It was then I had a silly thought—and it was the silliest thought I could possibly have in this situation—but what if I didn’t choose? What if I refused to? How long could we go on like this? Perhaps that would be better than outright choosing one.
At this point, I didn’t want to choose. They both made my heart act up, both made my body feel a strange kind of desperate and needy. They made me feel things I never dreamt I would, and if I was honest with myself, it was a nice feeling. To be wanted, to be needed by someone else…there were no words for it.
In the end, I would be heartbroken, I knew, either way, if I chose or if I didn’t choose.
“Maybe you won’t have to,” my sister said, picking at her nails.
I wanted to laugh, but I didn’t. All I could do was say, “You’re saying maybe Mason and Calum will both be happy to be with me at the same time?” The thought seemed so far out of the ordinary that I couldn’t even picture it.
Hell, I couldn’t even picture one guy staying happy with me, let alone two. Two just seemed like an alien equation.
Michelle said, “You never know. Guess you’ll have to wait and see. Now, I’ll leave you alone. I know you’re dying to lay down and stare off into the void.” Her voice took on a dramatic tone, and I had to roll my eyes—even if she was right. She rolled off my bed and left my room.
Heaving a sigh, I went to turn off the lights and get under the covers. My phone was already beneath my pillow, charging. Had to change the ringer to silent, because with the amount that Calum was texting me, it was going off constantly. It took every ounce of willpower in me to not roll over and check it.
Mason texted me a bit more now, too, actually. And not just about the project. He’d taken to asking me how my day was, telling me goodnight, texting me good morning. I mean, was all of this normal? Was this what everyone else did when they were dating or tiptoeing around getting into a relationship? I had no idea. I had no experience. All of this was new to me, as new as something could possibly be.
And the worst part about this was the fact that I knew none of it would last. I was so torn—so unbelievably torn because I knew this wouldn’t go on forever, and yet I wanted it to. I didn’t want to have to say goodbye to Mason or Calum. If there was ever a time in my life when I wanted to be selfish, when I wanted to be optimistic and hope for something good, it was now.
Maybe it was silly, maybe it was stupid, maybe other people would think I was a sad excuse of a human, but this was the first time I ever really, really wanted something for myself. Another person. Two of them, at the same time.
There was no way Michelle’s words would be true, that I could ever keep both Mason and Calum, but that didn’t stop me from losing myself in a daydream.
That night, when sleep called to me, my body and mind answered right away. It was not a fitful sleep, as it usually was. It was the pure, unabashed embrace of blackness, sweet and silent, dreamless, the kind of sleep I should get every night instead of the wakeful, interrupted bouts I did.
It was nice. A girl could get used to it.
Mason and I were currently sprawled out in my room, copies of journals before us, bits and pieces highlighted and numbered. We were trying to structure how our paper would be. We couldn’t actually write the entire paper until we got enough results to look over—still working on getting all that done, unfortunately—but we could get everything ready. Either way, we would have to come up with reasons why our hypothesis was supported or not.
Because, in every single psychology class, it was hammered into your brain: you could never prove a hypothesis. You could only support it or disprove it. Everything we took for granted, like the law of gravity or the laws of motion, were only ever supported by the thousands of experiments run all across the globe and in history. Because, in a scientific scope, there was no way humans knew it all. Best support something instead of claiming it was one hundred percent infallible, so if or when the time came that something went against it, everything in the past did not have to be scrapped.
It was just one of those things they told you over and over again, so much that the phrase became natural in your head. Kind of like the whole correlation versus causation debate. Don’t even get me started on that one.
Mason had become a bit better about asking about Calum. Granted, I was pretty sure that was because he knew Calum was now out of town. He’d been gone for a week now. I…I haven’t heard from him if he planned on visiting me this weekend or not, and I was trying not to freak out about it.
He had a life. He had a job. He had a bunch of other things to pay attention to besides me. I knew he wouldn’t come every weekend. Hell, at this point, I doubted he’d take the time and ever see me. I mean, it was just me. I certainly did not merit a two and a half hour drive one way just to see me for a bit.
Still, I missed him. I missed those bright blue eyes, the almost whiteness of his hair, the way he oozed maturity and confidence. He was a man that had somehow captured me,
