Page 22 of The Do-Over
He sighed. “No,” he said. “It’s not.”
“Are you kidding me?”
“I can’t go to Iowa State. It’s too close to Deer Ridge. Ames is less than thirty miles down the highway.”
“It’s not like we were talking about going to Europe,” she said. “We were talking about going to Illinois. It’s only a five-hour drive.”
“Yeah, well, that’s a lot longer,” he said. “Thea…I never made any secret of the fact that this was what I wanted.”
“More than you want to be with me?”
“That’s not fair,” he said. “I didn’t know I was going to have to choose.”
“Okay,” she said. “But now you do have to choose. You have to decide whether you want to be with me or whether you want to be in Chicago. You can’t have both.”
Rob sighed. “It’s not my fault this happened,” he said.
Thea felt as if he’d slapped her. “What?”
“It’s not my fault you didn’t get in,” he said. “You were on the dean’s list when I met you. They should have accepted you, same as they did me. They should have given you the same academic scholarship they gave me.”
“Are you saying it’s my fault?”
“You said they didn’t want to take you because of your grades,” he said quietly. “But your grades have always been great, Thea.”
She felt tears come to her eyes. “I—I’ve been slipping, but—”
But it is your fault, she thought. It was because of him that she hadn’t been prioritizing her schoolwork the way she once had.
Of course, that wasn’t his fault, was it? Not really. He hadn’t made the choices for her. She could have missed his basketball games. She could have told him not to come over on nights when she needed to study. But she hadn’t done that. She had chosen Rob every single time, and her grades had suffered for it.
And now he wasn’t choosing her.
“I’m sorry,” he said. “I just can’t do it, Thea. I can’t go to Iowa State.”
“Are we breaking up?”
He looked wretched. “I think we have to,” he said quietly. “Long distance never works out. We both know that. That’s why we talked about going to Chicago together in the first place.”
He was right. They’d agreed weeks ago that there was no point in trying to make a long-distance relationship work out, and Thea still felt that was the right choice. She didn’t want to spend her college years cooped up in her dorm room wondering what a distant boyfriend was doing that night. She wanted to enjoy herself.
But how could she do that without Rob?
“Won’t you at least consider Iowa State?” she asked him, unable now to stop the tears from spilling over. “It’s a good school, Rob. You’ll get a good education there. And you know they’ve offered you a basketball scholarship too. Nothing would be different.”
“We wouldn’t be in Chicago.”
“But we’d be together!”
He shook his head. “I’m sorry,” he said, but his voice was hard. “I wanted us to be together too. But I’m not going to give up on all my plans just so that we can be in the same place. We haven’t been together long enough for that.”
“But I love you,” she whispered.
Any other night, Rob would have grinned winningly, taken her in his arms, and told her that he loved her too. Any other night, he would have started kissing her, and they would have gotten lost in each other’s touch.
But tonight, Rob got to his feet and headed for the door.
“I really am sorry,” he said quietly. “This isn’t how I wanted things to end.”
