Third Love's The Charm [PUBLISHED]

Chapter Twenty-Three: In Any Timeline

The way he looked at me with his eyebrows scrunched up, the corners of his lips jutted into a frown, and how his whole stance made him appear as if he was bracing himself for a blow just confirmed my assumption that he already knew my answer before he even asked.

And it tore me apart to see him like this. This was exactly what I've been trying to avoid this whole time. While I didn't want to date him, I didn't want to reject him either. I wished that he would have given up on his own without having to go through this.

Now, standing in the field, a few meters away from where he broke up with me in a faraway future, from where he found me in the midst of a breakdown, he was now practically asking me to reject him.

For somebody else, this might have been a cause of self-satisfaction. To have the power to break up with the person who dumped you, but that wasn't the case for me. Because whether I liked it or not, I loved Pat and I would never ever want to hurt him.

Now that I knew that multiple timelines existed, since I came from a different one, I wonder if there was one that Pat and I ended up happy together. Where my nightmares didn't happen, where he wouldn't fall in love on first sight with Zoey, where he and I could work through our problems together before calling it quits.

Was there a timeline where we actually belonged together?

Probably.

However, as I felt the metal of the whistle press against my skin under my shirt, I reminded myself that this wasn't it. That I have my memories from where I came from, the heartbreak that I carried over.

So while I didn't want to do it, I knew I had to turn him down.

"I'm sorry."

I said it in the softest tone I could muster, allowing the wind to carry it towards him. The moment my words registered inside his head, his whole stance relaxed as if I finally gave him the slap he was preparing for. However, that didn't erase that devastated expression from his face.

Our roles were really reversed, weren't they?

"I adore you, Patrick, and I meant it when I said that any girl would be lucky to be with you," I said to him, trying to ease the situation, "And to be honest, I don't want to imagine a world without you by my side."

I really didn't. Why else would I have found myself thinking of jumping off a building after he broke up with me?

Why else would I still continue to hang out with him even though he hurt my feelings? Why else would I want to get close with him even if the chances of me falling for him were high?

Because I never stopped loving him in the first place.

"But that doesn't automatically imply that I meant it in a romantic way," I continued and I was really applauding myself that I have managed to collect my thoughts in such a short time, "I adore you, in a platonic sense, and I don't want to imagine a world without you as my friend."

What surprised me the most was that I meant every word. Slowly, I realized that I will always love Pat but that doesn't mean that I want to be in a relationship with him.

It must be weird for him that I was spouting these things when we haven't been hanging out for that long yet. For me though, it was walking away from all the memories we shared. I want to send him a small thank you for loving me, even though it was extremely difficult to, and an apology for the way we ended things.

The Patrick Vincent in front of me had yet to experience that kind of pain that the two of us had gone through due to being in a relationship. But that doesn't mean that I loved this Patrick Vincent any less.