The Upside of Falling Back To You

chapter forty nine | long overdue

IT'S BEEN TWO DAYS since the wedding. I've spent two days trying to collect all my feelings, because I think I'm losing it. I'm forgetting deadlines and the time of day and I can't tell if I actually sleep at night. I know my brain is in other places, dreaming of other timelines where I'm not alone in my room once again.

It's that morning that Parv forces me onto a call with Jamie and Laila. I've been trying to ignore them, but it's hard when Parv made Cas stay in my room until I picked up. I didn't expect a teenage boy to comply to what someone else tells them to do, but I guess he's also desperate to fix me.

So I tell them the whole story. It sort of just... spills out of me as if I was under some spell. Or maybe I really had this bottled up for way too long. They kept listening even if I was sure I went on multiple unrelated tangents, their faces staying on the tiny screen of my phone.

It would've felt a lot better if they were actually in my room, but Jamie still couldn't walk, I think Parv was spending part one of their honeymoon in a fancy hotel in Toronto, and Laila was caught up on work. This was the best we could do.

"You know he's going back to LA tonight, right?" Jamie asked.

I nodded. "Yeah..." I guess he no longer wanted to spend the summer here, nor did he need to. Vi's graduation and prom were before the wedding - originally I was supposed to go, but for obvious reasons I didn't. Ronan was hurt, he didn't want to stay in the same city as me. I understood that. I would do the same thing.

"I'm just... god, Asteria, that was messy," Laila commented. "Why didn't you feel like you could tell us?"

I shrugged, shaking my head. "I guess I didn't want to relive it... I guess that's what I've been trying to do all this time. Just... push it deep, deep inside of me until I didn't have to think of it anymore." I sniffed. "God, I feel like I'm being so dramatic."

"I mean, Aster, can I be honest?" Parv asked. She didn't wait for a response. "You're doing the same thing Ronan did back then."

I wasn't following. "What?"

"I mean, think about it - and please don't be mad at me, Asteria. But when we were in high school, Ronan was scared. He didn't want to hurt you by potentially messing it up in the future. So you broke up because he didn't want to give the two of you a chance."

I nodded. "Yeah, go on..."

"Now, you've admitted it, Asteria - you have feelings for him-"

"Right, can we please go back to that because I have so many ques-"

"Not now, Jamie-" Laila cut her off.

Parv cleared her throat. "Yeah, anyways- you're doing that right now, Asteria. You're scared to even try to date-"

I cut her off. "No, but that's different, Parv-"

"How so?"

"Because it is!" I tried to argue. "It's like- I have a right to be scared. We've seen Ronan's relationship status be plastered all over every social media platform. I don't want to be caught in the middle of that. And- and I'd literally never escape him if we were to date and break up-"

"That's the point, Asteria! This is where you're like him. You already played out how this relationship works out in your head and you determined that you're not going to last."

"We never lasted before."

"You're still holding onto the past, Asteria. You're basing every decision with him on how you guys ended up in the past. And you were so close to actually letting that go, but it got a firm hold of you again."