Make Me Hate You

by Kandi Steiner

I wasn’t sure how long we stood there, staring at each other, everyone else smiling and laughing, but it felt like a lifetime. It felt like years of regret, like decades of longing, like centuries of wrong decisions and missed opportunities and fucked-up timing. It felt like everything we wanted being just out of reach, and both of us realizing at the same time that we were fools for ever thinking we could run fast enough to catch it.

She turned to Morgan then, and they smiled lovingly at each other before all eyes were on me. Shit. I forced the best smile I could muster, “It’s so nice to meet you, too. I…” Slept with your boyfriend last night? Have been in love with him since I was fourteen? Was just thinking about how and when he would break up with you? “I can’t wait to get to know you better,” I landed on, my stomach cramping with the lie.

“Last night was amazing. I will never forget it.” My chest squeezed. “But that’s all it can be. One night. And we need to put it all to bed.” Tyler watched me for the longest time, and I saw every single emotion pass over his face in waves — pain, anger, hurt, sorrow, longing, regret. I wasn’t sure which one settled in deepest as his face leveled out, and his jaw ticked, his eyes hard on mine. “So, that’s it, then?” he asked. “That’s all you want to say to me right now?” I love you. I need you. Please, be with me. Choose me. Fuck everyone else. I don’t care who we hurt. I don’t care as long as it’s us in the end. I shrugged, wiping away the fresh tears on my cheeks with a whisper. “I don’t know what else there is to say.” Tyler tongued his cheek, looking out the window with nostrils wide and brows bent together so fiercely that the line between them was visible even across the room. He nodded, just barely, and then his eyes found me again. He took a step — toward me, into me — but then he stopped. The air zipped white hot with electricity and poison, with a warning that one false step would demolish everything. Tyler’s eyes searched mine, like he was waiting for more, but there was nothing more to be said or be done or be undone. It was what it was. And we both knew it. Maybe there was a part of me that hoped he’d say I was wrong. Maybe I held onto that hope like the string of a balloon, thinking he’d take me in his arms, call me crazy for ever thinking he would give me up...

Another sigh left him. “What if I still come to the wedding?” I blinked. “What?” “I know you’re hurting. And as much as you’re breaking my fucking heart,” he choked on emotion with those words, and seeing how torn up he was killed me. “I don’t want you to go through this alone. Let me still fly in tomorrow. I’ll be your plus one, and no one has to know. Then we can fly home together and… I don’t know. We’ll figure it out from there.” Emotion surged through me again, but this time, it was mostly a sickening sense of unworthiness. How could this man be so good to me, still, even after all I’d confessed? He was still willing to get on a plane and fly out to me after what I’d done to him, just to help me, just to ease my pain. I shook my head, rolling my lips together as more tears slipped down my cheeks. I was convinced they’d never stop at this point. “No,” I whispered, but I smiled when I met his gaze again. “That is… the kindest, most selfless thing anyone has ever offered me, but I can’t let you do that. It wouldn’t be fair to you.” “I wouldn’t mind.” “You’d be able to be around Tyler, knowing we’d been intimate, without it hurting you?” I challenged. He didn’t have anything to say to that.

“What I’m trying to say is that you only have two choices here, Jazzy,” Aunt Laura said, bending to look me in the eyes. “You either fight for Tyler, or you let him go.” I shook my head. “But I can’t—” “You have a choice,” she argued before I could get my sentence out. “Whether it’s an easy one to make or not is a completely different story, but the decision is not already made for you. There are consequences on either side of this, whether you run to him or walk away from him forever. But all I ask is that you don’t make the decision based on what you think he wants or needs, or on what you think will be better for his family, or for Azra, or for anyone else. You can’t project what you don’t know for sure. And making a decision based on possible negative outcomes only puts fear in the driver’s seat of your life, my girl.” She paused, shaking her head. “Trust me when I say you don’t want that.” I rolled my lips together, looking out the window over the dark ocean before I found my aunt’s gaze again. “What do I do? Which one is the right choice?” “I can’t answer that for you,” she said softly, regrettably. “Only you can. And like I said, there’s no easy right or wrong, no simple path on the other side of whatever decision you do make. You just have to decide which one you want to walk, and whether you want to walk it alone, or with him.”

I loved him enough to let him go, and that was what felt right to me. But I also loved him enough to be selfish, to keep him for my own — consequences be damned.

Time slowed as I watched Morgan with her father, her arm threaded through his and dewy eyes cast up toward him. He smiled down at her with his own eyes misted, placing his hand over hers in his arm, assuring her with his strength and caring touch. They didn’t have to say a word for me to hear everything. I love you. I’m proud of you. I’ve got you. My heart stung with a longing, the same one I’d always had watching them together. I’d never know what that was like, to have a father like Robert, or to have a mother like Amanda — but this family was my family, too. And when Robert looked back at me, reaching his other hand for mine and pulled me into his side for a hug, the only thing that stopped me from sobbing was remembering how Oliver’s cousin threatened to murder us if we ruined her makeup one more time. “I love you girls so much,” Robert said softly, and we both leaned into him, sniffing back emotion. “Let’s get you both down that aisle, shall we?”

“I want you, Tyler,” I whispered through the tears building, and at the words, his mouth parted, his chest depressing with the trembling breath. “I always have, and I always will. I’ve tried to forget you, and I know now that there is no amount of time or distance I can put between us that will ever allow me to. I am yours,” I said, and I felt so bold with the truth on my lips that I reached for him, wrapping my hand around his on the steering wheel until he let me pull it free. I held it between mine, his elbow balanced on the center console between us, and he kept his gaze forward while I lowered my lips to his fingers and closed my eyes. “Whether you claim me or not, I am yours.” A single tear slipped down his cheek when I opened my eyes to look at him again, but he wouldn’t blink to set another free. He just looked straight ahead, his eyes tired, his jaw set. “I know I am not in the position to ask anything of you, not after I took what I thought was the righteous route and insisted that what we had done was wrong. I pushed you away the morning after you’d pulled me in. I felt it in my heart that Azra was the one for you, that your family loved her, that you loved her, and I couldn’t step in the middle of that.” I paused, heart squeezing with the admission. “But I’m asking you now.” I reached for his chin, running my fingers over the slight stubble there until he finally turned to face me. His nostrils flared when our eyes locked, two more tears freeing themselves, and...

But I’d left everything in that car, exposed every yearning that threaded through my heart, that heart that beat only for him. So when the plane lifted off the tarmac and carried me west, I didn’t shed another tear. I smiled for what we had. And I promised myself to let go of what we never would.

I think if we all do this, just take a pulse check on our life from time to time, we can really evaluate what matters to us, and start to step away from what doesn’t. Focus on building habits that support who you want to be — not who you used to be, or who you think you are, or who you think others want you to be.

“But what I thought about most?” he whispered. “Was how you said you loved me. I replayed it a million times — the way your lips formed around the words, the way your eyes were glossed with tears and pain that I’d caused you, the way I felt that declaration so deep inside me that it might as well have been a tattoo on my soul.” I rolled my lips together as tears pooled in my eyes. “I don’t know if you still do,” he continued, shrugging. “Hell, I don’t know that I deserve it. But, I love you, too, Jasmine. I have loved you since the first day I saw you walk through the hallways of school that had felt like a prison to me until you came. I loved you when I wasn’t supposed to, when you were my little sister’s best friend, when I claimed you for my own at the worst possible time, and then broke your heart because I was too scared that I couldn’t be the one to help you through everything you were facing.” Tyler got choked up at that, his lips quivering a bit as he regained his composure. “I loved you from across the country, in secret, for years, praying for the day I’d get to see you again and explain everything, and somehow also praying in the next breath that I’d never see you again.” My heart splintered in my chest, because I knew the exact feeling he was trying to explain. We were shackled to each other like prisoners, but if someone handed one of us the key, we’d hide it and pretend we never had any other option. “Loving you has been torture,” Tyler said, stepping fully i...

“Jasmine,” Tyler whispered, tugging until I uncrossed my arms and let him hold my hands. His thumbs traced the cool skin of my wrists, just like that day at the rehearsal, and my eyes traced the hazel flecks of gold in his eyes. “I couldn’t stop you from getting on that plane, but I’m here to put you on another one, instead. I can’t let you go this time. I can’t make you hate me, just like you could never make me hate you, because the truth is we have belonged to each other since we were teenagers, and I think if anything, the last seven years and especially the last month have shown us that nothing will ever change that. Not time, not distance, not trying to love other people. This,” he said, motioning between us. “This isn’t effortless love, but it is real love — and I refuse to let it slip through my fingers again.”

“I don’t… I don’t understand. What are you saying, Tyler?” The right side of his mouth crooked up, and he stepped even closer, his hands sliding up my arms, over my neck, cupping my jaw and framing my face with his eyes flicking back and forth between mine. “I’m saying that you are spectacular, Jasmine Olsen, and that I love you with everything that I am.” He pressed his forehead to mine, and my hands wrapped around his wrists, holding him tight. “Please, come home. Come back to New Hampshire. Come back with me.” Then, he pulled back, his eyes catching mine again. “Be with me.” An ecstasy like nothing I’d ever felt before in my life washed over me like a tidal wave, sucking me under, stealing my next breath and any words I could have said in return. So, I wrapped my arms around his neck, and I tilted my chin, and I said yes with every single piece of me. I said yes with my hands in his hair, with my lips warm against his, with my heart and soul that had been plucked out of me years ago and given to him, wrapped in a little gold bow. I said yes with a promise to never let anything stand between us again. I said yes with fear behind me, beneath me, unable to touch me again. I said yes with an ache that seared as much as it filled, that broke as much as it mended, that told me more than anything that there was no other option but this one. I was his. And he was mine. Tyler wrapped his arms full around me, pulling me into him so fiercely that my back arched, and I felt that em...

This wasn’t the bruising, claiming fit of passion and lust we’d found ourselves in on the Cape. There was no need for it now. Neither of us required proof to know that we belonged to the other, and so we took our time, as if we had all we ever needed. There was no rush. We had forever.

We spent hours worshipping each other’s bodies, exploring and discovering like it was the first and the last time all at once. It wasn’t enough to make me fall apart with his mouth on me, or for me to swallow his first orgasm while I bent on my knees for him. We had to take more, we had to take it all, we had to have each other in every possible way until there was nothing left for anyone else ever again.

“Did you notice I was wearing sneakers?” he asked. “I was prepared to run you down and pin you to the ground, if I had to.” I bit my lip, wrapping my arms around his neck and kissing him long and hard. “Now I kind of wish I’d ran.” Tyler chuckled.

“We’ve wasted so much time,” I whispered. “Put ourselves through so much pain.” “I guess some lessons are learned the hard way.” I nodded again, with my forehead pressed against his, my arms looped around his neck. “So, what now?” Tyler grinned, pulling back to look me in the eyes. “I was thinking we could spend the rest of our lives making up for lost time.” “Oh yeah?” I asked, feigning nonchalance as my heart galloped in my chest. “Yeah. What do you think about that?” “I think the rest of our lives won’t even be enough.” At that, Tyler kissed me, slow and soft and sure, and then he whispered, “Then let’s stay together forever after that, too.”

My wife. God, I’d never get tired of that.

“Jerk,” Jasmine said through a pouty laugh, laying the book out to dry beside her drink. “I was just getting to a good part!” “A sex scene?” “Maybe.” “We can make one of our own, instead,” I offered.

“What are you saying, Jasmine?” I asked. “Are you saying you want to get pregnant?” “I’m saying… I already am.” “You…” I shook my head, speechless, and then my hands traveled from where they held her waist to wrap around her stomach. It was still smooth and toned and impossibly flat. And yet, it wouldn’t be soon. Everything caught up to me in one crash of emotions, my eyes welling with tears as I pulled her into my chest, hugging her tight, kissing her hair over and over again. “You’re pregnant,” I whispered, shaking my head. “We’re having a baby.”

So much time wasted, so many moments lost… But our forever was just getting started. And I had a feeling it’d be the best damn one to ever exist.