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For the record, everyone has told him that driving to his ex’s house in the middle of the night to tell her that he’s still in love with her two years after they’ve broken up is not a good idea.
Actually, he broke up with her two years, 45 days, 23 hours, 50 minutes, and 12 seconds ago, and he’s felt every breath without her by his side.
Here he is, hands clutching the steering wheel as his car speeds through the dark highway.
Scott feels like throwing up.
This is not a good idea, the voice in the back of his head singsongs, she’s not going to take you back.
Honestly, he knows this. He knows that he was such an idiot, beyond an idiot, for leaving her two years ago, and he wishes that he hadn’t done it.
He was just scared; scared because even though he had already bought a glittering ring for her wear on her left ring finger, he woke up one morning the week before and felt like he was living a different life.
Suddenly, he was questioning everything. Every glance, caress, kiss, sweet everything whispered in her ear while he was buried deep inside of her.
He didn’t know if he wanted to be with her anymore, and instead of talking to Tessa like he should have, he left.
He wasn’t happy, considering he was questioning everything about the best thing in his life, and there came a time when he couldn’t take it anymore, couldn’t stand to look in her eyes and tell her that he loved her even if he didn’t know if that’s what he felt.
But now, two years, 45 days, 23 hours, 50 minutes, and 12 seconds later, he knows that he fucked up insurmountably and the only way to fix it is to tell her how he feels, that he’s still in love with her and won’t ever stop, that it took him two years of therapy and trying to get over it to admit it to himself.
Pro tip: communicate with the love of your life as much as possible. Don’t let them go in a stroke of idiocy, smashing both of your hearts to pieces because you couldn’t work up the courage to talk to them.
Trust Scott, he has first-hand experience in this.
“Friday nights are date nights,” he mumbles to himself, wearing a hole in the carpet as he paces around the dark bedroom. “I was going to propose.”
Currently, he’s listing out all of the reasons he can’t break up with Tessa today. There’s a part of him that says not to break up with her at all, but he ignores it.
The door to the kitchen opens and closes loudly, and Scott whips his head over to look at the clock that blinks beside their bed.
5:47.
Shit.
This isn’t how he planned to spend his Friday night.
He was going to spend the night doing lesson planning for the week. He teaches kindergarten and he loves it more than almost anything. However, the ideas for the lesson plans were just falling flat and he couldn’t get Tessa out of his head.
She was always so amazing at helping him with lesson plans. One time, shortly after they first moved in together, he was stuck on planning for teaching the letter T, and she suggested that he should show his class pictures of the two of them, explaining, “That’s my girlfriend, Tessa” in a poor imitation of him. He had always been very private about his personal life in terms of school things, because kindergartners ask more questions than one would think.
He turns off the highway and makes his way to her house. And proceeds to spend ten minutes worrying whether or not he should go and knock.
His brothers, Danny and Charlie, had shaken their heads and informed him that this not a good idea, that he was better off moving on, when he told them that he wanted to tell her how he feels.
Danny had actually said that there’s a “snowball’s chance in hell” that Tessa will get back with him, but he just wants her to know how he feels.
Could it be two years too late?
Somehow, he gets up enough courage to make it to the front door, and he knocks. He hasn’t been to her house before since she moved as a result of the breakup, so Scott honestly isn’t even sure that he’s at the right house.
If he’s at the wrong house, he’ll just suppose that this wasn’t meant to be and spend the rest of his life moving on from the biggest mistake.
Then, he hears a voice that sounds like Tessa’s call out, “Just one second!”
So, he waits, his hands shoved in his pockets as he bounces on the balls of his feet.
Tessa doesn’t usually get home until six, sometimes 6:15.
He tiptoes downstairs and watches her for a moment. Not in a creepy way, just because he knows that these are the final, peaceful moments before he breaks their hearts and their lives go to shit.
All because of him.
She sits on the counter and takes out her phone, but then pockets it after a moment.
He puts one foot in front of the other and forces himself to do this.
As the front door unlocks, it feels like it takes a million years.
It opens, and he can tell that she’s still not used to the heaviness of the door because she almost faceplants into the screen door in front of her, but Scott is too overwhelmed with emotion to laugh. To do anything but stare.
Almost immediately after he comes into view, a banana hits him square on the chest before landing on the ground.
He stares at Tessa, momentarily forgetting about the banana, before he leans down to pick it up. “I didn’t think you’d be home yet.”
His heart is pounding so loudly, so furiously, in his ears that it’s the only thing he can hear.
Tessa looks like she’s going to say something but doesn’t.
He’s surprised that she’s even opened the door, much less is standing in front of him now. “I didn’t think you’d be home yet.”
It’s a poor attempt at a joke, and it isn’t even funny. He said those words two years ago on that night, but he has no clue why he would bring that up again.
If he could vanish the night he broke up with her from existence, he would do just that.
She blinks, studying him for a moment. Her hair is tied back in a bun and some of the pieces have come loose. He so desperately wants to go over there and tuck her hair behind her ears, but the look she’s giving him makes him stay rooted to the spot.
She flicks on the light above them and leans her elbows against the counter, props her head in her hands. “Yeah, I got off early.”
Tessa doesn’t say anything. He doesn’t blame her, because if the situations were reversed and all of a sudden Tessa Virtue was standing at his door unexpectedly, he wouldn’t have anything to say either.
Scott remembers vividly remembers then how he spent the first few months after their breakup feeling so lost that he moved back in with his parents. They had told him he should look in to going to therapy, so that’s what he did.
He hadn’t wanted to at first, because he knew it would be like pulling teeth to remember all of the good memories he had with Tessa, but it became clear after the first session that he was supposed to be there.
Finally, she speaks. Her hand is wrapped around the edge of the front door so tight that her knuckles are white, and he wants nothing more than to take her hand in his and soothe the cramps in her fingers that are surely starting to form there. “What are you doing here?”
He runs his hand through his hair and twists his fingers around the short strands that are there.
“I think we should talk, Tessa.”
He swallows thickly, his brown eyes burning into hers, and he remembers the last time they kissed. “Can we talk?”
“About what?” she answers, still looking confused as to why he’s standing on her doorstep in the first place.
She blinks. “About what?”
“I . . . I’m really sorry, Tessa. I didn’t know what I was losing when I left you.”
She blinks several times after he says that but doesn’t say anything.
“I’m really sorry, but I think we should break up.”
And . . . there it is.
“What?” she asks in a quiet voice, and he feels his heart start to break.
She closes the door and walks outside so that they’re standing face to face on the porch. “What made you come to that realization?”
“I just . . . I don’t know if I see forever with you anymore,” Scott tells her, focusing his gaze on the banana that he turns over and over in his hands instead of looking at her. “I don’t know what it is that I want.”
“Well,” she starts harshly, unable to keep the bite out of her voice, “when you figure that out, let me know.”
His eyes fill with tears, and when he blinks, one of them forges a path down his cheek. She fights the urge to brush it away.
“Do you remember what I said to you that day, about how I wasn’t sure if I could see forever with you anymore?”
Scott had bought her a ring. He hadn’t ever told her about it, but it was hidden in the back of his sock drawer for months while he waited for the perfect moment to give it to her.
That moment never happened.
“Yes,” she answers quietly, and when another tear falls, she reaches her hand up, cups it around his face, and catches it with her thumb.
He leans into her touch, missing it after two years, and tries not to cry more when he speaks next.
“Tessa, wait.” He reaches for her hand as she passes him, but she curls it in toward her chest, out of his reach.
She spins around to face him, crosses her arms over her chest, as she opens her mouth to speak.
“And you said – you said . . .” he trails off and looks away from her.
Her hand falls to his shoulder, and the tear that has been on the tip of her thumb soaks into the fabric of his shirt, but he doesn’t notice, instead chooses to look away from her and down toward the ground.
"Why should I wait for you if you’re going to break my heart?”
She repeats those words now, just quietly enough that only they can hear them even if no one else is around, and nods for him to go on.
“Those words stayed with me for a long time,” he confesses, looking back at her. “I thought about them in the quiet of the night when I couldn’t fall asleep, when I would type out a text message to you about how sorry I was and see the cursor blinking back at me. I wanted to text you so many times, Tessa, call you and hear your voice, but I knew it wasn’t fair to you. It wasn’t fair that I decided that I was going to leave and didn’t give you a choice.”
As he walks past the bathroom, he notices how the door is closed and the light is off. Scott wants to pause for a moment, but then hears the sound of Tessa sobbing coming through the closed door.
The suitcase’s wheels thundering down the stairs behind him are enough to mask the sound of her crying, a sound that he knows he caused, and the crack in his heart widens.
I didn’t even give her a choice, he thinks, stopping at the bottom of the stairs.
“You didn’t,” she agrees, her other hand coming up to his shoulder.
“That’s something that I will never forgive myself for. We should’ve talked about it, I shouldn’t have just up and left like that, I mean, who does that –?”
“Scott.” Her voice is quiet, and his name catches in her throat but both of them pretend not to notice. “Even though, yes, I was really, really hurt by what happened and it took me so long to get to a place where I wasn’t hurting anymore, you shouldn’t beat yourself up over it anymore. If you came here to get closure, to tell me that so I could tell you it’s okay to move on, there it is. You need to move on, okay? You can’t live your life stuck in the past.”
He hears the sound of her footsteps on the stairs behind him, and when she reaches the bottom, he turns around to face her.
There are tears in his eyes and he wishes that he wasn’t breaking up with her. Wishes that he felt happy in this relationship, that he felt like he could love himself. But he doesn’t, and he feels like he can’t, so he’ll go.
Scott walks around the suitcase and holds out his arms.
She collapses right into them with a sob, clutches at the fabric of his shirt. He’s struck by how much this hurts. It feels like someone has sucker-punched him in the gut a thousand times, is stabbing at his heart.
“I thought you were going to be my forever,” Tessa whispers, her voice hollow.
The only thing he hears in the moments after that is the shattering of his heart.
He has always thought that time stops when they’re together and judging by the way that time picks up once she pulls away, he knows that’s true.
She leans in at the same time he does.
Scott is already shaking his head. “I’m still in love with you, Tessa. I haven’t stopped loving you.”
There’s a split second where she doesn’t say anything, and he wonders if she’s going to slap him or walk back inside without another word.
It’s what he’s expecting. What he doesn’t expect is for her to wrap her arms around his neck and stand on her tiptoes, beaming at him as if he’s just said the most glorious thing in the world.
“I haven’t stopped, either,” she admits, her fingers tangling in the hair at the base of his neck.
Their last kiss is hasty, and if he’s honest, in the months after it happens, that kiss isn’t the one that comes to mind when he thinks about her.
(If anyone were to ask, the kiss that plays on loop in his mind is the first very first one they shared, in the stacks at the bookstore where they met. He had been holding a copy of Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix when she stood on the tips of her toes and pressed her lips to his.)
There is one thing he remembers from their last kiss: how tears glisten in her eyes when he goes to kiss her again but stops himself. He had wanted so badly to reach forward, cup her cheeks, and kiss her again.
It wasn’t the kiss that had hurt the most.
It was, actually, the fact that he wouldn’t be able to do it for the rest of his life, like they’d always planned.
Their second kiss is slow and languid.
God, he’s missed the spark that comes every time he kisses her, the electricity that courses through his veins every time they touch.
His hands wrap around her waist and pull her closer to him.
Scott laughs into the kiss, the sound bursting out of him as clear as a bell and he is so, so happy that what he thought was their last kiss turned out not to be.
He could kiss Tessa all day every day for the rest of his life, and that’s exactly what he plans to do.