I can’t help but think that if you wanted me to be a huge part of your life that you wouldn’t have let me in on that.”
“Esme, no! I do want you to be a big part of my life. You already are!” I shook my head and dropped my gaze from his face to my hands after finding my resolve draining away each second longer I stared into his dark brown eyes.
“No, Zac. I’m just the girl who happened to be there when you decided to try out the new, past-free Zac.”
“You’re wrong. You have to believe me!”
“How can I believe anything you say?” I asked, feeling my throat constrict of its own volition, “You told me you’d never hurt me like they did… and you were right. You hurt me way worse than they ever did.” I stood from the table before the first tears left my eyes and I started down the hallway towards the stairs but was stopped by his hand closing gently over my elbow, holding me firmly in place and turning my body back towards his.
“Esme, how can I fix this?” he asked sincerely. I tried my hardest to look anywhere but directly into his gaze.
“The only way to fix it is to start over, because I don’t know who the person I’ve been dating and sleeping with for the last few months is.”
“Start over? What does that mean?” he pleaded, letting my arm go as I wrenched it from his grasp and went for the stairs. I paused on the second step, turning to face him one more time.
“It means goodbye, Zac,” I said simply, trying not to watch as his face dropped as all hope left his expression. Without another word, I went up the stairs and left him standing in the hallway, knowing that he could easily find the door that was sitting right in front of him.