Make Me Hate You

by Kandi Steiner

“You are spectacular, Jasmine Olsen,” he whispered, his eyes closing as my chest split open. “Don’t ever forget that.”

“It’s you who brings me pain. It’s you who is killing me. It’s you, and us,” I added, motioning between us. “It’s this thing that never was, but always is, that never will be and will never not be.”

“Please,” I begged, fisting my hands in his shirt to hold him closer but still trying to shove him away. “Please, just make me hate you.”

It was my final warning, I’d realize in the coming days, and I should have heeded it.

But Tyler didn’t take me gently tonight.

“I’m sorry I’m breaking your heart right now. I’m breaking mine, too. But I love you and respect you and care about you far too much to lie to you.

you deserve a girl who loves you as fiercely as you love her, because you are the most amazing man,”

“Never more than me,” Jacob whispered. “Never more than me.”

I’d never felt the heat of his gaze so fiercely, like a flame held just centimeters from my skin, hot enough to make me wriggle and squirm for fear of being burned, but far enough away to not actually mark me.

“You’re going to be okay,” she whispered, squeezing my arm. “Everything is going to be okay.”

He and I, we weren’t just here and now. We were the past, the present, the future. We were other worlds and other universes, too.

we spend so much time trying to be what we think everyone else wants us to be, that we stop asking ourselves what we actually want.

“I came to get my girl.”

“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 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’m saying that you are spectacular, Jasmine Olsen, and that I love you with everything that I am.”

His arms were my home.

Tyler set my feet back on the ground, but still, I floated, soaring high with his promises and our future surrounding me like clouds of silver.

“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.”

“I’ve always been hopeless when it comes to you.”

So much time wasted, so many moments lost…