Chapter 16 - Ethan's Pov:

It’s Thursday morning, only about twelve hours since I left Las Vegas and Lila behind. I find that I’m missing her a lot more than I’d expected. She’s texted me a couple of times and I want to call and talk to her, but I promised myself I wouldn’t until after I talked to London. That way I could have a clear head. Maybe. Hopefully.

I’m at London’s aunt’s house, where London lives most of the time because it’s closer to her doctor’s office. I’ve been sitting in a living room that smells like cat food for about an hour, counting the tics of the grandfather clock while drinking iced tea and listening to Rae talk about hope while we wait for London to come back from her doctor’s appointment. I’m getting a little restless waiting, wondering what she’ll look like and the stupid part of me believes there’s a small possibility that she’ll walk into the room and recognize me. It’s making me regret coming here and making me really want to hop onto a plane and go back to Lila, just so I can hold her.

I’m just about to tell Rae that I can’t do this when the front door swings open and London walks inside. It’s mind-blowingly strange, seeing her again. She looks older, yet the same. Her black hair is still resting at her chin and streaked with purple, and she still has a scar on her lip and her nose is pierced. She also has a faint scar on her head where she hit it on the rock when she fell out the window, the thing that caused the brain damage. I swear, if I didn’t know any better, I’d guess that I’d somehow stepped back in time four years.

There’s this fleeting moment when I swear her eyes light up like they used to whenever she looked at me, but it vanishes so quickly I wonder if I was imagining it. She glances at her mother, who she does recognize, but not from her childhood. She can’t remember anything from the past, except the basic functions of walking, talking, and breathing.

“Who’s he?” she asks her mom in a robotic kind of voice.

Rae looks just how I remember her the last time I saw her right after London’s accident. She’s still the spitting image of London, only twenty-years older. She gets to her feet. “This is an old friend of yours.”

London’s eyes lock on me and I remember how she sometimes used to just stare at me with this thoughtful look on her face, like she was memorizing what I looked like. But now, well, she just looks lost, like someone who wandered off into the forest and can’t find her way back.

“I don’t remember him,” she says, stepping back toward the door. “Why is he here?”

Rae quickly winds around the sofa and grabs London’s arm, stopping her from bolting. “He came here to talk to you. A long way actually, so the least you could do is sit down and listen to what he has to say.”

London glances at me and I force a smile. It’s too weird. I just keep thinking about all the time we spent together and how I can remember it but she can’t. I’m a stranger to her, but I realize now she was kind of like a stranger to me the entire time we were dating.

“What’s your name?” she finally asks me.

“Ethan,” I get up from the sofa and walk toward her with my hands tucked into the pockets of my jeans. “Ethan Gregory.”

She considers this for a moment. “I have no idea who you are,” she says and then shrugs like she’s at a loss for words. “Sorry.”

“I’m sorry, too,” I reply, but I’m not quite sure what I’m sorry for. Whether it’s for leaving the house that day, not ripping the needle out of her hand when she was about to shoot up, or for the plain and simple fact that I can’t make her remember me. Or maybe it’s because even though I’m standing here with her, I can’t stop thinking about Lila, her smile, her sadness, and the fact that at the moment I really just want to be with her, not here.

“Why don’t you two sit down?” Rae gestures at the sofas. “And I’ll go get you some iced tea.” She smiles at me with hope in her eyes as she walks past me, heading to the kitchen and leaving me alone with London.

London shakes her head and then sighs and sits down on the sofa. “I don’t know why she tries so hard.” She tucks her hands underneath her legs. “I can barely remember her and she’s my mother.”

“She just cares about you.” I take a seat in the recliner across from her. “It’s a good thing.”

“Or a stupid thing, depending on how you look at it.” She eyes me over as she leans back in the sofa. “What’s your name again?”

“Ethan,” I say, picking up the glass of iced tea Rea has placed beside me. She’s disappeared back into the kitchen, and I can’t help but wish I was back there with her. “Ethan Gregory.”

“And we dated?”

“Yeah, pretty much?”

“And we had sex.”

I’m in the middle of a sip and nearly spit the iced tea all over the floor. “Yeah, I guess you could say that,” I say, setting the glass down.

“Was I any good?” she asks curiously as she leans forward. “I mean I had to be if you’re here to visit me.” Her feistiness resembles the London I remember so much it’s kind of hard to take in.

“You were,” I admit, wiping my lips with the back of my hand.

She arches her eyebrow. “The best you ever had.”

I open my mouth to answer, but then clamp my jaw shut because the answer is no. The best I’ve ever had is back in San Diego doing who knows what, hopefully smiling and being happy.

“Aw,” she states, her eyebrows arching as she relaxes back in the chair. “There’s someone else.”

I nod slowly, sadly. “Kind of.”

She seems amused by this, the corners of her lips quirking. “Are you in love with her?”

I lean forward, overlapping my hands on my knees. “You know, you ask a lot of questions.”

“Only about things I can’t remember,” she replies. “You know it’s a pain in the ass not being able to remember everyone, yet they’re always looking at you, hoping you will.”

“You can’t remember anything at all?” I know the answer, but I still ask the question.

“Nope, not really.”

“You seem so calm about it, though.”

“Not calm. I’ve just accepted it. I can remember the last four years, so that’s something. I’m not completely clueless and from what I understand—the fact that I threw myself out the window while on heroin—maybe I needed this.”

“I’m not sure I’d go that far,” I say uneasily. “Forgetting your past is a really big deal.”

“Maybe.” She pauses, crossing her arms over her chest.

I take a deep breath, preparing myself to say what I came here for. “About that day… the day you…”

“Threw myself out the window,” she finishes for me bluntly.

I nod. “Yeah… I wanted to say…” I fidget with the sleeve of my shirt. “I want to say that I’m sorry. I should have never left you in that house.”

“You left me?” she asks. “Why?”

I shrug. “You were frustrating me because you were obviously upset about something, yet you wouldn’t talk about it—you never would. You wanted to shoot up heroin instead and I didn’t want you to.”

She tucks her hair behind her ear, her analyzing gaze boring into me. “You told me not to do it?”

I nod. “A few times, but I should have tried harder. I should have made you stop.”

“How would you have done that?”

“I don’t know… ripped the needle out of your hand or something.”

She thrums her fingernails on the armrest, considering something. “You know, if I’ve learned one thing through this whole ordeal it’s that sometimes you can’t make things happen, even if you want them to. You can’t change things or make people do things they don’t want to do or can’t do.”

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I swallow hard, understanding what she’s saying. “But I could have tried harder.”

“And in the end I’m sure I still would have put the needle in my arm,” she says. “And probably went out the window.”

“Maybe not though.”

“But maybe.” She pauses. “But we’ll never know. And it’s not for you to feel guilty when I can’t even remember you.”

I shake my head. She’s still so London and it’s crazy. “I guess so.” I get what she’s saying. I really do. But it’s hard to accept because we’ll never know what might have happened or might not have happened if I’d just gotten her to put the needle down.

“I don’t want to talk about me anymore,” she says dismissively. “I’m always talking about myself—with my mom, the doctors, everyone I come across who used to know me. I get so sick of it.”

“What do you want to talk about, then?” I ask, leaning back in the seat, feeling a little lighter and at the same time a little sadder because I know this is it. This is how things will always be between us and I can’t change it.

“You.” She crosses her legs and stares me down so hard I swear she’s trying to burn a hole in my head.” Tell me, Ethan Gregory, this girl who’s the best you’ve ever had, do you love her?”

“Love?” I ask. “You want to talk about love?”

She nods. “I do.”

I shrug, feeling uncomfortable under her scrutiny. “What the fuck is love anyway?” Giving your heart to someone completely? Saying here, take it, I’m yours? Letting them love you, hug you, own you? Yell at you and tell you you’re worthless? Hold you and tell you you’re important? What is the definition of love? How can you tell?

I open my mouth and decide to just go for it, letting the first answer that pops into my head slip out. “I think I do.” My mind is flying about a million miles an hour with the declaration and it’s hard to process, especially since I just said it for the first time in front of my ex-girlfriend who has amnesia.

She tilts her head to the side, studying me. “Did you love me?”

I think about her question, knowing the real answer, but it’s hard to admit it. “I think I did, but in a different way.”

“What do you mean?”

“Our love was kind of chaotic and careless and we really didn’t know each other enough to actually completely love each other.” I reach into my pocket and retrieve the bracelet London gave me, the one with our initials intertwined. “But I think in some way or another we did have some kind of love for each other.” I lean over the table, holding my hand out to give her the bracelet.

“But not as much as this other girl?” she asks, taking the bracelet from my hand. “What is this?”

“You made it for me,” I say, leaning back. “You said it would always help me remember the time we spent together.”

She runs her finger along the leather. “Was I going to break up with you when I gave it to you? Because it kind of sounds like I was.”

I shrug and then shake my head. “You could have been thinking about it, but honestly I don’t know. Half the time I never knew what you were thinking.”

She grins as she looks down at the bracelet in her hand. “And now you’ll never know.” Leave it to London to have a sick and twisted sense of humor about the whole thing. But she’s right. I’ll never know what she was thinking, how she really felt, how I really felt, because we never got around to telling each other. I was so afraid of my feelings that I held them in and now the chance to tell her is gone. She’ll never know whether I loved her or not. How much I cared for her. I’ll never know if she felt the same way, whether she loved me so much she’d hang on to me if something happened to me and I was no longer part of her life. I will never know a lot of stuff about our relationship and there’s no changing that. It’s done. Final.

“I guess not.” I offer her a small smile.

She continues to stare at the bracelet, looking sadder with each passing moment. Finally she sighs and sets it down on the table. “So tell me something happy,” she says, shifting her mood in the amount of time it takes me to catch my breath. “And not about my past.”

I take a deep breath and start telling her about the last few years of my life, which aren’t really happy or sad, just neutral, because I’ve basically been stuck in the same mentality, never moving forward, always thinking about the past. Except in this very moment, I want to be moving forward to the other side of the country to be with some else. By the time we’re done talking, it’s midafternoon. My flight doesn’t leave until the morning, but the idea of waiting until then seems impossible. I need to see Lila now and I need to tell her how I feel so I don’t miss my chance again.