I pull out of the school’s parking lot and head toward my house. The thought of having to return to this place every day seems less exciting now. Now that I know that Christian’s daughter is one of my students. For a brief second, I think about what it’ll be like to meet Ari’s mom, the woman in Christian’s life, but I try not to linger on that. I don’t want to start bawling again. I need to keep the tears in check.
Blasting the radio, I start singing along to all the songs that play, skipping any songs that remind me of him. I play the anthems, the songs that make me feel empowered. Alive. The one song I don’t skip when it coincidentally goes on is Before He Cheats by Carrie Underwood. I wish I were one of those girls who exacted revenge. The kind of girl who grabbed a bat and destroyed a guy’s car.
The last thing I need though is a headline about a school principal going wild and being charged with destruction of property. Better to shout the words from my car than regret the actions from a jail cell. I put the song on repeat, listening to it over and over until I reach my house.
Feeling emotionally drained, I park the car and enter my house. When I moved back to Forest Pines, I knew there was always a chance I could run in to him. Part of me hated that idea, but a smaller part of me had some hope. Hope that we could at least talk. That he’d explain to me what happened six years ago.
It was silly of me to think that an explanation from him would make things better.
I only briefly thought about him moving on. There was always the possibility that he would find someone else. That he fell in love with another girl. I always thought there was a chance that he settled down and had a family. Never in a million years did I expect that his family started back when we were in high school.
I slam the door shut behind me and walk straight to the kitchen. Kicking off my shoes, I grab the pistachio ice cream from the freezer and a spoon. Walking over to the living room, I grab the TV remote and turn it on. I lie on the couch with my blanket covering my legs and search mindlessly through Netflix for the next thing that’ll stop me from thinking.
When I finally find something I haven’t watched before, and won’t remind me of today, I hit play. I spend the next couple of hours eating my ice cream straight from the tub and trying to think about the plot of the movie and not the plot of my life.
Forest Pines is a small town.
People run in to each other all the time.
Considering his daughter is a student at the school I’m the principal of, the chances of me running in to him and his family just got bigger.
I’ll be professional. Courteous. I’ll treat him like I would any other parent. Like I don’t know him. I guess the reality is, if my Christian were capable of having a child around the same time we were together, then I didn’t really know him at all.
A couple of tears slide down my face, but I clear them out immediately. I’ve cried enough about Christian Cole already. I won’t allow myself to cry anymore. With that resolution, I decide to do the unhealthiest thing I could possibly do. I push my feelings deep within me hoping that will make them go away.
Except, I know it won’t.
Because if there’s one thing I know, it’s that I’ll always love Christian Cole. I loved him then, even after he broke my heart. And I’ll love him with all the little pieces he left behind.
12
CHRISTIAN
“See you tomorrow, Coach,” the last student says as he walks past my office and out the locker room.
“See you then,” I tell him when I finally register his words, knowing he probably didn’t hear my response.
Practice sucked today. I sucked today. I couldn’t help it though. If this weren’t a new job, a job I wasn’t interested in keeping, I would’ve gone straight to a bar and drank until I couldn’t remember my name… or hers.
Amari is back.
She’s back and I bet she thinks worse of me now than she did before. I know she does. She thinks I cheated on her, which I would never do to anyone. She’s wrong about that. But the fact that I didn’t cheat on her doesn’t make what I did any better.
I slept with someone weeks before getting involved with Amari.
I got that person pregnant.
I left the girl of my dreams without explaining to her why.
I guess my belief that I wasn’t worth a second chance made her believe that I thought she wasn’t worth an explanation.
I’ve imagined running in to Amari a million times. I’ve thought about every word I would say. How I would get on my knees and beg her to forgive me for being stupid. Beg her to take me back.
I’ve even thought about what it’d be like for the most important women in my life to meet. How I would introduce her to my daughter… introduce my daughter to her. Never in my wildest dreams did I think that it would actually happen. Ironic that the two most important women in my life met without me even having anything to do with it.
I wonder what that’ll be like for Amari. She’s the principal of my daughter’s school. She’ll see my daughter in the halls and think of her as a reminder of why I left her every single day without understanding it.
I bet she didn’t figure something else out. She probably didn’t realize, likely blinded by her anger at me, that she and my daughter have similar names. That I named my daughter after her. It was probably not the most sensitive thing to do, for Ari’s mother, but I was given a choice and I went with it. Amari and Ari.
My mind travels to the memory of when I decided what I would name the baby girl who would become my life. “What do you want to name her?” Katie asked me while I worked on setting up a crib in the nursery. Her room was the only room that had anything inside of it at that point. I didn’t come from money and having to figure out a place to live was the first problem I faced. I didn’t want to live at my mother’s house. If I were enough of a man to bring a child into the world, I needed to be man enough to make that work without relying on my mother. Once I got a place, I couldn’t furnish it all at once. Unlike me, Katie came from money, but her parents wanted no part in her future with me. It’s not like they needed to contribute anyway because Katie wasn’t going to live with me. My daughter would though, even though I hadn’t known it at the time, and I would make sure she had everything she needed.
“You want me to name her?” I asked Katie, a little baffled that she’d give me that privilege. She was almost due and it hadn’t been the easiest of pregnancies. She screamed at me. Resented me. I knew deep down she hated me for putting her in that predicament. I hated myself too but for different reasons.
She nodded. “Yeah, I don’t really have any idea. It’s not like I was planning to have a kid at nineteen.”
Neither was I. “Let me think…” I hadn’t thought about any child names. I didn’t think I’d be the one naming her. Then again, sometimes I felt like I was the only one who cared about the kid we would soon have. I guess, in the end, I was right.
“Take your time,” she told me as she watched me assemble the crib. Her ankles were swollen, her eyes tired, and her belly was so big I didn’t think it could get any bigger. Our daughter was only a few weeks away, so the name thing wasn’t really something we could keep pushing off.
“What about Ari?” I asked. Katie didn’t know anything about Amari because they never met. They didn’t run in the same circles and didn’t go to the same schools.
“Ari? Like Ariana?” she asked.
I shook my head. “Not really.”
“Like Ariel?” she asked, once again trying to figure out where I was going with this.
Ari, like Amari, is what I wanted to say. But I didn’t think it would fly to get the girl I impregnated to name our child in honor of the girl whose heart I broke, the girl I loved. “Just Ari.”
She shrugged. “Sounds good to me. What about a middle name?”
“That one’s up to you,” I told her. She’s the one who’ll be doing all the hard work when it comes to labor, I don’t want to take away from her the
ability to name our kid.
“No middle name then,” she stated and then pulled out her phone, effectively ending the conversation.
Ari Cole. That’s my daughter’s name. The daughter I wished I’d had with Amari instead.
It was supposed to be our family.
Amari Cole.
Ari Cole.
Christian Cole.
White picket fence and all. But that isn’t the reality I’m living. Instead, I find myself sitting at my desk ready to bang my fist on the table because I can’t forget the way Amari looked at me with disgust.
She didn’t let me speak.
She didn’t want to hear what I had to say.
How the hell am I supposed to leave her alone knowing she’s this close to me?
She’s back at Forest Pines.
I always expected her to come and visit them when her parents lived here, but she never did. She left this town and didn’t come back for six years.
When her parents left, all hope of her returning to this town went with them. And now, unexpectedly, she’s back. They never did sell their house, so she’s probably living there now. In the same house I snuck into numerous times without her parents knowing. The house where I stole kisses and made her mine.
The memories assault me and my breath shortens when I realize how much I want her. How much I’ve always wanted her. Not just want but need. Six years have passed and yet my feelings for her have remained the same, if anything, they’ve gotten stronger. Despite the distance, seeing her again today was like I’d never stopped seeing her at all. It makes me want to pick up right where we left off. Well, a few days before then.
I love her just as much now as I did back then, if not more, and that realization scares me because now that she knows Ari exists, now that I have nothing to hide, I don’t know that I’ll be able to stay away.
I need her to give me a chance to explain it all. And maybe more than just explain.
I don’t deserve a second chance, but damn it all if I don’t want one right now more than anything.
The problem is she wants nothing to do with me.
She hates me. And I can’t blame her for it because it’s not her fault… it’s mine.
13
AMARI
I roll over in my bed and the moment I do, my face meets the ground with a loud bang. Opening my eyes in shock and pain, I realize that the reason I fell is that I didn’t actually fall asleep on my bed. Nope. I knocked out on the couch.
That makes perfect sense considering the moment I got home, I planted my ass in front of the TV and never got up. I stay on the floor for a few more seconds, laughing at the irony of falling. I’ve hit bottom before and while I thought I was in the up and up, falling unexpectedly and crashing down on the floor is exactly what my life feels like right now.
I groan and finally get up from the floor when my alarm starts ringing. Reaching for my phone, I shut it off. Letting my eyes adjust to the light creeping in from the living room window, I check my phone for anything I’ve missed.
Selfishly, my heart wants there to be something from Christian. A message. A call. Anything that explains to me what happened. That assures me I was wrong. That what I think happened isn’t true. I know that’s never going to happen. Not only because there’s no way he could explain himself out of the fact that he has a daughter but also because I changed my number.
I waited by my phone for months after the breakup. Years even.
Desperately, I texted him to figure out what happened. I think I must’ve texted him every single day after the breakup asking for an explanation. The whole thing caught me so off guard that I wanted him to break it down for me and help me understand.
At Emely’s insistence, and under her supervision, I started messaging him less and less. But still, every time my phone pinged with a notification, my heart would soar at the thought that it could be him. That he would come back to me, apologize and tell me he was in the wrong for breaking my heart.
Every notification I got for months made me hope that my misery would end and the two of us would be back together. I hoped that he’d just gotten cold feet at the thought of the goals we had set together.
As the days passed though, I realized that the message or call was never going to come. It didn’t stop me from hoping every single day. Still, he never picked up. Never responded to a message. Never even bothered reading them. To stop myself from freaking out every time I got a notification, I changed my number. I did it partly because I was pissed at him. I gave him a long time to call and he didn’t, so changing my number would be my way of telling him I wasn’t going to wait on him any longer. The real reason for changing my number was that part of me wanted to believe that at some point in those six years he realized he was wrong and called me. I think it would’ve hurt more to have kept the same number and for him to never have called. This way, I could convince myself that he was calling me every day hoping my phone would be connected again. That he would be the one waiting by the phone for the day it would ring and my name would pop up on his screen once again.
Now I know that he wasn’t.
While I was mourning our dreams, he was building his family. Raising his daughter. Doing God-knows what else.
I sit on my bed with my phone in my hands and the past on my mind. It isn’t until I get a message from Emely that I realize how long I was lost in my thoughts. I need to start getting ready for work.
Emely: Got the weekend off! I’m coming your way soon.
Emely: Wow. No response.
Emely: You didn’t even read the message.
Emely: You probably fell asleep, didn’t you?
Emely: Gosh you’re so old.
Emely: I feel like this is making me look desperate, so I’ll let you go for tonight. Send me signs of life in the morning.
Emely: Love ya!
I smile at the chain of messages my best friend’s left me. The smile leaves my face the moment I realize I’m going to have to tell her everything. I didn’t want to talk about it last night because I wanted to forget. But there’s no way I can forget all of this with him being so close. With his daughter being one of the kids I work with.
Maybe he’ll pull her out of school now that he knows I’m teaching there… maybe his girlfriend, wife, whatever, will not want her daughter at the same school as Christian’s ex-girlfriend.
Then again, maybe she doesn’t care. I clearly wasn’t as important to him as I thought, so maybe he never bothered to mention me.
Shaking those thoughts out of my head, I walk over to the shower and start getting ready for work. I have a job to do. I’m a big girl and I promised myself I would never let a guy come into my life and tear it to shreds. Not again. Not like before.
I thought about calling Emely on my way to work like I did yesterday, but I opt against it. Her last message came in at 2 am and she’s probably still asleep. That’s the reason I tell myself, but the reality is, I’m a coward and don’t want to break down again. I know that if I call her and tell her what happened, I won’t be able to stop myself from falling apart all over again and I refuse to do that. Instead, I choose to run through my daily routine like nothing’s happened. Like yesterday didn’t come bearing devastating news.
Every time Hannah walks into my office, she gives me a questioning glance. She lingers at the door. She looks back twice every time she’s about to leave the room. I can tell she’s worried. She doesn’t know me, but she knows I’m barely holding myself together. I hope she’s just really good at diving deep into people’s emotions and not that my misery is written on my face. I can tell she doesn’t know what to do with me. Without even knowing me, I know she cares enough to want to make sure I’m okay, but she isn’t going to push me for answers.
To let her know I won’t fall apart, I smile at her every time she comes in and out of my office. I meet her questioning looks with reassuring nods. I try to show her that I’m okay, but I can tell she doesn’t believe me. Still, I’m ho
ping that the more I smile in her direction the more she’ll start to buy my act… the more I start to feel like I’m actually going to be okay.
Finishing some of the paperwork on my desk, I look at the clock and realize it’s already noon. I’m making great headway, which is a product of not wanting to have the space in my mind to think about him. At this rate, I’m going to be done today with all the paperwork I was hoping to get done next week.
A slight knock at the door grabs my attention. I bet Hannah’s checking on me again… “Come in,” I instruct. Hannah pops her head in.
“You have someone here to see you,” she tells me.
I swear I feel my heart stop beating. “Who?” I ask, clearing my throat.
“It’s me,” Ari’s little head pokes in through the door as well.
Hannah opens it the rest of the way and Ari lets herself in. “Hi,” she starts walking herself in and plopping down on the seat she occupied yesterday. I take her in and I can’t believe I didn’t realize it before. Before Christian walked in. She looks just like him. Carbon copy. Her eyes are his eyes. And her confidence as she walks reminds me of him. No wonder I was immediately taken by her. No wonder I felt she reminded me of someone I knew.
I clear my throat when I realize I’ve not responded. “Hi Ari. How are you?”
“I’m good, how are you?” she asks. She doesn’t crack a smile, just sits on the other side of the desk like this is a business meeting. I can’t help but feel like I was the one called to the principal’s office, like I’m the one in trouble here.
Just Because of You Page 6
