Pitbabe S2, Chapter 13 pg7

 Pitbabe S2, Chapter 13 pg7

   I’ll admit I didn’t expect that answer, and I felt a little hurt that Jeff didn’t seem ready to fight alongside me for us. Even though I’d already declared I’d endure anything to stay by his side, maybe this was the age gap people talk about. For Jeff, who’s still young, he has plenty of chances to meet new people, plenty of time to start over again and again. But me, I’ve been around for a while. I don’t want to start over anymore. My life’s already settled, everything’s in place. Even if changes happen every day, they’re not enough to throw me off balance. The only thing that could knock me down now is something to do with Jeff.

   “Look at that face,” Jeff chuckled softly, then reached up to pinch my cheek, clearly enjoying teasing me. “Feeling hurt?”

   “Isn’t it justified?”

   “I didn’t say I’d leave right now.”

   “But you’re not ruling it out for the future, right?”

   “Exactly. The future’s unpredictable.” Once again, I felt like the childish one in this relationship, while Jeff seemed steady, with an answer for everything. I was still adrift in my own confusion, never knowing how to decide until the problem was staring me in the face. “Tomorrow, you might not love me anymore—who knows?”

   “That’s too much hypotheticals,” I said, pinching his cheek back and shaking him lightly until Jeff’s head bobbed with giggles. “I love you today, so how could I not love you tomorrow?”

   “Tonight, I might act really bad.”

   “Like what?”

   “Make you feel all hurt and petty.”

   “That’s not enough to stop loving you, you little rascal.”

   Jeff giggled at my old-man tone. He loves teasing me but also seems to enjoy when I talk like this. If you asked who loves my old-man persona the most, it’d definitely be my boyfriend, hands down.

   “If you’re tired but you’re okay, I won’t make decisions for you. If you say you can handle it, I will believe you can. But I don’t like feeling tired himself. Because if I am tired, it’s not just me who’s unhappy—everyone around me ends up unhappy too,” Jeff explained slowly, in simple words. He looked into my eyes, his hand ruffling my hair playfully, and somehow, it made me relax too. “I know my limits. I don’t like forcing things, especially in relationships. It’s not like exercise where you get tired, rest, and start again. Relationship fatigue doesn’t have a rest period. If resting could fix it, no one in the world would ever break up.”

   Jeff has always spoken with such reason throughout our relationship. I think I’ve learned more from him than he has from me. This must be a clear example of the saying, “Maturity doesn’t depend on age.” Someone who’s lived longer might have seen more, but that doesn’t mean they understand more. Some people with empty heads could go to the ends of the earth and still die without discovering or achieving anything on their own with their limited brain space. I’m not foolish enough to be called empty-headed, but it’s clear that Jeff understands things far more deeply than I do. You could say I’m just an ordinary guy, while he’s an exceptionally smart kid, like a big brother, no less.

   “I get it,” I sigh. “I just don’t dare think about the day we’d have to break up.”

   “I don’t like thinking about it either. Just saying it for you to hear.”

   “You’re so damn tough.”

   “You could try being tough too,” Jeff smiles at me, a smile I don’t see often since this kid’s default expression is usually blank. Even with me, he often keeps a deadpan face, but every time he smiles, I can’t help but smile back automatically. “If you get too tired of me, don’t force it.”

   “Don’t say that. It hurts, you know.”

   “Seriously, Phii Alan,” Jeff’s earnest tone makes me feel like I’m not a thirty-year-old adult but a fourteen-year-old kid who thinks he knows everything when, in reality, I don’t even fully understand myself. “I want you to be happy.”

   “I’m happy when I’m with you.”

   “If that’s true, great. But if you’re not as happy as you are now in the future, you’ve got to be really tough, got it?”

   I can only nod, even though I don’t fully grasp the core of it. But if being “tough” will put Jeff at ease, I’ll become that person for him someday.

   Of course, I hope the day I have to be tough never comes.

   

   CHARLIE:

   I drove past the house.

   This is probably the first time I’ve been so out of it. I even forgot I was driving. It’s like my body was here, but my mind had already drifted back to the house. If I hadn’t snapped out of it on my own, I’d probably be a famous racer on some news website by now.

   A whirlwind of thoughts swirls in my head. I keep mulling over everything, thinking how great it’d be to have time-travel powers. If I’d known staying to fix things at the lab would lead to me and Babe breaking up, I would’ve left everything to Dr. Chris back then. At the very least, I should’ve made sure to be with Babe first. We could’ve talked about the rest over the phone. If Babe had seen my face first, things wouldn’t have ended like this.

   I loop back to the house, wasting nearly twenty minutes. Parking in front, I sigh in relief seeing Babe’s car still there. Right now, anything can make me worry. The whole drive, I was scared Babe might’ve gone somewhere else, not home. I didn’t want Babe, in that unstable mood, to be in a strange place or with strangers. So I kept chanting in my head, “Be home, be home, be home,” the entire way. My next fear was that Babe might’ve changed the door code like he did when he was mad at me before. Luckily, the old code still worked—not because he was being kind or waiting for me to come back, but probably because he was too angry to even think about it.

   The downstairs lights are all off, the house dead silent. Babe is probably upstairs, maybe showered and already in bed.

   Hmm… if that’s the case, that’d be nice.

Previous

Next