Kayden freaking Harrison.
5 Ari Cole
“Do you guys know each other?” Ethan asks a few beats after he realizes he introduced me as Streamline and Kayden called me by my name.
“We...” Kayden starts, and the sound of his voice gives me a feeling of comfort and also pain.
“We went to high school together,” I interject before he has a chance to say anything else.
“Oh wow, small world,” Evan says, looking back and forth between the two of us. “Were you guys friends?” He asks, prolonging my suffering.
I take deep breaths. Slowly, I lower myself until I’m seated in the sand. I should probably be running in the opposite direction, but Kayden’s presence here makes my legs feel weak. If I didn’t sit, I would have surely fallen. So, I had to pick my battle. I think I chose wrong.
“Not really,” I answer once again. “He was a grade above me and we didn’t move in the same circles,” I add. I watch Kayden nod slowly in disbelief. That’s all the reaction he gives me though.
People start to get disinterested and resume their own conversations. I find myself relieved that our relationship is no longer the center of attention. Mexico was not the place I expected to run into Kayden. Honestly, I never wanted to run into him again.
Evan sits next to me and tentatively places his hand on my lap. I wonder if he senses that I’m all over the place. That Kayden’s presence here has shocked me. That if it weren’t because of the nerves I’m biting down on, I’d run and get as far away from here as possible.
I let Evan’s hand on my lap anchor me. I focus on it. Not because it feels nice or romantic or anything. But because it gives me something else to shift my attention to.
Hearing a throat clear, I turn to my left before I have a chance to convince myself not to. My eyes meet Kayden’s. He looks from me to Evan’s hand. I look from him to the girl still seated between his legs. She’s blonde with blue eyes–almost like a female version of Evan. If he were going for someone who looked completely different than me, he got it. Impossible for the people around this circle to even think that he and I dated if they look at her and then me.
She’s beautiful.
So are you, I can hear Mercedes say in the back of my mind. I take my eyes away from Kayden and look back to see if Mercedes is by chance making her way here. I watch her as she and Tyler chase each other a few feet away. I’m hoping she runs in this direction and rescues me. Not that she would know who to rescue me from. I’ve talked to her about Kayden, not in detail, but enough for her to know that we dated and broke up. I’ve never so much as shown her a picture of him–mostly because I purged them from my phone. She wouldn’t recognize him, to her he’d be just another guy around the fire. Shoot, she may even be drawn in his direction. I haven’t talked to anyone about the breakup, when Mom and Dad asked me why we broke up, I didn’t give too much detail. Just told them he and I were going in different directions.
And we were.
I was hoping to go into the military. And he was going to be a baseball star.
Despite knowing we weren’t right for each other, I still haven’t been able to erase him out of my heart. But it was easy to erase him from my life. Kayden and I were never friends. If anything, we’ve been enemies since the day he killed my ladybug back in elementary school.
Everything changed the night I accepted a dare and jumped into freezing water from the highest rock in our town. I wish it hadn’t.
We went from enemies to lovers to nothing. The lifetime of our relationship spanning a year.
It was a year of high highs and incredibly low lows.
Then, everything went back to the way it was supposed to be and he and I didn’t talk again. The last time I saw him, I had spent a weekend at his school and got to meet all of his friends. He was the big man on campus, though I guess he always has been. Even while we had drinks and hung out with his friends, the girls couldn’t stop staring. Couldn’t stop whispering. I hated being jealous but I couldn’t help it. He was in college. I was a high school student. He had always been Mr. Popular, and I was most certainly not. I was determined to make it work though, distance and all.
But that didn’t work out too well.
As the days went by, we started to talk less. Other things in life became our priority. For him, it was baseball, classes, and parties. I was more worried about how to pay for college, so I focused on my grades and extracurriculars to pad my stats.
I felt his absence every day a little less. It got to a point where FaceTime conversations became phone calls. Calls became texts. And eventually, I got the message.
He was in college now... and I wasn’t.
He was going to be a baseball star and I was going to USU.
Kayden Harrison was never meant to be mine, so I let him go.
Part of me hoped that the whole, if you love someone let them go, would mean that he would fight it. That he would convince me I was wrong for thinking we had just strayed too far to come back to each other. I hoped he would insist that with more effort we could make it work. That he was willing to put in the work to stay with me.
If it doesn’t come back, it was never yours, is the rest of that saying. And well… he didn’t
