Her Bundles Of Joy

“It’s okay. As I said, it’s been a long time since it happened.” Evan rubbed his eyes with the back of his hands. His blue orbs were stinging as tears threatened to escape. It might have been a while, but his scars were still very much open. Whoever said that time heals all wounds must surely have never lost their parents. “I just…I never really got over the fact that I didn’t even get to say goodbye to them. My dad…”

“We don’t have to talk about this, it’s up to you,” she said softly. She mentally cursed herself for being so insensitive and asking such an invasive question. Who the hell asks someone to tell the story of their parents’ death?

“It..it’s good for me to talk about this, or so my therap*st says.”

“You do therapy?” Nicole thought that was really brave. Men usually preferred to hide behind their tough macho facade, and would rather keep their issues and feelings bottled up inside instead of seeking help. Yet another aspect that made Evan stand out among the other men Nicole had ever met. He allowed himself to feel, and he allowed himself to express what he felt. Nicole thought it was endearing.

“Yeah, I’ve been going to therapy for a while now. She told me to share this with someone other than her, as it will only do me good. Why not share with you? You’re my closest friend right now, other than Brandi. But I don’t think this is a conversation I could have with her. Brandi has this positive aura, there’s this light in her personality, you know? I don’t want to taint that with my pain. My conversations with her are always lighthearted, and I feel like I can’t talk about this stuff with her. She probably won’t even know how to react. She’s a great girl but…with you, it’s different.”

“How so?” Nicole whispered.

“I feel like I can share both my joyful and my sorrowful moments. I don’t know, it’s weird, right? Here I am, telling you I feel like you’re the perfect girl to hear my tragic life story.” Evan chuckled.

“Well, would you think it’s weird If I said that it makes me feel kind of special? You trusting me with that stuff, I mean.”

“Yeah, I’d say you have a shrink complex.” Nicole nudged the blond man’s shoulder playfully. “I had a fight with my dad before we left my grandparents’ house. I’d been offered scholarships from two top universities, to play football for them. I hated football, to be honest. I wanted to help in the family business but my father used to say he wanted me to choose my own destiny. He didn’t want me to feel pressured into following his steps, but, at the same time, he was pushing me towards becoming an athlete, when that was actually his teenage dream. So, we argued that day because I told him I wanted to work at the company and that I wouldn’t go to college. He was so mad…”

Evan paused but Nicole sensed this wasn’t the time for her to speak yet. He looked like he still a lot to say.

“He claimed that he wanted me to have an option but he was forcing his other option on me, and I told him that. He didn’t take it well, of course. He claimed that I was wasting the opportunity of a lifetime, that I could be the next star quarterback in the country, but he was deliberately ignoring the fact that I didn’t want to be a player, that I wanted to take care of the farm and help him and my uncle run the family business. We didn’t speak for the whole weekend. I figured he’d need some time to get over it, so I decided not to push him. I thought ‘okay, I’ll apologize when we’re back home and I’ll try to make him understand my side in a more gentle way’.

 “Only I never had the chance to. I never got over the fact that our last interaction was a heated argument, and it hurts me so much to think that I wasted the last moments I could’ve spent with him after the accident because I was in a fu*king coma. Maybe he said something to me, maybe he forgave me, maybe he apologized. Who knows? I’ll never know. And I’d give everything that I have today just for a chance to go back in time and change everything.”

“Evan…” Nicole whispered. She wrapped an arm around her friend and pulled him into a hug. She didn’t know exactly what to say to help him feel slightly better, but the dancer guessed a hug spoke louder than any words she could have possibly said. Maybe she’d be able to transfer some of his pain onto herself somehow…

“I never got over it. Most nights I still have nightmares about that day, about arguing with Dad and then seeing that truck coming in our direction, destroying my life forever. That’s why I go to therapy. I reached a point in which I couldn’t even sleep anymore. Everyone thinks I’ve moved on, that my parents’ death no longer hurts, but the truth is that I’ve been faking it all this time. I’ve been pretending that I’m fine and grateful for having survived, but there’s not one day that I don’t wish to have died with my parents. I mean, I’m all alone and I have no one-”

“Don’t you ever say that again,” Nicole said sternly. “How can you possibly think that you’re alone in this world? You have friends who love you very much, you have an uncle who loves and treats you as if you were his own son. Don’t you ever think how we would feel if you died? I’d miss you every day and I’d be immensely hurt, you have no idea. Your parents wouldn’t want you to feel like you should’ve died. They would have wanted you to live your life to the fullest and make them proud. So don’t you dare say that ever again. I promise you I’ll punch you on the nose if you do.”

“Okay, okay,” Evan chuckled and lifted his hands in surrender. “No need to get all violent on me.”

Evan ran his hands through his wet hair. He’d trusted Nicole with his deepest secret, how could he have been so naive? He’d never told anyone about his depression, that he was finally getting out of, partly thanks to the friendship he’d found in Nicole and Brandi. The latter he knew he could trust, as he didn’t have anything to offer that she didn’t already have. The dancer, on the other hand…women like her only wanted one thing from rich men like him, and that thing was money. It should have been obvious that she wouldn’t want a friendship with him unless she had ulterior motives. Evan felt really dumb for trusting her with all his heart. He felt really dumb for making love to her that night, for thinking that she was actually interested in him for who he was, not for his bank account. He had promised him he would never fall for that again…It seemed like that popular saying was indeed true.

Fool me once, shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me.

Shame on me, indeed. Thought the blond man.