Tanner and Esme

Chapter 3 (Tanner): Throwing Me Out

"Hey, Ez." I opened my apartment door to the girl I'd been seeing for three months. I'd been starting my senior year and she was starting her sophomore year, and we'd met at a party at a mutual friend's house near campus.

She looked scared. "Can we talk?"

"Sure. Come on in." This sounded serious for something that was casual, even after three months.

She blew out a breath. "Tanner, I'm pregnant."

Three little words that changed the entire course of my life. Three little words that entitled me to wear that chip on my shoulder for years. Three little words that crushed my dreams and made self-pity my constant companion.

My phone buzzed with a text from my mother.

You caused this destruction. You did this to your wife for Mindy, of all people, who isn't worth even the smallest fraction of Esme. I want you to look at this and see what your thoughtlessness and selfishness has done.

There was a short, seven-second video of Esme, curled into herself on the couch, sobbing, head down, a soft pillow clutched to her chest.

There will never be un-soft pillows in our house, Tanner! Un-soft pillows should be illegal! We shall only allow the softest of soft pillows through our doors!

She'd been laughing and grinning when she declared our home a soft-pillow zone, but now Esme was crying into that pillow because of me. Because her husband cheated on her with his past. Those pithy little sayings about leave your past behind and look to the future are full of shit because you always carry at least some part of your past forward with you.

Just like Esme and I would always carry this night with us. You carry those painful days with you like rocks in your pockets that weigh you down. And this present would one day be our past, but the echoes of it would remain, silent specters in the shadow of our futures. The night I'd destroyed us once and for all. To be honest, from the minute I'd approached Esme and suggested getting married, I'd been destroying us in increments. Withholding myself from her in many ways, the ways that truly counted. The ways that could have built a strong bond between us.

It was suddenly clear to me how I'd been focusing on all I thought I'd lost, the bitterness eating me up ever since I played the heroic martyr and had done the right thing. Through my disappointed eyes, I viewed the past through a rosy haze of perfection because it was taken away from me before it could play out, so it lived as the ideal in my mind. Never mind reality, never mind that all of that so-called perfection had already been showing cracks that I'd refused to acknowledge. All that mattered was the choice about my future had been ripped away, or so I liked to tell myself, and I became the toddler with the surly attitude because my favorite toy had been taken from me. Never had I looked at my relationship with Mindy from an adult perspective, where I would have realized that it would have crashed and burned sooner or later. Probably much sooner. I could only look at it from a twenty-one-year-old's passionate perspective.

An extreme travel blogger?

With Mindy at my side?

Mindy who liked things first-class all the way? I'd never told her that my parents had explained that, while they encouraged me to pursue my dream, they weren't going to underwrite it.

We've paid for your college, Tanner. Anything beyond that is up to you. You know you always have a job at the company, but if you want to work elsewhere and explore other things, that's OK, too.

How fucking idiotic and unrealistic was I to think that they'd support Mindy and me for any length of time once I'd graduated? Especially given how much they hated my girlfriend for no reason.