Chapter Text
“But here’s the thing. What we have is special . It’s for life. You had a crush because you were lonely and you missed us. I understand it completely. But you and I both know that what we have here is stronger than any affair you may or may not have had with Hayley.”
Her voice seemed to go an octave lower. “I know deep down you know I’m right.”
Misinterpreting his silence as agreement, Aspen seemed to cheer up. “Gosh, it’s so hot! I’m gonna go ta-”
“No,” he managed to find his voice.
“Excuse me?”
“No,” he repeated, his voice stronger. “It wasn’t just an affair.”
There seemed to be something fragile about the moment; he could still take what he said back, and Aspen would forget it ever happened. But he knew too much had happened for him to continue pretending, and so he trudged on.
“I… I love her. I really do. And I’m sorry I-”
“You love her? Really , now don’t make me laugh!” She punctuated her statement with a scornful laugh, just this side of forced, given the all-too-familiar tremble in her voice.
“You can’t have known her for than– what, a month?” Her voice was definitely shaking now. “And you’d put that over this–” she gestured to the space between them with a flailing hand “–over us ?”
Leo had the decency to look ashamed, letting out a soft breath before looking back into her eyes; the eyes he knew as well as his own and not nearly as well as the ones he had been thinking of for weeks on end.
“Look, Aspen, I know. There’s really no excuse, I wasn’t fair to either of you, but even though I’ve only known Hayley for a month–” actually, it’d been a month, two weeks, and three days. He’d counted. “–I’ve never felt more…alive.”
He knew it was cruel, to tell her to her face that a month of his teenage spent with a girl he’d only just gotten to know meant more than the decade they’d spent together, but if he was being honest, he might as well do it properly.
He might as well tell her that he’d only approached her 11 years ago because his 5-year-old self couldn’t stand the sight of someone crying (and perhaps neither could his 16-year-old one).
He might as well tell her that the only reason he’d continued to talk to her– though he’d hated her affinity for crying at the tiniest of things and the air of drama she consistently seemed to have around her– was because he parents, entirely too happy to see their somewhat eccentric daughter making a friend, had bought him a guitar, which was the one thing he wanted above all else and the one thing his mother, constantly substituting for a father he’d never met, couldn’t afford.
He might as well tell her– this girl whose only mistake was loving him– that he taught her guitar only because her parents were rich enough to take the burden of his school tuition in exchange, that he wrote exactly none of those ‘hundreds’ of songs for her, but for some fantasy he envisioned, a fantasy that he only just come this close to living, one that was slipping out of his reach each second that passed.
And he might as well tell her that whatever semblance of love he felt for her had long since ceased to exist, that he had just come to realise that maybe he never truly knew what love was, not until he met Hayley.
But he couldn’t tell her any of that, not if he had even a hint of a conscience, so he used his words to spin an entirely different lie, one that painted him as an unappreciative boyfriend rather than a fake one, one that ensured Aspen wouldn’t lose the confidence that came from knowing she was loved, because who didn’t crave it?
And as he saw in her eyes something burning, he flinched, anticipating a reprimand, a shove, a slap, a push of any kind– he more than deserved it– but was surprised when she instead put her hands on his shoulders, barely holding back tears.
“Lee, we can work through this, you know we can,” her grip got tighter still, and he shook his head slowly like a child caught in a lie, “We’ve worked through way worse, haven’t we? It’s OK, It’s OK, It’s OK ,” she seemed to convince herself. “It doesn’t matter. Please –” her voice broke (and maybe something in him did too), “don’t throw this away, don’t–”
Her fists curled against his chest, throwing off his attempts to drag them away. She raised her hands to her face, wiping away tears and calming herself in the way she did right before establishing something in the most hurtful way possible.
“She won’t take you back,” she said matter-of-factly. His eyebrows met somewhere right above his nose. Her voice still shaking, she continued, “After all that’s happened, there’s no way she will.”
And there it was, her old self– Leo almost scoffed at her natural tendency to hide behind cruelty (which she liked to refer to as ‘brutal honesty’), as used to it as he had grown.
“I know she won’t. I don’t expect her to, because I don’t deserve it. But I can’t… I can’t have her believing it meant nothing.”
“And what, we did?” she scoffed, arms crossing at her chest. “We’re perfect together, Lee, you know that. You can’t think she’ll love you the way I do.”
His eyes traveled to the ocean, the sun shining over it like any other day, which this was the opposite of. He imagined a day he came here with Hayley instead, a day he needn’t hesitate to kiss the smirk off her face when she won at frisbee, a day he’d spend squirting absurd amounts of sunscreen on her back and admiring– without worry of being caught– her red swimsuit, simple in all its beauty as the entirety of her was, which was when it struck him.
Aspen was right. Hayley could never love him in the way Aspen had (or in any way, now), and that was, perhaps, the thing that made her inherently… Hayley . She was the freshest breath of air he’d taken in a long, long time.
“When I’m with Hayley, I don’t feel like Leo Cruz, captain of the Ravens and all that jazz. She helps me remember that at the end of the day, I’m just… a regular guy. And I feel like one too. A regular guy , without the expectations, without the frill, just… me and her. Like it’s all that matters.”
She seemed to be speechless at his aversion to being the centre of attention. Maybe because she’d been it for much too long.
“She’s playing with your mind,” she pleaded, “You’re not some regular guy. You’re incredible . And it seems like I’m the only person that–”
“Maybe I’m tired of being incredible, Aspen. Did you ever think about that?” he all but yelled. “ No , of course you didn’t. You’re too busy thinking about your own damn self !”
She stepped back, her eye brimming with something he couldn’t quite identify. Sighing defeatedly, he ran a hand through his hair. He said nothing; there wasn’t much left to say.
“So, you’re saying… what, exactly?” Her voice sounded hopeless, and he almost wanted to undo what he said; he might not love her, but he never wanted to cause her pain.
“That you think I’m awful,” she trodded on, “awful for loving you. And that you’d rather be with someone that doesn’t recognise how brilliant you are– someone that doesn’t even want to be with you . Over me. You’re ending this, after I flew in from London for you– for us – and you’re dumping me. Just like that?”
And as his eyes met hers, swimming in remorse and guilt and words he’d leave unsaid because how could he explain to her that Hayley makes him feel incredible without it feeling like that’s the only thing he’s allowed to be, because she let him know how much she wanted him without ever smothering him, because she understood how he felt without ever making a big deal out of it, and because she was a puzzle he didn't mid spending the rest of his life trying to solve, they said words he’d never say out loud: Yes. Just like that.
As the two stared at each other with heavy hearts– one clouded with despair and one with tentative relief, from behind a rock slunk off a barely concealed figure, unbeknownst to the two of them.
Heart pounding in her ears, Hayley stalked towards the ocean, hoping to drown her feelings as she registered what she had just come to realise: She had fallen for Leo Cruz in a stupidly short amount of time, and so had he .