“You're damn right I am. I did the right thing. The hard thing.”

“Did it ever occur to you that maybe it should’ve been Pearl’s choice?”

“What should’ve?” I asked.

“Whether she wanted to risk trusting you.”

Maybe it was the beers, but I wasn’t quite putting the dots together. Usually, I was smarter than this. “I’m not following.”

“Clearly.” Laney tucked her legs under herself, holding up her two index fingers and speaking slower like she was talking to a child. “This little piggy thinks it’s a bad piggy.” She wiggled her other finger. “This little piggy likes the bad piggy anyway. But the bad piggy pretended he doesn’t like her because he doesn’t want to hurt her.”

I squinted. “Did you just call me a pig?”

“Focus, you big idiot.”

I grinned, cutting her off. “Okay, okay. I get what you’re trying to say. I should’ve told Pearl how I felt and let her decide? Is that it?”

“Uh, yes?”

“No. You’re wrong. Because you don’t understand how we felt. We would’ve given it a shot if I did that. I would’ve been basically baiting her into it, even though I knew how it would end.”

“Do you know how it would end?”

“The same way it always does!” I said, setting my beer down with frustration. “You know me, Laney. You know what I do. I lose interest. I fuck it up. I always have and I always will.”

“Have you ever walked away from a woman you really cared about to spare her from you before?”

“No,” I said.

“Then you haven’t felt like this about a woman before. Which means you don’t know how this would end, stupid.”

“I know how it would probably end,” I said with a little less force.

“Knowing something will probably happen isn’t knowing.”

“What?”

“You screwed up, Dean. That’s all there is to it. You owe it to her to go tell her how you really feet. I doubt she’s going to change her mind about it now, but you owe her that much.”

“What good would that do?”

“You said she has anxiety like me, right? If she did, can you even imagine how hard it must’ve been to tell you how she was feeling like that? Imagine how much she cared about you to do that. And what did you do?”

It finally hit me. When it did, it all came with the force of a fucking freight train straight to my chest. I hung my head, hands balling into fists. “Shit,” I muttered. I thought back to the dressing room–to the emotion and fear in Pearl’s eyes as she told me how she felt right to my face. She’d asked me to be with her and I told her I couldn’t. It must’ve broken everything in her, and the next time I really saw her she was getting plastered to take her mind off it.

Laney leaned forward, tilting her head to get a look at me. “Is he finally realizing the scope of his screw up? Have we gotten through the iron curtain surrounding that peanut you call a brain?”