Fake Love (For Now) by Penny Wylder (great novels .txt) 📗

And right now, that’s the absolute last thing that I want to do.

13

Erin

I make it to my car before my parents can reach me, and I don’t stop driving until I get back to my apartment. I don’t care about the fact that I saw them staring after me or the fact that I left all my luggage in my guest house.

But I do care about the fact that I heard someone tell Hudson to let me go, and he didn’t come after me. Why would he? He has no reason to. We’re not actually anything to each other.

All it takes is three steps past the door, and I’m falling apart. I’ve never really let myself do it. All this time I’ve held myself together and told myself that I need to be strong. I can’t do it anymore.

I’ve never let myself feel the grief of failing or the disappointment of things not turning out differently. Not completely, anyway. Instead, I just threw myself into the next thing hoping that it would fix it, and it didn’t.

Now that I’m letting it in, it’s all coming in. And it all hurts so much more than I thought it could because along with everything else, I had to walk away from Hudson. That doesn’t even make fucking sense. It was too fast for me to feel as strongly as I do. But I fit with him in a way that I’ve never felt before. He didn’t judge me for my failure, and he seemed confident that I’d get there and be successful. Somehow, he seemed to know what I needed before I even said it.

How is that possible?

My phone rings in my pocket. The ringtone for my parents. But I don’t answer it. I just crawl into my bed and close my eyes. I’ll hide here in my apartment for a few days and just let things settle. I need to breathe. I need to just…not think.

The problem is that the only way that I’ve found not to think? Is Hudson.

Kicking off my shoes, I wrap myself in my blanket and try to forget that he ever existed. It hurts too much.

I hide in my apartment for a few days. I don’t go to work at the clinic or answer any calls. I sleep and let the grief happen. And I try to figure out what I’m going to do. There’s no chance that I’m giving up on my dream, because that’s the only thing that I still have that actually means anything.

My test scores were the problem. And I could take the GRE again, but even if I did, the acceptance period for vet schools is over for the year. If I want to re-apply, I have to wait anyway. I might as well take the time and study for a longer period of time.

Though deep down, I know that it wasn’t a lack of studying that made me bomb the test. It was just me and my fucking overthinking.

An entire year though…what am I going to do for an entire year? I can barely survive on my meager wages at the emergency vets and shelters, even though I never turn down a shift. After what I did to my parents, I can’t exactly expect them to keep supporting me.

It’s five days since I ran away from Blue Mountain when there’s a pounding on my door—the kind of pounding that’s impossible to ignore because whoever is on the other side is going to break in if I don’t answer. My hair is still wet from the shower and I’m wearing comfy sweats. I’m not exactly surprised when it’s my mother.

She brushes past me when I open the door, not giving me the chance to shut her out. “I’m here to make sure that you’re actually alive, since you haven’t been answering your phone and we haven’t seen you.”

“I’m alive,” I say, and even I can hear the dullness in my voice.

“Good, now we have to talk.” She chucks her purse on the couch and sets down the suitcase that I left at Blue Mountain and turns to face me with her arms crossed. “You know that your father and I love you, right?”

“Of course,” I say, sitting heavily on the couch.

“And that we absolutely, in no uncertain terms, do not consider you a failure?”

I can’t answer that. I feel like a failure, so it’s hard for me to imagine that everyone else doesn’t see it too.

She continues. “Of course we don’t love that you lied to us, but after thinking about it, I can see why you did. It was embarrassing for both of us to walk in on you like that, but you’re an adult, Erin. We wouldn’t have been upset to find out that you just wanted to have some fun.”

Looking at the ground, I pick at my nails. I can’t look at her right now.

“All your father and I want is for you to be happy, and we could see that you weren’t. You are so determined and so driven. And we love that you want to achieve your dreams. But it was draining you. If you want to still do it, we’ll support you. If you want to go be a janitor or a waitress or a regular human doctor, we’d support you just as much as when you make it into vet school. And you will. We don’t have any doubts about that.”

I look up at my mom’s face, and there’s no lie there. She really does believe that, and I hadn’t realized how much I needed that. The last days—the last months, really—I’ve been so twisted up in my own head that I assumed that everyone else was just as disappointed in me as I was in myself, when in reality, I was the only one who was measuring.

Tears prick my eyes, and my mom sits next to me to wrap me in a hug. “We love