XVI
"Good evening, Dr. Barrington," he said politely. Daniel smiled at him.
"Good evening, Jed. Won't you come on in?"
He had to hide a smile at the way the boy surreptitiously glanced about in search of his daughter. "Is Abbey around?" he asked, oh-so-casually.
"She's out with Ron at the moment."
"Oh." Jed tried to conceal the way his face fell, and didn't quite succeed at it.
"I'm sure she'll be back before we're done," said Daniel kindly. "You can talk then; no doubt you two have a lot to catch up on."
"Yes, sir." He hesitated, then suddenly blurted "Is she happy? I mean... She was a little down last time I spoke to her. I wondered if she seemed okay to you."
"Well, I don't know about that," he said, although he did, and the answer was definitely 'no'. "I think you should probably ask her yourself."
"Yes sir, I think I might," he agreed.
"Then you just go ahead and do that, son. I'm sure she's grateful to have such a concerned friend in you."
"Well, I hope so, sir," he agreed. But Daniel, watching closely, didn't miss the way he winced at the word 'friend'. Apparently, dear old good buddy Jed wasn't entirely happy about being stuck labelled that way.
It was probably, Daniel reflected, dreadfully bad parenting of him to be taking sides in any kind of brewing battle for his daughter's affections. Especially when most of the participants in said battle seemed bound and determined to pretend it wasn't happening. Any kind of parental intervention in the middle of that was definitely asking for trouble.
But dammit, he was going to do it anyway.
"Come on, Jed," he smiled. "Let's play chess."
He'd been planning to say it on the phone last night, but he'd chickened out and asked her to dinner instead. And then he'd planned to say it when he'd come to collect her from her house, but she'd been all dressed up and ready for their night out, and he couldn't drop it on her like that. And then they'd been in the restaurant, and he hadn't wanted to cause a scene or embarrass her...
And now they were walking home, hand in hand, and... he had to say it.
"Abbey..." Ron came to a halt.
She turned to look up at him, and God, she was beautiful. And God, he wished...
But no. He knew what he had to do. It was the only way, and delaying it was just making both of them miserable.
"What is it, Ron?" she asked softly.
He sighed heavily, and walked over to sit down on a nearby bench. She came over to join him, and he took her hand. "Abbey, this is... I think you know what I'm going to say."
"I think you'd better say it," she said, automatically defensive.
Oh God, could he? His throat suddenly felt dry and devoid of any voice.
"Abbey, I... this is..." He pulled away from her grip to rest his head in his hands. "This isn't working."
"What isn't?" she asked warily, although he knew she knew.
He looked up at her miserably. "We aren't, Abbey. We've been trying and trying and... we're just not working."
"Are you breaking up with me?" she asked. Despite the crushing inevitability of it all, her eyes were wide and hurt in the darkness, and he was reminded of the fact that those few years between them were a bigger gap of experience than they seemed. He knew he'd been her first real boyfriend.
Been. Past tense. Already in the past tense...
He felt like he was going to throw up.
"Abbey, I'm not breaking up with you... I don't even think we're even close enough to call ourselves together anymore." He held up a hand to forestall her injured comment. "We're so different, and we want such different things, and... and every time I'm with you, I feel like it's tearing me apart. I feel like- I feel like there's so many things you need me to be, and I don't know how to be them."
She was shaking her head in the darkness, and he could see the tears beginning to glisten. It made his own eyes burn uncomfortably. "I don't mean to," she said plaintively.
He smiled bittersweetly. "I know that, Abbey," he sighed. "But you belong..." He threw up a hand, gesturing at he didn't know what; the city, the outside world, the stars? "...Out there. You were born to be out there in the world, doing all these things, and... I wasn't. That's not me."
Ron knew, instinctively, that he wasn't destined for a life of grandeur and changing the world. Oh, he got top grades in his classes and the teachers predicted a sterling career, but inside of himself he ached for a simple, quiet life. A wife and children and a steady job and a regular routine and a world that was stable and comfortable. Abbey could never be happy in that world.
And he could never be comfortable in hers.
"But we could try," she pleaded, her voice barely even crossing the short distance between them.
"We've been trying, Abbey," he said, and he heard the naked pain and frustration in his own voice. "We've been trying and trying, and it's not-" His voice broke. "It's not doing anything but making us both unhappy."
He stood up and she stood with him, laying a hand on his arm. He looked down into her eyes and saw a mirror of his own feelings. They'd wanted this to work so badly... and it just hadn't happened.
It just couldn't be.
"I love you," she whispered. It was the first time she'd ever said it to him, and it made his heart physically hurt.
"I know you do. And I love you." He shook his head softly. "But you're not in love with me."
She bit her lip and looked away, and even though he'd known it for so long, it was still a knife through his chest. Her face crumpled, and she buried it against his chest. He wrapped his arms around her, and laid his head against her hair.
Maybe for the last time. Oh, God, maybe for the last time.
The embrace lasted forever, and was all too brief. When she finally pulled away from him, he laid a brief kiss on her forehead. "I'm sorry," he said, and then he said no more because the words would have undone him.
A tear trickled down her face. "I'm sorry too, Ron."
She took a few steps back from him and hesitated, as if committing his face to memory. Committing him to the past.
"Goodbye, Ron," she said softly. He just smiled sadly.
And he wanted, more than anything, to fling out his arms to her, to call for her to come back. To say 'I love you, we can do this, why don't we give it one more try?'
But the hell of it was that... he really did love her.
And so he let her go.
Ron didn't meet anybody he knew on the way back home. It was just as well, because if he'd had to deny that he was crying, he wouldn't have been very convincing.
The tears felt like they were burning her, inside and out, but she just couldn't make them stop as she stumbled through the streets.
She'd known this was coming. Known it, known it, known it. And yet, here it was, and-
Damn it!
Ron was right, and damn him too for being right. This had never been anything but doomed. She'd spent too long trying to convince herself that the places where they didn't fit together didn't matter, that just because they had so little they shared didn't mean they couldn't love each other, that if they just kept trying hard enough, then they could make it work.
They'd both known it was coming.
And it didn't make it hurt any less.
It was just as well there was so little traffic about on the way back to her house, because her own tears were blinding her as she walked... walked faster and faster, as if by running she could somehow leave the pain and the frustration far behind.
It wasn't fair. Ron was a nice guy, Ron was a great guy... it never should have ended like this. How come the movies never showed you this? That sometimes you could be two great people and do everything right and it still just didn't work?
They were just wrong for each other. No bad guys, no melodramatic tragedies, no 'other woman', no screaming matches... They were just... wrong for each other.
It was better, Abbey supposed somewhere deep down, that they broke it off now than kept trying and trying and killing themselves to make it work when it just wouldn't.
She supposed.
Funny how that really didn't make her feel any better.