Changing Leaves Read online

  But it was always there, in the back of my mind, haunting me quietly. And now it was all beginning to catch up to me.

  Which I knew it would once I came back to this town. Mostly because I knew as soon as I was here again, I wasn't going to be able to avoid thinking about Gina. And I hadn’t been.

  God, especially with my mom bringing her up. As if thinking about her wasn’t painful enough. But hearing her name in my mom’s mouth just brought up so many childhood memories. My parents always loved her so much.

  Fuck, I had to stop thinking about this. All I wanted to do was cave and talk to her, even though I knew it’d be intensely awkward. Honestly, if I had her phone number, I would have been dialing it already.

  But I deleted it a long time ago to avoid this exact situation. Still, nothing was keeping me from driving to her parents’ house to see her.

  Though I was sure she didn’t live there anymore. Damn, maybe she didn’t even live in this town anymore. She always said she wanted to get out like me…

  The thought that she might not be here was more of a disappointment than a relief. But at least it would mean I couldn’t see her and I wouldn’t have to deal with all the repercussions that came along with that.

  I spent the rest of the night trying to distract myself from my guilt while also avoiding my mother. To my relief, she slept peacefully the rest of the evening and I spent most of my time looking up quick and easy recipes that I could make on nights when I was busy with my work.

  I got one more call from that unknown number, but I ignored it the second time as well. I never answered calls from unknown numbers.

  It wasn’t until a few hours later that I noticed I had a voicemail waiting for me on my phone. Well, that was a little unusual. I didn’t generally get voicemails from spam calls. I clicked on it and then held the phone up to my ear.

  “Hello there, I’m just calling because I found a lost kitten in the parking lot of my work. She's a tiny calico and her collar instructed me to call this number if she was lost. Don’t worry, she’s no longer in the parking lot. I’ve got her home with me and I’m giving her food and water. So call me back at any time to pick her up. Thanks!”

  My heart leapt in my chest. Damn it, why hadn’t I answered my phone? Someone had Lyla! And I could get her back!

  As shitty as I still felt about a lot of the things I’d done, this call was a damn relief. I immediately looked through my missed calls to see when I could get Lyla back. It was late, but hopefully whoever called me was still awake.

  What did I know, maybe this little phone call would be a turning point in my persistent bad luck.

  3

  Gina

  It was almost midnight when I got a call back about Lyla.

  But it wasn’t the call I was expecting.

  “Hello?” I asked as I picked up the phone.

  “Hi, I’m Lyla’s owner. I’m so sorry I didn’t call back earlier, but I had some personal family stuff to attend to.”

  My heart sunk as soon as I heard her voice.

  For a moment, I doubted myself. No, I must be mistaken, I thought to myself. There was no way it could be her.

  But it was. It had to be. I mean, the name on the collar… It was her.

  I froze as soon as I heard her voice. It was like I forgot how to use words. I was just so shocked… I never thought I’d hear this voice again…

  “Hello?” Jess asked.

  “Uh, yeah, hi!” I said in a fake, squeaky, high-pitched voice.

  I wasn’t even sure why I was faking my voice. I guess I didn’t want her to realize what I realized… That we were two long lost best friends talking on the phone again.

  But changing my voice was probably unnecessary. She had obviously heard my voicemail and still she didn’t realize it was me.

  Holy shit, she hadn’t even realized it was me? How had my voice not rung a bell for her? Had she forgotten about me completely? Was that even possible? Could I have meant that little to her?

  “I need to say thank you so much for taking care of Lyla. Not everyone would have bothered to take care of her and reach out to me to return her. I really appreciate it.”

  “Oh, it’s no problem at all,” I continued in the squeaky voice. It may have been unnecessary, but at this point I didn’t know how I could stop without making things extremely obvious.

  “So, when can I pick her up?”

  “Uh, any time you want tomorrow, I have the day off,” I answered nervously.

  “Oh, okay, where should I meet you?”

  Holy shit, where should she meet me? Meet me? Was I really going to be doing this? Fuck, how could I see her again?

  But how could I not? I had her kitten. I needed to give her her cat back…

  “You can meet me at my house,” I said without thinking. Shit, no, I should have made it a public place.

  But public might not have been the best idea, right? I mean, if I got emotional, it was going to be doubly awkward to be out in public. Better to meet here where I could freak out in private after, right?

  “That sounds great. Can you text me your address? And I’ll text you tomorrow when I’ll be coming over? It’ll probably be some time around noon.”

  “Sounds great!” I said in an overexcited tone. “Well, bye now!” I was cutting the conversation off fast, but I needed to get off the line. My heart was pounding in my damn chest. I felt like I couldn’t breathe.

  “Okay, see you tomorrow,” she said before hanging up.

  As soon as the phone clicked, I was overwhelmed with the amount of information I now had to process.

  So this was Jess’s cat. Jess was in town, then.

  No, not just in town, but living here! She was actually living here! How else would she have lost a kitten? People didn’t bring kittens with them to travel home. Okay, maybe sometimes they did; I guess I was jumping the gun on that one.

  Either way, she was here. We’d been living in the same town for God only knew how long, and she never reached out to me. Fuck, she didn’t even recognize my voice on the damn voicemail.

  I had to admit, that really stung. Obviously I had more feelings for her than she had for me but…. Did she really not even know what I sounded like anymore? Did she never think of me? Was I some distant childhood memory?

  I guess that was what I should have expected from a girl who ran out on our friendship nearly a decade ago. I couldn’t expect that she’d been hung up on me the same way I was hung up on her.

  If she was, she never would have left in the first place.

  After I had finally processed that it was Jess I had just spoken to, I had to process what I’d just done.

  I’d talked to her on the phone in an overtly fake voice and made plans to meet her tomorrow, at my house, to hand her back her kitten.

  Fuck, this was going to be so embarrassing when I actually saw her! Why hadn’t I just said who I was? What exactly was I trying to do here? I’d made everything so much worse by not coming out and saying who I was.

  She was going to be fucking shocked tomorrow when she showed up and it was me. And I was going to look like some fake weirdo stalker who had her cat but couldn’t say who I was over the phone. Ugh, this was bad. I’d gotten myself into the weirdest fucking situation. I was mortified.

  But on the other hand, I was also somewhat excited.

  I never thought I’d see Jess again. Honestly, I never thought Jess would even step foot in this town again. The prospect of seeing her had butterflies flying through my stomach.

  But it shouldn’t. In my fantasy, Jess had missed me as much as I missed her and we had a happy reunion. Maybe I even fantasized a bit about her confessing her feelings for me….

  Which was never going to happen. She left for a reason, and it wasn’t because she cared about me so much that she wanted to be with me. She didn’t, and so she left forever. This would not be a happy reunion. She was going to break my heart again.

  Could I really go through this? It was so hard to
be hurt by her the first time. To do it all over again… That wasn’t going to be easy. Even after ten years, it wouldn’t be easy. Because nobody had ever had this kind of effect on me.

  I was starting to think nobody ever would.

  I was laying in my guest bedroom with Lyla when she called me. She was curled up on my lap, completely oblivious to the shock I had just received.

  I gently ran my hand down her soft back. “So, you’re Jess's, huh?” I asked her, though she obviously wouldn’t answer.

  It was hard to wrap my head around, though. The kitten that was currently on my lap was the same cat that had been sitting in Jess’s lap. She had been keeping her company. She was part of her life… This tiny little kitten.

  And for the last ten years, I hadn’t been.

  I got real low to her, so that I could whisper softly in her ear. “She’s a good person, Jess. I need you to watch out for her for me. Be there for her, comfort her when things are hard. She’s not good at dealing with powerful emotions, you know. She needs someone to lean on. Can you do that for me? Because I can’t do it anymore.”

  I could feel my heart breaking all over again as the words came out of my mouth.

  I wanted so badly to be her person again. My life was never as good as when I was hers, even just as a friend.

  Not to say that my life sucked now; on the contrary, I was really happy with where I was at in life. Maybe not so much my love life, but that was a small part of my world. For the most part, things were good and I was happy.

  But being friends with her … It had been perfect. I’d never had someone in my life that I could tell anything to and know that I'd be completely supported. I’d never loved like that.

  It was great being her friend, but that meant I would think about how great it would be if I had more than that. How fantastic it would be if I wasn’t just her best friend, but her girlfriend too.

  And I went after her.

  It was stupid. I knew that she was never going to feel the same way as me. I should have kept my feelings to myself. That was what I always planned to do, anyway. I wanted to keep my feelings hidden from her.

  But every day that passed, each day that brought us closer to graduation, I thought about her. I questioned what I’d be losing if I never ever sought a relationship with her. I guess I was rationalizing to myself. But I thought, if there’s even a sliver of a chance that she feels the same way about me, I need to go for it. I couldn’t lose out on a possible future out of cowardice.

  And, you know, at first I thought she did. For a while there, I really thought I had made the right choice.

  I still remember the night. It was graduation, and I knew we only had one summer together left. Then she was going to college out of state, I’d go to community college here, and we’d be separated.

  More than separated. How many people really stay friends after high school is over? I’d heard it all the time from people older than me. When my parents spoke of their old best friends, they always said the same thing: “We just lost touch.”

  I didn’t want that to be us.

  We went to this graduation party some guy in our class was throwing. He was a total rich kid. His parents basically had a god damn mansion and almost everyone in our grade showed up. Of course, there was a ton of alcohol.

  I hadn’t really drank before that and neither had Jess. But what the hell? We were both graduating. We knew what was coming next in college and we decided to let loose.

  The thing about the first night you ever drink alcohol is that you have no sense of your limitations. I had no idea what would get me drunk. A shot of alcohol seemed like such a small amount.

  As it turned out, five of them in an hour was kind of a lot.

  Jess had been equally clueless. But she didn’t go as hard as me. She had a few shots, probably two or three, I wasn’t sure. Definitely enough to get you tipsy the first time, but not wasted.

  I, on the other hand, was falling over myself drunk. I always thought they exaggerated drunkenness on television. I didn’t realize if you were wasted you’d actually start falling over.

  I still remembered it to this day because I’d gone slow on my alcohol since then. I was leaning against the wall at one point and thinking, “Wow, if this wall wasn’t here, I might actually fall down.”

  My lack of coordination was embarrassing enough, but when I threw up in the guest bathroom, I was utterly humiliated. I mean, I made it into the toilet, so it wasn’t as if anyone would actually know, but Jess knew. And I didn’t want her to see me that way, ever.

  “Come on, let’s get you home,” Jess had said, trying to pick me up off the ground.

  “No!” I said quickly. “I can’t go home like this! My parents will freak out, you know they’ll freak out!”

  “I know, I know. We’re going back to my house,” she said. “Nobody will ever know.”

  It was really easy to sneak into her room. Originally, her parents lived in a one bedroom house. When they had Jess they didn’t want to move, so they just made an addition onto their house. When they built it, they gave it its own entrance. So she had a door that led directly to her room in the back of house.

  I wasn’t sure why they did that. I knew one of her parents told me once. Maybe it had to do with some building regulation. Or was it for resale value? I hadn’t a clue.

  But I was grateful she had that door. And we’d used it to sneak out more times than I could count. We may never have drank before, but that wasn’t to say we never got into trouble. We used to sneak out to the creek by her house and have our own little bonfires all the time.

  This time, though, we were actually using the door to sneak in. That was a first for us. But it was easy enough to do. Her parents wouldn't have expected us back tonight. We had both lied to our parents and claimed to be sleeping over at the other’s house.

  The one really annoying thing about going back to her house, though, was the long walk. Neither one of us was in any condition to drive, so we had to walk back. It was only a few blocks, but a few blocks felt like forever when you were drunk.

  I kept my arm around Jess the entire time. By the time we got to her house, I felt I could walk on my own. I had sobered up just slightly, or maybe woken back up to reality a bit, but either way I knew I could walk without falling.

  But I didn’t say that. I was really enjoying how good it felt to have my arm wrapped around her neck. I kept it there as we quietly unlocked the door and walked into her room.

  As soon as we were inside, I fell onto the bed. Jess stifled a laugh and laid down next to me. This wasn’t unusual for us. We had shared a bed often when having sleepovers growing up.

  “Can you believe it?” she said softly to me, so her parents wouldn’t hear. We didn’t have to whisper, as the walls were thick, but better safe than sorry.

  “Believe what?” I asked, pretty dazed.

  “We’re graduates! High school is over, girl! It’s done. Now we just get to start our lives… in whatever way we want to start them.”

  I rolled over on my side so I was facing her. I usually thought she was beautiful whenever I glanced at her, but in my drunken state, she’d never looked better. God, those big beautiful green eyes. That smile that sent a shiver down my spine… She was so gorgeous.

  I had to fight the urge to lean over and kiss her. That would’ve been way too inappropriate, and I didn’t want to cross a line. I didn’t want to make her uncomfortable.

  But her words were ringing in my ears. We could start our lives the way we wanted to… And I knew what way I wanted to start my life. With her by my side. And I couldn’t do it. I wasn’t going to get to have the life I wanted.

  Unless, maybe…

  “I’ve thought a lot about that,” I told her. “My future, I mean.”

  “Oh?” she asked, one eyebrow raised. “And what do you think about it?”

  “I think… about how I want you in it. How I never want to lose you.”

  I was expecting a
look of repulsion, but I didn’t get it. Instead, she gave a soft smile.

  “Aw, Gina, I’m always going to be in your life. We’ll always be friends.”

  She had missed the point entirely.

  “But we might not,” I answered. “In fact, we definitely won’t. Look at all the people who say they’ll keep in touch who never do. You’re… you’re eventually going to move on from me. And one day I’ll hopefully move on from you.”

  I hadn’t realized what I said or how it sounded until she narrowed her eyebrows.

  “Uh, what?” she asked. “Did you say hopefully? You want to move on from our friendship?”

  “No, no, no!” I said quickly. “You’re totally misunderstanding me. Absolutely not, I never want to lose our friendship…”

  “Are you lying?” she asked suspiciously. “Is there something you need to tell me? Did I, like, do something to piss you off or some shit?”

  “No! Seriously, that’s not what I meant. Not at all.”

  “Then what did you mean? If you don’t hope you’ll lose our friendship, then what did you mean?”

  “I meant I want to get over you romantically!” I drunkenly blurted out.

  Her eyes widened. “…What?”

  “I meant that I hope I’ll get over you… romantically,” I said nervously. “I don’t want to spend my whole life missing you. Right now, I’m afraid that’s what's going to happen. And I just… I can’t do it.”

  “Are you saying… What I think you’re saying?”

  “I love you,” I continued, though I could see her hesitance. “I’ve been in love with you for so long. I… I’m sorry. I’m sorry if that’s weird to hear and I know you’re not into women. But I had to say it. I had to tell you how I fucking feel.”

  She shook her head at first. “You don’t love me.”

  “I do,” I insisted. I might as well be honest, I thought. I was in too deep now. “You don’t understand. I think about you all the time. You are my person, you’re who I come to for everything. I’ve never trusted anyone the way I trust you. You’re always the person I want to spend my time with above all else. You’re the world to me.”