Chapter Twenty-Three: Epilogue

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I wish I could be looking back on these events from far enough in the future that I could say everything worked out for the best and it’ll stay that way. But I haven’t even started college yet. We haven’t even faced the hardest parts of our lives, not to mention the difficulties of the new dynamics of the relationships we all formed.

So you see there’s no real end, here. No closure yet.

I applied regular decision to nine different colleges, because people kept telling me to keep my options open, not to mention the completely different tidbits of advice thrown at me from all quarters. I exploded sometime during Thanksgiving dinner, startling the twelve people seated around the table, and announced that I wouldn’t go to college at all.

Jo called me a moron and told me to sit my bony blonde ass down. I did so, if a little petulantly, and Jeremiah winked at me. The difficult part was that I knew, no matter where I went, I’d be far enough away from him to make me miserable. At that point he was still maintaining—in all earnestness, unlike my own declaration—that he would not go to college. He would be working with his brother.

Christmas came with much more warmth than it ever had since my father died. We actually decorated a Christmas tree while the old plastic one rotted away in the attic. At least, I imagined—with some satisfaction—that it was rotting, kind of the like the fakeness disappearing and leaving only a real Christmas tree and a broken but very real family in its wake.

I tried to convince myself that with the way my life was going, Cam and my issues with him didn’t matter. I thought I could make him not matter, but the closer March and the arraignment date loomed, the more I realized that it couldn’t be over until it was legally over. And there was no way in hell he could just walk.

The trial took a week. It was the biggest thing the town had ever seen, and I don’t think I’ve ever been prouder of any of my past or present friends than when Becca walked right up to the stand and told her story. The emotion was there, but I could tell she wasn’t broken. I wanted to shove her show of strength and stoicism in Cam’s face, but he didn’t look at her once during the entire process. He looked at me. Jeremiah pulled my head down to his shoulder and I stayed there, a little ashamed that I could not look at Becca’s rapist. I felt his eyes on me, day in and day out, sitting in that courtroom and waiting for it all to end.

I testified on a beautiful Thursday morning in mid-March. Cam’s lawyer was expensive and supercilious, but if Becca could stand up to the jerk, then I could. I answered all of his questions and didn’t let him rout me. It was windy that day, and zephyrs beat against the courthouse windows like animals trying to enter as we sat there in the benches. I couldn’t wait to go out there and experience the chill that seemed still warmer than the atmosphere inside.

The verdict was guilty. Cameron Guest was sentenced to eleven years in a federal penitentiary, with a chance of parole after seven. It was hard to imagine that he would be released, but at that point, and even now, eleven or seven years is so far in the future that none of us can imagine that his release will mean anything. By none of us, I can’t speak for Becca. I couldn’t possibly.

I only found out mid-April that Jeremiah had applied to three schools. I was a little pissed that he’d lied, but also incredibly happy; I’d been feeling sick to my stomach thinking that his future didn’t hold anything, and I never voiced those concerns to his face because they’d sound patronizing, but they made me uneasy. He decided on Johns Hopkins—I still don’t know how he got in. He was grinning like an idiot when he told me.

Jo and Aidan became the “it” couple, broke up, and then got back together for the long run. The break-up was a mystery to everyone. I have the strangest feeling that Aidan got scared that he was the one who tamed the wild Jo-ho. The break-up brought them closer together; sometimes I just had to roll my eyes when I saw them holding hands, walking down the hall, because it was a very, very strange phenomenon to see Jo so in love.

I didn’t laugh when Jeremiah would just come up and slip his hand into mine, though. Even if we weren’t headed in the same direction down the hall, he stopped by my locker and held my hand until the bell rang. It was weird and wonderful. I think our relationship is going in the opposite direction from Jo’s. She had to work her way up to holding hands; Jeremiah and I started out that way and now all I want to do when I see him is kiss the bejeezus out of him.

During spring break in April, Jeremiah and I got into an enormous fight—I think it’s the fight that had to come for us, when we both started to trust that neither one of us would be backing out or cheating. Maybe it’s a little naïve to think that now our fidelity is a given, but I was falling in love with him. I tried not to care about whether he was in that same place. He hadn’t said it yet, but neither had I.

Sometime in the middle of that fight, I found out that I was accepted to seven of my nine colleges, rejected only by Yale and Columbia. After everything was said and all the visits were over, I knew exactly where I belonged. It was Stanford. Talk about leaving home. I just didn’t want to be the girl who stayed home to stay near her boyfriend. My family would be struggling, of course, to make ends meet. We were eligible for a lot of government aid with three kids in three college, not to mention the single-parent factor. It all made it too easy to fly across the country to go to college. It didn’t give me time to regret.

About three weeks into May, long after we made up, Jeremiah told me he loved me.

My guitar was sitting three months unused at the foot of my bed and I was sitting cross-legged on my bed, trying to pen a letter of thanks to whatever relative sent me my first graduation money. Graduation wasn’t for two weeks, but the gift made it more real and vaguely terrifying.

I had problems making my brain work in the way it was supposed to, and I was all too relieved to take a break once I heard the footsteps coming down the hall.

I regarded Jeremiah a little warily, realizing but not being able to help that I’d been feeling much the same way ever since our fight. Before that I had thought we weren’t that kind of couple. I didn’t realize until just as he entered that it had made us a little boring.

“Hey,” I said with a big smile. Jeremiah’s return smile was quick and a little nervous. The bad weather light filtering through half-drawn blinds glinted on the metal in his face, emphasizing the jerkiness of his movements. “You got something to say?” It was said with a teasing note.

Jeremiah did something interesting in settling on my floor against my leg. He had never put himself below me before. When he grasped my calf and turned my legs to face him, I was more than a little curious. I was also a little worried.

“What is it?”

“Look, I know I have bad timing.” This was what he chose to open with? I hadn’t seen him for three days and this was the first thing he had to say?

I frowned down at him.

“And I know whatever we have doesn’t always work too well.”

I had never thought that, and it made me angry that he did. “I don’t know where you’re going with this, but you need to not take that tact.” By the tone of my voice, he knew I was serious.

“You don’t know where I’m going because you never try to shut up and wait for me to finish,” he grunted under his breath. When I went to yell—something I was very good at—he pulled himself up to his knees and looked me in the eyes. “I’m not saying this to piss you off, Charlotte, just listen to me.”

After settling my hands on my thighs so I didn’t strangle him, I nodded.

“With everything’s that’s been going on, half the time I think we’re just in this because the circumstance made it easy and comfortable. But I’m only nineteen. I’m not ready for comfort. And I always thought I needed the heat before the comfort. It’s weird being where I am with you. We don’t have heat, Charlotte.”

That was too much. I shoved him away and stood up. “Well then what do you want? Sex? That’s f—“

“No!” He almost shouted it and it was enough to give me pause in mid-angry-pace. “That’s not where I’m going with this.”

I made myself watch him and wait. Jeremiah got to his feet. “I always thought I needed heat. But I don’t, really. This thing we have…it’s shown me that.”

I didn’t know whether to laugh hysterically or cry. It wasn’t exactly every girl’s dream to hear the boyfriend she was falling in love with say he didn’t need passion as if he were humoring her.

“Jeremiah, these aren’t good things to say,” I decided to tell him.

“Damn it, what’s wrong with you? I’m trying to tell you that you make me want things I didn’t think I’d want. Comfort, yeah? This is really comfortable.”

“Chairs are comfortable,” I retorted. I accidentally tore the letter I was writing in half and then stared at the ripped pieces. My gaze met his and I said sweetly, “So screw you. My first kiss with you was better than all the others. I kind of wish I still hated you.”

Jeremiah looked pole-axed. Clearly this was unexpected. I sighed.

“Listen, I’m not saying it hasn’t been great with you, but if we used up all of our ‘heat’ in despising each other, then I don’t know what to do with ‘us’.”

He rubbed his hand viciously down over his hair and face. Knots in my stomach were blooming and twisting so that all of my innards were heavy with sick feelings. I loved him, I suddenly realized. But was it a friend love?

“Charlotte, this wasn’t what I meant. This wasn’t what I came here to say.” He looked a little sick, too, and maybe a little angry. “So it’s this easy for you?”

“What?” I asked in confusion. “Easy? Jeremiah, I want this to work but we aren’t.”

He grabbed my wrist and jerked me to him. “You only liked me when I hurt you?” He looked angrier.

“I didn’t like you at all then,” I growled, trying to wrest my arm away but was ultimately unsuccessful.

He released me and took my face in his hands. “This can’t be a love-hate thing. I don’t have the heart for that,” he murmured. I stilled. “Yeah. It was a little surprising to me too, considering how half-hearted we’ve been about being together. That’s what I came to tell you. I love you.”

I was utterly silent for a moment. “I guess I kind of ruined the big announcement, huh?”

I barely registered his grin before he yanked me up on my toes and covered my mouth with his. All I could feel for the next moments were his tongue, his lips, his hands, and the tingling in the toes of a body gone almost completely numb. I barely got any breath and I didn’t care. I didn’t care if I hurt him when I gripped his hair and pulled him down harder as I pulled myself up his body, trying to climb into his mouth if I could. We stumbled back until I was caught in a half-falling position between the corner of my bedside table and the skirt of bed.

And I didn’t care. It was wonderful. He grabbed my butt and lifted me up. His hands were all over my back and hips, diving into my hair and tickling down my abdomen until we broke apart, gasping, smiling, giggling in my case, and all around feeling terrific.

“Did you make me mad on purpose?”

“God no. I can never hope to predict what’s going to go wrong with you next.”

College and separation loom. I’ve spent so much time with him that it feels like we’re one person and this distance is going to rip us in half. I don’t even feel that way about my family, as close as we’ve grown. I hope this means something big. I hope that all the aching and love inside me means that when real life comes along we’ll want to go at it together. For now I guess it’s all about enjoying the moment.

Jeremiah can’t predict me and I can’t predict what will happen, but God I hope it includes a lot more of this love.

For all of us.

A/N: I’ll edit and make this better, more poignant, but for now IT’S OVER! Tell me what disappointments you have, and I’ll try to edit to make this more inclusive of all the chaos I’ve poured into this story.