"I am grateful for what I am and have. My thanksgiving is perpetual." -Henry David Thoreau
69 days sober
There are right ways to tell people things that will hurt them, and there are wrong ways to tell them. At this point, I’m pretty sure Travis only knows how to do it the wrong way—somewhere between “hey, Mom, I’m dating my stepbrother; also, I think I’m gay,” and “welcome back, Garen! By the way, I’m now fucking your best friend in Lakewood,” the kid lost all capacity for tact. Somehow, though, it’s different, when people pick the wrong way to tell him something. It’s worse.
It happens suddenly, midway through Monday’s rehearsal. There’s a click from the speakers, and then Riley is saying, “I need Rizzo in the sound booth right now.”
I frown. My mic—a flesh-tone strip of stiff wire that hooks over my ear and runs halfway along my jaw—is already in place and seems to be working fine. There’s no feedback, no static, no awkward rustling sound of it moving against my skin. I raise a hand to shield my eyes from the stage lights and say, “What’s up, dude? I’m in the middle of—”
“Now.” The words are practically a growl, which is so unlike Riley that I’m stunned into motion. Shooting a bewildered glance at Christine, I hop off the stage and jog up the aisle to the back wall stairway that leads to the control booth. Riley is alone in the booth when I push open the door; he beckons for me to close it behind myself, and I do so without question. He checks to make sure all of the microphones are off, then says, “You need to find Travis. I think he’s in the hall behind the auditorium. Go now.”
“Uh, as much as I appreciate you playing messenger for whatever mid-rehearsal booty call he’s trying to initiate, I’ve actually got shit to do, in case you haven’t noticed,” I say, gesturing through the window that overlooks the auditorium. “Opening night is in nine days. Whatever he wants me for can wait until after rehearsal’s over. Or at least until my scene is over.”
Riley makes a vaguely frustrated noise in his throat and thrusts a hand out towards the sound board. “A few weeks into rehearsal, Travis asked me if I could set up his headset to record everything that’s said into it, so that he could keep track of his ideas and notes for the set pieces without having to stop every other minute to write things down. Every word that gets spoken near his microphone gets stored in my computer.”
“That’s—” really fucking creepy. “—nice for you. And for Travis. Wait, shit, does that mean you’ve got a recording of their breakup? And of him getting kicked in the nuts? Please tell me you do. And please tell me that if I steal his phone, you can set it as his ringtone, because that would be—”
“Garen. Stop,” Riley says, and I fall immediately, cautiously silent. He reaches for his laptop and cues up a track on it. There’s a moment of silence, and then--
“I need to talk to you,” I hear Joss’ voice saying.
There’s a pause, then, in a slightly louder, closer voice, Travis says, “Um. Sure. What’s up?” She doesn’t say anything in response. There’s a faint rustling noise, like maybe he’s still moving set pieces. Or like she’s handing him something. Then the rustling stops, and there’s a little hitch in his breathing, and he says, “That’s not funny, Joss.”
“It’s not meant to be,” she replies. “I just thought you should know.”
Two footsteps, and then another, slightly louder rustling, like he’s moving after her. “Stop. Wait, you can’t—we talked about this.” His voice sounds a little panicked now. Desperate. “You asked me what I thought about you doing that, and I said no, I said I didn’t want that, and you said okay. You said you’d keep it, that you’d let me keep it. Y-You promised, you said that even if you weren’t sure you were ready, that you’d respect the fact that I can do it—I know I can do it, Joss, and you said you’d let me. You promised.”
“I promised you that because we were together, and you swore to me you were willing to make an effort. You said you’d stop seeing him, and you’d stop speaking to him, and you didn’t. You lied to me, and you cheated on me, so fuck you, if you think I’m going to ruin my life just so you can take a baby I gave birth to and try to—what, raise it with him? What is this, ‘Heather Has Two Daddies: Teen Edition’? I know you don’t support abortion, and I know you think you wanted to have that baby, but this is my body, and I don’t owe you anything. So I got pregnant. Big fucking deal, okay? That doesn’t mean you can tell me what I should do with my body for the next nine months. That’s not fair. You’re not being fair. So, whatever, I’m done.”
“Please don’t do this,” Travis says, voice breaking a little. “Please, Joss, I’m fucking begging you, please don’t--”
“Too late.”
There’s silence. I am gripping the edge of the sound board so hard I’m worried I might crunch the material between my fingers. Riley still hasn’t moved, though he’s still staring at me. I can just barely hear Travis swallow on the recording before he says, “I don’t, um. You got it done already? You… it’s gone?”
“Yeah,” Joss says, voice soft enough to be almost apologetic. “It’s gone.”
Riley reaches out and stops the recording. He looks upset, but not entirely surprised. I wonder if it’s because he knows Joss well enough to have expected her to eventually get an abortion, or if it’s just because he’s used to hearing things he shouldn’t hear. Like their breakup. Like Travis kissing me on the cheek after his birthday lapdance and whispering, “Happy birthday to me.”
“Can you talk to him?” I ask. “H-He’s probably still wearing the headset, right?”
“Yeah, he, um—hang on.” Riley punches a button on the board and says, “Hey, Travis?” There’s no response. “Trav, bud, the light for your headset is still on. I know you can hear me. Garen’s in the booth with me, we heard what happened. Can you tell me where you are so I can send him to you?”
“I’m, um,” Travis says. He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and my heart breaks for him. That’s it, that’s all he gets out.
I gesture for Riley to connect me, and once he hits the button again, I lean in and say, “Hey, T? Tell me where you are, babe, I’m going to come find you.” No reply again. I turn to Riley and demand, “Can’t you use something up here to figure out where he is?”
He squints at me. “Like what, dude? A GPS? I run a high school drama club’s tech crew, not a friggin’ police station. Go look for him somewhere!”
I glare at him, then head back down the stairs to the auditorium. Christine shoots me an expectant glance and asks, “Is everything okay? Can we continue?”
“No,” I say shortly, hoisting myself up onto the stage so I can cut through the wings to get to the back hall. I add over my shoulder, “Do a scene without me. I have something important I need to do right now.”
The hall is empty. I poke my head into one of the classrooms, where most of the members of the crew are working on props. Right now, they seem to be hand-painting a collection of Styrofoam sundaes for the soda shop scenes. I say, as casually as I can manage, “Hey, guys. Anybody know where I can find your fearless leader?”
“He left here maybe fifteen minutes ago,” says a girl who I think might be named Marcellina. “He said he was going to drive his car around the back of the school so he could unload the jukebox mech he made this past weekend. I think it’s too heavy to bother carting through the front doors, so he’s using the ones in the sophomore wing.”
I have no idea what a jukebox mech is, or how he made it, or why we need one for the play, but I do know where the sophomore wing is. I mutter my thanks and take off down the hallway, looping through a side door to get to the right section of the building. The moment I pass through the wing doors, I freeze. Travis is sitting on the floor halfway down the hall, his back propped up against the wall between two classroom doors. There’s a large cardboard box next to him, and a crumpled paper on top of it. I take a step towards him. “Travis?”
He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t move. I close the distance between us and drop to my knees in front of him. His legs are kicked out limply in front of him, spread just enough that I can wedge myself between them to crowd up into his line of sight. He still doesn’t react. I carefully lift the headset off him and put it on myself. “Ry, you there?”
“Yeah, man,” is the immediate reply. “Is he alright?”
“I think he might be in shock?” I say. “And I don’t really know what to do. We’re in the sophomore hall.”
“I’ll be there in a minute. Just let me grab Annabelle. Don’t go anywhere, alright?”
Like I could if I wanted to. I push the headset off so it’s dangling around my neck and settle my palms on top of Travis’ shins. “Talk to me. Please, say anything. Do anything.”
He slides his hands down his thighs onto his knees and tugs his legs up until they’re bent at right angles. I take that as a sign and wriggle closer, until my own knees are touching the wall on either side of his hips and he’s practically sitting in my lap. Neither of us moves for a moment, and then he gestures to the box—rather, he gestures to the paper on top of it. I pick it up.
It’s a Planned Parenthood pamphlet about abortion.
“This is how she told you,” I say flatly. “This is how she told you that she aborted the baby you wanted—she handed you a fucking Planned Parenthood brochure.”
He nods. I sit back on my heels and drag a hand through my hair, trying desperately to resist the urge to hunt her down and murder her. Because it’s not that I necessarily expected her to keep the baby, and it’s not that I’m refusing to understand why she would want to get rid of it; it’s that I cannot even fathom anyone being so goddamn tactless that she would think it was okay to tell the boy who wanted to keep this baby, who loved it already and was stupidly excited about it, that she’d gotten rid of it with nothing more than a shrug and a fucking pamphlet.
“Is he going to be okay?” says a voice just to my right. I glance up. Annabelle, anxiously peering down at Travis, with Riley at her side.
“’M fine,” Travis finally says, though he still doesn’t move. His eyes are unfocused and staring straight ahead, somewhere in the vicinity of my neck.
Riley clears his throat. “G, I think maybe you need to take him home. He’s not alright right now. And I don’t think being in the same building as Joss and that—” He jerks his chin at the brochure, “—is going to help him at all.”
That does nothing to quell the fury that’s flaring up inside of me. Even the sound of her name makes me want to destroy something. I crumple up the paper and shove it into my pocket, mostly to get it out of sight. “Yeah, I know. Listen, if I drive him back to his place in his car, do you think one of you could pick me up after rehearsal and bring me back here to get mine? I’m not—”
“I can’t stay away from you anymore,” Travis says suddenly, looking up at me with a still-dazed expression on his face. “I want you, every last part of you, I want to be with you. I’m in love with you, G. I think I forgot that somewhere along the way, and then… the thing with Ben in the hospital happened. And Halloween happened. The fight happened. Christ, my birthday happened. And it all just—it made me remember. It made me want you more.” Riley and Annabelle are exchanging looks like wow, this is the most inappropriate time to ask someone out. But I can tell that’s not what he’s doing; he just needs me to listen to him right now. When I don’t try to cut him off, he says, “I don’t—I hoped I could ignore it, but after my birthday, I knew I was done. That’s why I had to break up with her. Because I knew things would keep happening between us, but I didn’t want to cheat on her again, so I had to end it. But I didn’t think she would… I’d hoped that she’d still let me keep it. I didn’t know she’d get rid of it just because I broke up with her.”
He sounds so broken, so betrayed, that for a moment I don’t know what to do. And then I find myself saying, “I have to go take care of something.”
He laughs at that. Or, he makes a sound that might be meant to be a laugh, but mostly it just sounds strangled and painful. “What, now?”
“Yes, right now,” I say firmly. I reach out and cup his jaw between my hands. “I’ll be right back, though, okay? There’s just one thing I’ve gotta do, and then I promise you, I’ll come right back here so that I can get you and bring you home.”
His eyes are wary, shuttered, like he’s two seconds away from closing himself off from everyone and everything. Then, as if he’s trying his hardest to give me an order, he says, “You promise you’ll come back to me.”
“Always have before, haven’t I?” I say. He nods and makes a vague flickering gesture with his hand, like he’s saying, yeah, go on, then. I tilt his head down so that I can press a kiss to his hair, then carefully clamber out from under his legs. I grip Riley’s elbow for a brief second and mutter, “Stay with him for a minute, alright?”
Without waiting for a reply from him or Annabelle, I turn and stride back in the direction I came from. My legs are a little cramped from my time curled up on the floor, but they work well enough to carry me down the hallway, through the wings, and out onto the stage. Joss is sitting on the very edge of it, her feet dangling over and her eyes focused on her knees. A very large part of me wants to shove her off, even though it’s only three or so feet to the ground. The part of me that’s desperately clinging to control, however, wanders over to her and sits down next to her, close enough that our thighs are almost touching. Close enough that only she can hear me when I all but growl, “How the fuck could you do that to him?”
“I wondered how long it would take for him to tell you,” she says simply. Neither of us is looking at the other. “You know, I’m not actually sure if you’re aware of this, Garen, but my body is sort of none of your business. The fact that we share an ex doesn’t mean you can tell me what to do.”
I can’t help it; I laugh. “You honestly think that this is some pro-life, abortion-is-bad bullshit? I’m a gay man. I can’t ever get knocked up, and if the soul-crushing disgust I felt last week when I kissed a girl for the first time is any indication, I can’t ever knock somebody up, either. There is no part of me that believes I’ve got any right to tell someone she has to keep a kid she doesn’t want. I don’t even know if it counts as a kid yet, to be honest. But I do know that my opinion on abortion is completely irrelevant.”
There’s that word again, hanging between us. Irrelevant. And when you see him and realize what happened, when you kiss him and remember where his mouth has been, then I want you to look me in the eyes and tell me again how irrelevant I am. I know she must be remembering it, too, because her lip curls. I clear my throat and keep going. “If you wanted to get an abortion, you should have been upfront about that. You should have just done it from the start, or told him you were going to, or made it clear that’s what you wanted. But stringing him along for a month, making him believe he was going to be a dad, and then getting rid of it the second he breaks up with you? That’s fucked. You should have at least told him you were planning to do it, not just tossed it off after the fact, like it meant nothing. Because even if that baby wasn’t important to you, or me, it was important to Travis. And you’re a piece of shit for not respecting that.”
I can’t think of a single other thing I could need to say to her right now, not when Travis is still waiting for me in the sophomore hallway; I stand up again, brush off my jeans, and take two steps back towards the wings.
“I don’t know how he can even stand to look at you right now,” she calls after me.
I wave a hand over my shoulder without turning back. “Yeah, I get it. I’m terrible, I’m awful, I’m a waste of flesh and bone, the world would be a better place if I—”
“All true things,” she agrees, “but I’m referring to the fact that it’s your fault I did it.”
My spine locks up, and my whole body goes rigid. Not rigid enough to stop me from turning in place to stare at her, though. “Excuse me?”
It takes nearly a full minute for her to stand up and approach me. I’m not sure if the hesitation is for effect, or because she’s debating whether or not to go through with saying what she wants to say. Eventually, she shrugs, makes her way over, and says, just low enough that only I can hear her, “You ruin every single thing you touch, Garen. You’re a total trainwreck, but everybody around here just acts like it’s cute. Oh, Garen came to school drunk and humiliated Travis and Joss in front of everyone? That’s so funny. Garen brought a sex worker to a sweet sixteen party? What a riot. Garen got his head bashed open on a lunch table and beat the shit out of Jack Thorne in front of half the school? Classic. Garen took his ex-boyfriend to bed, and made jokes about it, and ruined a relationship, and got somebody to cheat on his pregnant girlfriend, and thought it was all okay? That’s just… fucking lovely.”
“You don’t get to put this on me,” I say. Or, I think I’m the one who says it. I’m pretty sure that’s my voice I’m hearing, but I’m surprised it can get out around the huge lump I feel forming in my throat. “It’s not my fault you—”
“It is, actually. And sooner or later, Travis is going to figure that out. He’s going to realize that you and your selfishness and your total inability to keep your dick in your pants are the reasons he’s not going to be a dad anymore. Because at the end of the day, that’s what really happened. I got sick of putting up with your shit, so I had to get rid of the only thing that could ever tie us together,” she says. She takes one last step forward and adds, in little more than a breath, “You said you didn’t know if it even counted as a kid yet. It didn’t, not to me. But it did to Travis. And how much do you think he’s still going to love you, once he realizes that you’re the reason his baby is dead?”
“Stop,” I order, but it doesn’t come out the way I want it to. It comes out soft and weak and scared.
She smiles without humor. “You fuck up all the time, but this must be the first time you actually killed someone, huh?”
I stagger backward a step, nearly pitching off the edge of the stage. Considering my options are to either bolt or stay here and listen to her say that again, I scramble down off the stage and stride up the aisle, no goal in mind but getting away from her, from her words, from the awful, terrifying truth of what she’s saying.
The first place I can think to go where I might be able to be alone is back up the stairs to the sound booth. Riley is probably still in the sophomore wing with Travis and Annabelle, so it’ll give me somewhere to think. Somewhere to be silent, and still, and quite possibly sick. I push open the door to the booth and pause just inside the room. It takes me several fumbling minutes to properly extract myself from the tangle of microphones—mine and the headset. Fucking hell, the headset. I blink over at Riley’s computer; there’s a new file on the screen, time-stamped to about three seconds ago, the moment I turned off the mic. Swallowing hard, I scroll through most of it, then hit play.
“—this must be the first time you actually killed someone, huh?”
“Fuck,” I breathe, completely without intending to. I click the little diamond that marks the progress of the moment in the clip, drag it back, and release it. “You fuck up all the time, but this must be the first time you actually killed someone, huh?”
It’s dead. The baby that Joss and Travis were going to have, the one I hated from the second I heard about it, is dead.
Click. Drag. “You fuck up all the time, but this must be the first time you actually killed someone, huh?”
Travis’ baby is dead, and it’s dead because Joss couldn’t stand being pregnant with his kid after their breakup, and they broke up because he thought he couldn’t stay away from me, and he thought he couldn’t stay away from me because I wouldn’t have let him. Because I’ve spent the past year following him, and pushing him, and pressuring him, and wanting him, and needing him, and now his baby is dead, and it’s my fault.
Click. Drag. “You fuck up all the time, but this must be the first time you actually killed someone, huh?”
I don’t know what makes me do it. All I know is that one minute I’m clicking and dragging and restarting and listening and hating, and then I’m clicking and dragging and the file is moving to a blank CD shoved hastily into the drive, and then I’m tucking that—the evidence of my failings, my crimes, my bloodied hands—into the backpack I don’t remember getting from the auditorium. And then I’m walking outside. And I’m getting in my car. And I’m driving down the street. And I’m flicking my turn signal. And I’m putting the car in park.
And I’m taking out my fake ID.
And I’m walking into the liquor store.
And I’m buying a bottle of Jack.
And I fuck up all the time, but this must be the first time I’ve actually killed someone, huh?
70 days sober
I don’t sleep. Of course I don’t sleep. How the fuck could I, with that bottle sitting on my desk, and Joss’ words playing over and over in my head and on the CD on my computer, and the chiming of my phone on the nightstand where Riley and Annabelle keep messaging me, demanding to know where the hell I disappeared to?
Sometime around seven in the morning, after I’ve managed to burn my hand on my flat iron for the third time because I’m too tired and distracted to notice when I’m clamping the ceramic plates around my fingers instead of my fauxhawk, Travis finally sends a text: You didn’t come back yesterday. Ry says he hasn’t heard from you either. Hope you’re alright. See you at school. That, of all things, is what makes me stride from my bathroom to my bedroom to actually reach for the bottle of whiskey. It’s still unopened, and my hand trembles around the cap when I finally break the seal. I raise the bottle to my lips, and the sickly sweet smell hits me like a punch to the heart, but for some reason—my hand just won’t tip. It’s right there, the fucking glass is touching my mouth, all I have to do is tip the goddamn bottle, and I’ll be fine. But my muscles won’t move, which is fucking stupid, because they work just fine when I move to put the bottle back down on the desk.
I pick up my phone and scroll through my messages—first, I reread the one from Travis. Then I check out some of the ones from Riley and Annabelle.
Where did you go?
Dude, pick up your phone.
You said you were going to be right back, instead you disappeared completely. What the hell.
Where are you? Travis needs you.
I pick up the bottle again. This time, I get my mouth on the glass, I get the bottle tilted, but my lips remain stubbornly sealed. I can feel the booze lapping at them where they’re pressed to the bottle opening, and all I have to do is shift them apart ever so slightly, and I’ll be drinking. But it doesn’t happen. My body won’t let me. Squeezing my eyes shut tight, I set the bottle back down on the desk, screw the cap on, and wipe the back of my hand across my mouth. Christ, I can’t even manage to make myself lick my lips.
Arriving at school isn’t any easier. I’ve been standing at my locker for approximately six seconds when Travis comes up to me, touches my waist, and says, “Hey. Are you okay?”
Shouldn’t I be asking you that? I say. Or… try to say. The words are rattling around in my head, and it’s not that I don’t want to say them. It’s just that my throat seems to have completely closed up around them, caging them inside my chest. Nearly a year ago, I asked him to marry me, and he said yes, and then I left, and I took that future away from him. Now, he got his girlfriend pregnant, and I bitched and moaned and pushed until he finally cheated on her, and she aborted the baby. All I can think about right now is the spark in his eyes when he admitted he was sort of hoping for a daughter.
You fuck up all the time, but this must be the first time you actually killed someone, huh?
“Garen?” Travis says uncertainly. His hand isn’t even on top of my jacket; it has slipped beneath the leather to brush over the too-thin fabric of my t-shirt. I can feel the heat of his palm, but it’s not reassuring—it’s stifling. It’s burning me, torturing me, because I can’t understand why he would ever want to put his hands on me when I’m responsible for the thing he’s been dreading for weeks now. His grip on my waist tightens a little, and he says, “Did you hear what I—oh.”
He stares down at his hand, the one I’m prying off my waist and tucking into the pocket of his hoodie. Or--Patton Military Academy, Whitman Hall. Fuck, my hoodie, then. I grit my teeth, snatch my books off the top shelf of my locker, and slam the door. He can’t depend on me right now, not when I’m the one who’s at fault. Not when, soon enough, he’s going to figure out every last reason why he should hate me, and then everything will be ruined.
He slips his hand back out of his pocket and reaches for me again, but I walk away without a word.
If not drinking the whiskey was hard, and not speaking to him at his locker was hard, then trial law is harder. I sit in my usual seat, and Travis sits in his, right next to me. Ten minutes into class, he reaches over and ticks a tiny check mark off in the top margin of my notebook. It’s something he does all the time, multiple times during every class, honestly—it’s a way to get my attention when Mr. Esteves isn’t really paying attention, a way of summoning my eyes to his paper, which is where he’s constantly scribbling notes to me in the margins. He says it’s easier than actually trying to pass a note, but all of my papers are littered with tiny checks at the top, and looking at them usually makes me smile like an idiot. Today, they make me shift my paper further away.
“Dude, what the fuck is going on?” he whispers, the moment Mr. Esteves has turned to face the board.
Almost involuntarily, I glance over. In the margin at the top of his paper, he has written, Why aren’t you talking to me? I do my best not to acknowledge that I’ve even seen it. Below that, he now scribbles, Can you at least tell me what I did wrong? before leaning over to slash another check into the corner of my paper. I don’t move, and now it’s, You promised you’d come back yesterday, and you didn’t. I deserve to know why, and another check.
This time, when I don’t react, he snatches my notebook right out of my hands, scrawls, SAY ANYTHING, GAREN across the entire span of my paper, and shoves it back at me, not bothering to make any attempt at subtlety.
“Travis, pay attention,” Mr. Esteves scolds. Travis regards him with defiant, unapologetic eyes, but his hands remain in his own space for now, so our teacher continues. I make the mistake of meeting Travis’ gaze, and he just looks… broken. And confused. And lonely. And I did that to him. I’m always doing that to him.
I grip my pen so hard it snaps in half, leaking black all over my hand and dotting my desk with ink. A bewildered Mr. Esteves excuses me to go clean up, and I spend the rest of the period shakily scrubbing my palms in the men’s room. When I finally return to my desk, Travis’ message is still staring up at me.
SAY ANYTHING, GAREN.
And I still can’t.
71 days sober
I should be expecting him to show up. In a way, I think I am—maybe that’s why, when he pushes open my bedroom door and walks in, I’m sprawled out on my bed like all of my bones are missing. My blankets are pulled halfway up my chest, and I’m wearing pajamas, even though it’s the middle of the afternoon. There was early dismissal today for the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow; I crawled into bed a little before one o’clock and haven’t budged since.
“Hi,” Travis says, shutting the door behind himself. “I rang the doorbell, but no one answered. I guess your dad’s not home. And you’re… you know, moping. Or whatever this is.” I still don’t move. I want to ask how he got in, because I’m positive I locked the door behind myself, but my throat is still too tight to speak to him. I want to get the words out, but I don’t want to choke on them. Luckily, he knows me well enough to add, “So, I sort of broke in, I guess. That electronic keypad you’ve got on the back door? Really dumb idea. Almost as dumb as the fact that—I guess you have multiple codes? Because Bill’s is actually just his name. B-I-L-L, two-four-five-five.” Oh wow, that is really dumb. I’m almost embarrassed on Dad’s behalf. “I used yours, though. Took me a couple tries to get it—there’s a ten second lock-out every time you punch in the wrong code. But I got it eventually.”
My code is ten thirty-one. Halloween. The first night we kissed. Neither one of us verbalizes this. I contemplate pointing out that he didn’t need to bother trying to find mine, if he figured out Dad’s already. I guess it was more a matter of principle than anything else. Maybe breaking into my house to see me just isn’t as much fun if he doesn’t use my house code to do it.
I can sense the exact moment when he notices the bottle of Jack on the desk, because he goes inhumanly still. His motionlessness is what finally prompts me to shift, to lift my head so that I can look at the bottle as well, which just draws his focus right back to me. He tips his head towards the bottle and says, “You haven’t had any of it.” I shrug. “That’s, um… that’s good. I’m glad.”
Another shrug. He lets out an aggravated sigh and says, “Garen, I need you to tell me what the fuck happened. I need you to talk to me. Why won’t you talk to me anymore?”
Because I don’t deserve to, I don’t say. Because I can’t think of a single word that doesn’t make me sick with guilt and disgust and shame at my own selfishness.
Travis is running his thumbnail down the seam between the door and its frame. “You and I, we, um… we’re part of this group, you know? You and me, and Ben, and Alex, and James. And when the shit hits the fan, everybody kind of pairs off. Alex and Ben go to each other first, and so do you and James, and it never bothered me that I didn’t have a partner or whatever. We’re not in third grade, I don’t need to have a best friend. But I think that… you’re the one I go to when I need somebody. You’re the person I count on, and I need you, and you’re not here.”
I don’t say, Holy fuck, please don’t count on me. Choose anybody else, because I keep letting you down, and I always ruin things, and your kid is dead, and it’s my fault.
“I’m sorry for whatever I did wrong,” he says.
That almost makes me look up. I don’t say, How the fuck can you think you did anything wrong?
“I keep trying to figure it out,” he continues. “And it’s—I’m sorry people found out about what happened on my birthday. I’m sorry if people are blaming you for the breakup, and I’m sorry Joss called you a slut. Though, I mean, she’s mostly calling me a slut, because I’m the one who cheated on her. But if that’s why you’re mad, I’m sorry.”
He waits for a response. I have none.
“I’m sorry I got you kicked in the nuts,” he tries, and I huff out a laugh. I can feel his eyes on me, hear the sad smile in his voice as he says, “So, you are listening to me. I was beginning to think I was hallucinating this entire conversation. Or that you’d gone fucking catatonic. But I guess you’re just deliberately choosing not to speak to me.”
I finally look up at him. That’s what breaks him; he sits down—collapses, honestly—on the edge of the bed and grips his knees so hard his knuckles turn white.
“I need you, and you’re not here,” he repeats, his words an accusation now. “I know you’re not mad about us almost sleeping together—or mad about it not really happening. You were still talking to me last week. And you were talking to me after I broke up with Joss. So, I’m still trying to figure it out. Was it—” He sneaks a glance at me, but when our eyes actually meet, his snap back to the floor. He licks his lips. “Is it because y-you’re just done with me? Because we’re both single right now, and I told you how I feel about you, and now you could have me, but you don’t want me anymore? Is that it? The chase is over, or it’s not funny unless it’s complicated, so there’s no point in talking to me anymore?”
I squeeze my eyes shut. You can’t honestly be stupid enough to think that, I don’t say.
But he must take my silence as confirmation, because I hear him swallow, and then the bed is shifting as he stands. “Alright, then. I guess I should go.”
The only thing that scares me more than the idea of him staying is the idea of him leaving. My eyes fly open, and I scramble out from under the blankets, startling him back a few steps with my sudden movement. I fling myself off the foot of the bed and onto my desk chair, clicking on the audio file I’ve been tormenting myself with.
“—how he can even stand to look at you right now.”
“Yeah, I get it. I’m terrible--”
I skip ahead, because he already knows those things; he doesn’t need to hear them all over again. What he needs to hear is--
“—ruin every single thing you touch, Garen. You’re a total trainwreck, but everybody around here just acts like it’s cute. Oh--” Skip ahead. “—ought a sex worker to a sweet sixteen party? What--” Skip ahead. “—actually. And sooner or later, Travis is going to figure that out. He’s going to realize that you and your selfishness and your total inability to keep your dick in your pants are the reasons he’s not going to be a dad any--” Skip ahead. “—how much do you think he’s still going to love you, once he realizes that you’re the reason his baby is dead?”
“Stop.”
“You fuck up all the time, but this must be the first time you actually killed someone, huh?”
The track ends, but I skip back to the last few seconds, playing the same six words over and over, until I’m sure he has to get it. “You fuck up all the time. You fuck up all the time. You fuck up all the time. You fuck--”
Travis snatches the mouse away from me and closes out of the audio player. I don’t think I’m supposed to notice that his hand is trembling. He doesn’t seem to know what to say to me, but the tightness in my throat has finally eased up enough that I can force out, “She killed it, and it’s my fault. The baby. She had an abortion because you dumped her, and you dumped her because I made you cheat.” My voice isn’t loud, but at least there are words coming out of my mouth in his general direction, for the first time in nearly two days. “I pushed you to hook up with me, Trav. That’s all I do—I push people until they do what I want them to do. B-But no one’s ever died because of it, and I don’t—she’s right. How can you stand to look at me? How—I never wanted you and her to have that kid, but in an ‘I wish she’d never gotten pregnant’ way, not an ‘I wish she’d abort the baby you begged her to keep’ way. Because you were going to be a dad, and you were going to be so fucking good at it, and I took that away from you—”
“That was never mine, Garen,” Travis says, spinning my chair to face him and dropping to his knees in front of me. “Did I want her to keep the baby? Yes. Completely. Am I sad that she had an abortion and didn’t even bother to tell me until it was too late for me to even try talking to her about it? Yes. I’m fucking shattered by it. But this—” He grabs the bottle and gives it a little shake, “—is probably the only thing that could make this situation hurt more. You don’t fuck up all the time, and you didn’t kill anyone, for shit’s sake. It’s not your fault that Joss had an abortion. It’s hers, and mine, and nobody’s, and this hurts me now, but someday I’ll get over it. You won’t get over this, though.” Another shake of the bottle.
I draw my legs up to my chest so that I can rest my forehead against my knees. “I’m just really, really sorry, okay? For everything. I don’t—”
“Stop,” he says, and I immediately fall silent. “You don’t need to apologize. You never made me do anything I didn’t want to do, so don’t blame yourself. And don’t expect me to blame you, either.”
If I can’t apologize, then I don’t know what to say. So instead of saying anything, I stand up, take the bottle into the bathroom, and upend it in the sink. The smell of it floods the enclosed space, but I’m not ashamed to say I pretty much bolt back to my bedroom. Travis is still sitting on the floor, though he has shifted so that his back is leaning against the foot of the bed. I sink onto the ground next to him, and he slips his hand into mine. Neither of us says anything, but neither of us leaves, either, and that’s a start.
72 days sober
“Garen, I swear, if you put your hand in that bowl one more time, I am going to chain you to the dining room table until it’s time to eat,” Dad says, dragging the bowl of cooked potato chunks out of my reach.
“It’s not my fault you’re taking forever to make dinner,” I say, scowling and inching towards the bowl again the moment his back is turned. “Can I help? I promise I won’t set anything on fire, or chop anything off anybody, or—”
“No,” Mom says from the table, and whatever, her opinion is invalid. She’s not even helping Dad cook; she shouldn’t even be here, they’re divorced, it’s completely creepy that Dad even asked her to come for Thanksgiving dinner. But I can’t say any of this—I’m pretty sure she’s only here because they assumed that my first sober holiday should be spent with as many members of the family as possible, and considering they’re both only children with dead parents, this is pretty much as big as an Anderson Family Holiday gets.
Instead, I glower at my mother and say, “Well, if I can’t be trusted to help, maybe you should. Because, you know, eating dinner sometime before Hanukkah might be cool.”
She snorts and says, “You get your cooking abilities from me. Any assistance that either of us tries to give will just ruin the food, and he’ll have to start over.”
“I gave up on the idea of your mother learning to cook sometime in the nineties,” Dad says. “You can set the table, if you’re that eager to help.”
I wrinkle my nose, but he rolls his eyes and looks away, so I do it. I am just finishing arranging the silverware when my phone rings. I dig it out of my pocket and glance down at the caller ID. Travis. My heart most definitely does not jump, because that would be lame. Instead, I clear my throat and answer the call with, “Hey, man. What’s up?”
“Hi,” he says, voice hushed as if he has ducked out of the room and doesn’t want his absence to be noticed. “What are you doing right now?”
I hop up onto the counter and snag another chunk of potato. Dad smacks my hand with the spoon he’s using, so I snap, “I’m hanging out in the kitchen and being physically abused by my food-fascist father.”
“He is not,” Dad says loudly. “He’s stealing pieces of potato out of the bowl before I can mash them properly. You’d think he was raised by wolves.”
“Alright, first of all, that makes no sense, because wolves don’t eat potatoes. Second of all, I am your only offspring, so stop being mean to me,” I say. Into the phone, I add, “Yeah, so, I’m not really doing anything important. What’s up?”
Travis hesitates, then says, “Oh. Okay. I mean, I asked because Bridget and I are, uh… we’re headed to the Grind for a while. Just to get coffee, hang out, take a break from what’s going on here. We were going to ask you if you wanted to come along, but if you’re doing family stuff—”
“I thought the Grind was closed today,” I say. I know it’s closed; all of the baristas there have been warning me about it for a week now, like they’re worried that I’m going to Hulk out and smash through the window to steal the espresso machine if I can’t get my coffee in the middle of the day.
“I have a key.”
I raise my eyebrows, even though he can’t see the gesture. “You’re going to break into your place of work during the middle of a holiday just to have coffee with your sister?”
Dad shoots me a quizzical look, but I wave him off.
“It’s not breaking in,” Travis says in a slightly pissier tone. “I told you, I have a key, and I know the alarm code, and I—Jerry said it’s fine. I asked him about it the other day. He told me that it’s cool, as long as I clean up and lock the doors after.”
I slip out of the living room, lowering my voice a little as I say, “Dude, is it really that bad at your house right now? With your mom and everything?”
He laughs, but the noise is humorless enough to just make me uncomfortable. “Worse, actually. Mom’s sisters are here, and my uncles, all my cousins. Ever since they got here, they’ve been interrogating me and making all these snide comments. Uncle Marcus keeps telling me I’m an idiot for giving up a varsity sport to do stage crew. He says I’m never going to get into a good college if I make decisions like that, which is fucking stupid, because if I managed to get into Harvard early admission, I’m pretty sure I can get into—”
“You got into Harvard?” I interrupt. I don’t even wait for him to confirm it—I know he will—before I launch myself back into the kitchen and say, “Guys, hey. Parental units. Travis got into Harvard.”
“He did?” Mom says brightly, raising her coffee in a toast. “Tell him I said congratulations.”
“Likewise,” Dad says. “Maybe I should’ve asked for custody of him in the divorce, too.”
“Might as well have, considering his own bitch of a mom is still leading the charge against him,” I whisper. Dad’s brow creases in confusion, but Mom shoots me a wary glance. Sometimes I forget that she was in the room for the admission about his mom’s silent treatment, too. I can tell she’s about to start quizzing me about the comment, and I’m really not in the mood to let her harsh the buzz I’m feeling from the news of his acceptance. I duck back out of the room and fling myself down onto the living room sofa to bury my face in a throw pillow. It’s so stupid—I’m grinning like an idiot, even though I’ve got no reason to be this excited for him. He’s not mine to brag about, nothing but my friend. After a moment, I lift my head and say, “My parents both extend their congratulations. And I extend mine, obviously. I’m… really happy for you, dude. I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks,” he says, a smile in his voice. I close my eyes to picture it. After a moment, he adds, “I, um. Northwestern, too. And Brown.”
“Shit, dude. You’re a total genius, I’m feeling really inadequate right now. I won’t even find out if I’ve gotten in anywhere until January at the earliest.”
“You’ll get in,” he says immediately. “You’re one of the most talented people I’ve ever met, and you’re pretty much only applying to music programs, aren’t you?”
I make a noise of agreement and say, “Auditions start up in a few weeks. I’m stupidly nervous about—”
There’s a muffled sound of a struggle on his end, and then Bree is saying, “You can have your heart-to-heart at the Daily Grind. Be on your porch in ten minutes, we’re picking you up. I cannot tolerate another minute in this house, and it’s really cute that you want to flirt with my baby brother and wax poetic about his dreams and aspirations, but I am going crazy, Garen. My aunt asked Travie if he’s ‘feeling any better’ now that he’s not living with you anymore. ‘Better’ as in ‘straighter,’ like he caught gayness—bisexuality, whatever, from you, and now that Mom and Bill are broken up, Trav would go back to being straight. It’s a trainwreck over here.”
“Wait,” I say, scrambling upright. “Hang on a second, I need to—” I poke my head back into the kitchen and cover the mic on the phone. “Dad, how much extra food do we have?”
Dad quirks a brow at me. “That depends on you and your inability to behave like a human when faced with a dish of mashed potatoes.”
“Mashed potatoes are delicious, and if you don’t understand why I need to eat all of them, you’re no parent of mine. Question stands, though.” I pause, then reluctantly add, “If I uh, if there were two people whose relatives were totally dicking out right now, would it be cool if they came here instead, maybe?”
“Travis and Bree?” Dad says, frowning at me. The are you seriously asking me if your ex-stepbrother-slash-ex-boyfriend can come to Thanksgiving dinner is heavily implied.
I swallow hard and say, “Come on. You don’t know what it’s like over there. Their aunt asked Travis if he’s feeling any more hetero now that I’ve moved out, okay? It’s fucked, and seriously, even if you say they can just come over for pie later or something, I’d—”
“Give me the phone,” Dad says, holding out his hand. I blink, but obey. He clears his throat and says, “Travis? Oh, Bree, hi. I just wanted to tell you that, if anything that’s happening at your house right now is making you or your brother uncomfortable, I would love to have you both join us for dinner. It’s just myself, Garen, and his mother here, and while I’m fairly certain that my son could polish off anything I put on the table, I—” He pauses, smiling, clearly having just been interrupted. “Excellent. We’ll see you soon.”
He ends the call and hands me the phone. I blink at it for a moment, but take it anyway. “Thanks.”
“Of course,” he says.
“Am I allowed to ask when you started speaking to Travis again?” Mom asks.
I fling myself down into the seat opposite her. “About a month ago.”
“Hm,” is all she says at first. We sit in silence for a moment before she takes a sip of her cider and says, “Am I allowed to ask if you still have feelings for him?”
I narrow my eyes at her. “No, you are not allowed to ask me that.”
There’s no point to my refusal to answer; I’m pretty sure she and Dad both know the answer, and if they don’t know it then, they sure as hell figure it out ten minutes later, when Dad goes to let our guests in, Travis walks into the kitchen, and I blurt out, “Oh my god, you look so hot.”
“Thank you,” he says, even though it really sounds more like wow, please stop talking. I don’t care—Evelyn must force her kids to dress up to impress the rest of the family, because Bree is wearing a short burgundy dress that makes her blond hair stand out brilliantly, and Travis is wearing a dark navy suit. He looks fucking gorgeous.
Bree ducks down to press a kiss to my cheek and plucks at the sleeve of my plain black t-shirt. “So glad to see you’ve dressed up as well.”
“Just for you,” I say, beaming at her. “You look beautiful, Bree. If I’d noticed you were this smoking a year ago, I might’ve tried to go two-for-two on banging stepsiblings.”
“Congratulations. In the minute I’ve been in this house, you’ve managed to work my little brother’s body into fifty percent of the sentences you’ve said,” Bree says, smiling too sweetly.
I open my mouth, but Travis cuts across with, “I swear to god, if you make a single comment about ‘working her little brother’s body,’ I’m going to crawl inside the oven next to the turkey and burn myself alive.” I raise my hands in surrender. Satisfied with my silence, he turns to Dad and says, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Everything’s nearly done. But if you’d like, you can grab yourself a pop from the fridge. Or grab a roll of duct tape from the desk in my study and tape your stepbrother’s mouth shut,” Dad suggests.
I have to fight the urge to gag as I say, “Can you please not call him that? It’s gross.”
“It’s true,” Mom says, grimacing. “At least, it is for the next few months.”
“Well, speed things up a little. And Dad, do me a favor? Make sure your next girlfriend or fiance, or wife, or whatever doesn’t have a son who’s got an ass like that,” I add, gesturing in the general direction of where Travis is still standing at the fridge, his back—and ass—turned to us. “Seriously, look at it, it’s fucking perfect.”
“Please don’t look at it,” Travis says over his shoulder. Dad doesn’t look, because he is a forty-something, heterosexual man, and Travis is still technically his eighteen-year-old stepson. Mom, however, spares a glance, because hey, I had to get my filthy, boy-obsessed perversions from somewhere. I flash her a thumbs up, and she rolls her eyes; apparently ‘check out Travis’ time never lasts as long for anyone else as it does for me.
Once the food is finished cooking, the five of us scatter ourselves around the table; it’s a large, perfect square, so Travis and Bree end up next to each other on one side, across from me. It’s my immediate instinct to nudge each of them with my toes until they glare at me and kick back. It’s my Mom’s immediate reaction, however, to turn expectant eyes on them and say, “It doesn’t look like the situation with your mother has improved very much since the last time I saw you.”
Travis just shrugs, but Bree scowls and says, “She still isn’t talking to him, if that’s what you mean.”
“Your mother doesn’t speak to you?” Dad says, frowning.
“Hasn’t in two and a half months,” Travis says. His voice is tight, and he’s meticulously arranging asparagus on his plate in a way that suggests he wants to focus on anything in the world but this conversation. For fuck’s sake, he’s only been here for ten minutes, and he’s already wishing he were elsewhere.
Mom opens her mouth to speak, but I cut across her with, “Hey, if either of you guys is free tomorrow, you should come do the Black Friday shopping thing with me. Well, Ben and me, technically. His mom gave him her credit card and a list of toys he’s supposed to buy for his siblings, and he was wise enough to realize that he’s going to get trampled by a bunch of soccer moms if he tries to navigate the biggest toy stores without help from a real-sized person. And Alex is too busy whining about Jamie dumping him to provide any necessary assistance. He’d probably just stand in the middle of an aisle looking wounded while some cow with a fanny pack beat Ben down for the last Tickle-Me-Elmo.”
“Alex and James broke up?” Travis says, frowning.
“Alex and James were dating?” Bree says, also frowning.
“I don’t think they make Tickle-Me-Elmos anymore,” Dad says, looking thoughtful.
I roll my eyes towards the ceiling and rattle off, for everyone’s benefit, “They’ve been sort of seeing each other for months, and at first it was in secret—well, a secret to everyone except that freckled douche sitting across from me, because no one ever bothered to teach him that secrets don’t make friends—and Jamie’s been wanting to make things official, but Alex is being a bag of dicks and still won’t stop pining over Ben—”
“Wait, Alex and Ben are involved?” Mom asks, squinting. “I thought you and Ben were together.”
“You had a Tickle-Me-Elmo,” Dad continues, glaring at me. “Stood in line for four hours to get that thing, and you broke it in a week.”
“Mom, no, Ben and I were—look, we weren’t together, not really, but even if we had been, we stopped seeing each other weeks ago. The week before Halloween, I think. Anyway, Alex and Ben aren’t involved, Alex just has a total boner for Ben, which just makes that whole thing with Jamie and the living room floor so much worse.”
Travis raises his eyebrows and says, “Alright, I was following along fine until that. The floor. Is that an Alex-and-James thing?”
“Absolutely,” I lie, spearing a bite of turkey and very pointedly not thinking, you’re really just better off not knowing about the hatefucking thing right now. We’re all better off not knowing about that.
Dad is still frowning at his water glass. “And it’s not that children don’t sometimes break their toys, but did you have to break all of them? It was like you couldn’t hold onto something for a week before it ended up in pieces. God only knows how you managed to shred that Fisher-Price guitar the way you did. I was terrified when you asked for the Fender when you were in middle school—”
I snap my fingers in front of his face and say, “Dad? Focus.”
He sighs. “Right. Please, Garen, go back to tell me about your sex life, because I really feel like that’s the best holiday conversation we could have. Ever. Please, keep talking.”
“Thanks, I will!” I say brightly, before turning back to the others and saying, “Whatever, anyway, Jamie’s got this girl in New York who told him she wanted him to be all-in or completely out by Thanksgiving, and since Alex is still wavering on the whole commitment thing, James texted me last night to tell me he guesses he’s going to call things off with Alex for good. So, yeah. That’s my life.”
“To answer the earliest question,” Travis says, raising his eyebrows and poking at his mashed potatoes without taking a bite, “thanks for the invitation to your shopping festivities, but I have to work. We’re doing this horrible all-nighter thing at the Grind so that people who are up for the midnight sales can have someplace to get their coffee before they go shopping. I’m working from ten at night to six in the morning.”
“That sounds awful,” I announce. He’s still just poking at his potatoes, and I know exactly what he wants, but for whatever reason, he won’t go get it, even though he knows where everything is by now. Rolling my eyes, I retrieve a bottle of barbecue sauce from the fridge and set it down in front of him before returning to my seat. He nods his thanks, unscrews the cap, and tips a generous amount onto his mashed potatoes. At Bree’s questioning glance, I say, “What? Don’t tell me you lived with the guy for seventeen years and never noticed he does that.”
She shrugs. “Guess I haven’t spent nearly as much time staring at him over the dinner table as you have.”
“No one has spent as much time staring at him over the dinner table as I have,” I agree. “Or touching him under the dinner table, either.”
Travis looks mortified, Bree looks appalled, and Dad just stabs viciously at his turkey and grits out, “So, are they giving you some sort of bonus for working the odd shift?”
“They’re counting it as a holiday so I get time-and-a-half,” Travis answers. “I’m pretty much planning to leave the shop at six, go home, and pass out for a few hours before I go back for the three-to-eleven shift. I’d be totally useless with picking out toys for Ben’s sisters anyway. I don’t even know any kids other than the girls, since I’m the youngest person in the family.”
“That’s such a lie,” Bree says. “What about Christian and Zachary?”
My brow furrows. “Who are Christian and Zachary?”
“Dad’s kids,” she says, shrugging. Travis freezes halfway through the act of accepting the bowl of green beans from Mom, who fumbles for the dish so it won’t slip between them and hit the table. Bree stares back at her brother. “Okay, please tell me you know about Dad and Monica having the boys.”
I gesture to him. “Is that the face of someone who knew that? Because it looks more like the face of someone who just awkwardly had that revealed to him during the middle of a holiday dinner in which he already feels disconnected from his family, but I could be wrong—”
“I have brothers?” Travis says, staring at his sister.
She looks wildly uncomfortable. “They’re twins. They were born in the first Saturday of October. I don’t—Dad called me at school to tell me. He said he was going to call you next.”
“Travis works on Saturdays,” I say, setting my fork down so that I can slip my hands beneath the table and clench them into fists. “Hank must have called while he was out, and I guess Evelyn just didn’t think it was important to pass along the message.”
That self-important, child-neglecting, petty little bitch. How the fuck could she keep something like that from him? Even taking her silent treatment situation into account, how could she not grant a reprieve for five fucking minutes to tell him that his dad had just fathered two more kids? Or at least tell him to call his dad back?
Travis is still just staring at Bree as he repeats, “I have brothers.” It’s not a question this time. It’s a statement, or an announcement, like he’s trying to get himself used to the idea. Fucking hell, this revelation couldn’t be coming at a worse time—I can’t imagine how he feels right now, finding out that there are more McCall babies in the world, right after Joss has gotten rid of his.
Not really caring if anyone realizes what I’m doing, I slouch a little lower in my seat so that I can kick a leg over towards him and slip my toes under the hem of his pant leg, just a reassuring touch to his ankle so that he knows I’m here for him. He flicks a smile in my direction and turns to his sister to ask, “How’s that econ class of yours going?”
The rest of the early evening carries on like that. We wind our way through casual conversation for the duration of dinner, and then into dessert. It’s a little before six, and I’m loading the dishwasher when Mom stands up and says, “I should really be heading back to the city soon. I can’t even imagine how horrible the traffic is going to be, and I’d rather not be getting home at two in the morning.”
“We should be going, too,” Bree says, rising from her seat as well. “I was planning on hanging out at Josh’s for a bit tonight, and I’ve got to drop Trav at home before I go. Want me to grab our coats?”
He must nod, because she strides out of the room to wherever the coats have been left—the study, probably. Dad goes with her to retrieve Mom’s coat, but Mom herself comes over and pulls me away from the dishes and into a hug. “Happy Thanksgiving, Garen. Don’t forget to call. I’d like to hear from you sometime before Hanukkah.”
“Obviously. How will you know what awesome presents to buy me if I don’t call you to tell you what I want first?” I say.
She rolls her eyes at me--why does everyone in my life insist on doing that so much?—and moves to where Travis is still standing next to the table. To both our surprise, she squeezes his shoulder, kisses him on the top of the head and says, “Happy Thanksgiving, Travis. I look forward to seeing you again soon.”
“Yeah,” he says, looking so stunned at a maternal display of affection that I have to turn quickly to face the dishwasher again. “I, um—you, too. Thank you.”
Mom slips back out of the kitchen, and for a long moment, there is silence. I’m reaching for the last dessert plate when a pair of arms winds around my waist and draws me back against the warmth of Travis’ chest. He buries his face against the nape of my neck and mumbles, “Today meant a lot to me. Thank you for asking us over.”
I can’t feel his heartbeat through all the layers of clothing between us, but I’m sure he must be able to hear mine. I dry my hands on a dish towel so that I won’t ruin his suit when I reach to cover his forearms with my palms. “Technically, Dad asked you.”
“It was your idea,” Travis says. I don’t deny it; I’m too busy trying not to turn around in the circle of his arms and kiss him. Will there ever be a time when he touches me and I don’t want to crawl inside his soul and stay there forever?
I can hear the click of Bree’s high heels on the floor down the hall. Travis must be able to hear it too, because he sighs and steps back. I’ve never felt colder than I do in that moment, but I still manage to turn around, lean back against the counter, and smile. Bree sails back into the room and tosses Travis his coat. “Ready to go?”
“Yeah,” Travis says, though his eyes are fixed on mine and he’s practically vibrating from how hard he’s mentally chanting, ask me to stay, ask me to stay, ask me to stay. “I’ll, uh, we can head—”
“Or you could hang out for a little while longer,” I say, rolling my eyes up towards the ceiling so that I can pretend not to see the smirk that Bree is shooting at me from across the room. “I don’t have plans. And if Bree’s taking the car to go see her boyfriend, I can just drop you off later.”
He’s nodding almost before my sentence is complete. “Yeah, that would be awesome.”
“Awesome,” Bree says, clearly mocking both of us. She snatches Travis’ coat away from him and tosses it over the back of the nearest chair before stepping close to me and giving me a firm hug. “Great seeing you again, G.”
“Mm. I’ll text you,” I offer, and she nods, whacking her brother’s arm one last time before she strolls back out towards the front door, leaving Travis and I alone in the silent kitchen.
“Gotta tell you, dude, you’re kind of ruining my Thanksgiving plans,” I finally say. “I usually go for the cliche, post-meal sleeping.”
He shrugs. “You could sleep, if you wanted to.”
“And that would leave you doing what, exactly?” I ask, latching the dishwasher shut and punching the ‘start’ button.
“I could, um,” he says, scratching the back of his neck and avoiding my eyes. “I could sleep, too, maybe. Since I’ve got to work a crazy shift in a few hours anyway.”
The last time he slept in my bed with me, he ended up with his hand on my dick, which led to me getting kicked in the nuts. In retrospect, it was kind of worth it. But he doesn’t have a girlfriend anymore. Now it’s just me, and Travis, and my bed, and a pile of warm blankets I want to burrow into so that I can lull myself into a food coma with him beside me. The image is so clear in my mind that all I can think to say is, “That sounds perfect.”
The smile he offers me in response is sweet and shy. “Okay.”
I lead the way down to my bedroom without another word, but once we’re inside and I’ve shut the door, he strips off his jacket and hangs it over the back of my desk chair. I try not to ogle the slim cut of his Oxford in favor of offering, “If you want to borrow some clothes so you don’t have to worry about going home in a wrinkled suit, I can give you some stuff to wear.”
His sweet smile turns a little bit wry as he admits, “I’m sort of looking forward to seeing my mom’s face when I come home from your house in messed-up clothes.”
I yawn. “If I weren’t about to fall asleep, I’d offer to help you mess them up in an entirely different way.”
“I’m sure you would. It’s the thought that counts,” he says, patting my wrist. I think I’m still smiling at him when I fade into sleep a few minutes later.
When I wake up next, probably around an hour later, my legs are tangled up with Travis’, who seems to be just awakening as well, and there’s only one thought in my mind. The moment he blinks over and catches my eye, I say somberly, “Pie.”
He shifts to prop himself up on his elbows, though his head remains twisted to the side so that he can stare down at me in disbelief. “Pie. You ate two plates of real food, polished off three slices of pie, passed out for an hour or two, and now you’re awake and ready for—”
“—more pie, yes,” I say. “I’m really not understanding your confusion here, man. That’s the whole point of a Thanksgiving power nap. Tricking your body into thinking it wants more delicious treats inside of it. Right now, all I’m trying to decide is whether I’m going to want pumpkin or pecan.”
“Have a small slice of each,” Travis suggests, and I think he’s just being an asshole, but it’s a good idea, and I think my enthusiasm shows on my face, because he’s grinning at me.
Because it’s a holiday, and holidays are a time for generosity, I allow, “You can have some pie, too. A small piece. Of the pecan. Because sometimes I can have that on random days throughout the year, but I only ever really get pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, and you’re great and all, but not as great as—”
“Can I kiss you?”
“—pumpkin pie,” I finish slowly. His eyebrows are a little raised, but he’s still smiling—the sort of smile that’s still kind of forming, like the start of a laugh. I say, “That was me finishing my sentence, not me… doing some uh, some weird nickname thing, and can you what me?”
“Can I kiss you?” he repeats. His smile is fading a little, replacing itself with hesitation, as if he’s honestly unsure of my answer. The answer I can’t even manage to get out right now, because I’m not entirely sure that he really asked the question. I’ve got to be hallucinating this, right? He can’t really be saying these words to me, not when I’ve been waiting so long to hear them. Whatever face I’m making must not be particularly reassuring, because he sits up quickly and says, “I-It’s okay, if you say no. That’s completely fine, I just thought maybe I’d ask, and—do you still, um. Do you still want more—”
“Yes,” I interrupt once I’ve finally found my voice. His eyes shoot back to my face, hesitantly hopeful, but he still hasn’t moved, so I sit up and repeat, “Yes.”
Without another word, he curls a hand over the back of my neck and leans in to kiss me. From the instant our lips touch, I feel like I’ve lost my fucking mind. My hands are shaking a little, but I manage to grip the front of his shirt to keep him anchored to me. His own hand shifts from my neck to my hair, twining the strands between his fingers and tugging just gently enough to remind me that this is really happening. My entire body feels like it has been taken over by a bone-deep, earth-shattering happiness. This is what I’ve been craving for months now, and it’s too much and not enough all at once. I break away and let my forehead drop to his shoulder.
“Is this okay?” he whispers, fingertips still working against my scalp. My heart is pounding too hard for me to speak; my breath is coming in shaky little huffs, and holy shit, this is so embarrassing. I can’t believe I’m freaking out right now, like a middle-school girl who’s just gotten her first kiss. Travis shifts both his hands to my jaw so that he can guide my head back until our eyes meet again. His voice is more urgent now as he says, “Garen, is this o—”
I nod sharply, hauling him in by his shirt, and our mouths crash together with enough force to almost cause us to overbalance. He just goes with it, pushes me onto my back and sinks down to cover my body with his. His hands won’t stop roving over me, palms skimming up my sides, across my chest, from my shoulders down my biceps and forearms to tangle his fingers with mine. Even that contact must still not be enough to satisfy him, because he pulls back enough to speak, but I chase his mouth with mine. He tries again, but it just keeps happening, back further and further, until we’re both upright again. He’s settled in my lap, his legs on either side of my hips, and I’ve got an arm wound around his waist, but he catches my face between his palms to push me back enough that he can finally say, in a voice so urgent it nearly breaks me, “I’ve missed you so much, G.”
“I know,” I say, still digging my fingers into any part of him I can reach. I just need to be sure that he’s here, that he’s real, that I’m not letting myself be taken over by another one of my impossible fantasies. But then he’s kissing me again, it’s the realest thing I’ve ever felt. After a moment, it’s my turn to separate our mouths just enough to say, “I-I’m not going to say it right now, I don’t think it’s—but you know, don’t you? You know how I feel about you, even without me saying it?”
He nods. “I know. God, of course I know. Me too, okay? I feel that way, too. I—”
I swallow up the rest of his words. For the first time in forever, we’re kissing like we did when we were together. Neither of us is holding back, or resisting, or focusing on anything but the brush of lips and slide of tongues. I think I must be wrinkling the material of his shirt from how I keep gripping it, though Travis’ solution his end of that problem seems to be to tug the hem of my shirt up and duck down to mouth across my skin. The second his tongue comes in contact with one of my nipples, I practically pass out, because it’s just like it was with the body shots, but with so much more intent, like this is going somewhere right now.
Because it is. It’s going somewhere. Fuck.
“Wait, stop, stop, stop,” I say, catching his shoulders and pulling him back up. “This is a bad idea.”
He snorts. “I’m sorry, but have you seen what you look like without a shirt on? This is literally the best idea I’ve ever had.”
“No, I mean, obviously, but…” I hesitate long enough to push his hair back and press a kiss to his forehead. “I want you, but I want… slower. Please, dude, I can’t—” I have to break off to swallow, even though my mouth has never been this dry before. “I can’t fuck this up by rushing into something you might not want tomorrow.”
His face softens a little. He pulls my shirt back into place and says, “I’ll want it tomorrow. You know I will. But if you say you want to go slower, we will. Okay?”
I nod, smooth the fabric of my shirt down a little, and kiss him again. He hesitates now, though, like he thinks I’m likely to shove him off and declare the whole thing a mistake. It’s the stupidest thing ever, but cute-stupid, not awful-stupid. I pull him closer and say, “Dude, that was a yellow light, not a red one. Fucking kiss me already.”
We’re both still grinning into the next kiss, and we end up tangled up together in bed for hours. Sometimes the meeting of our mouths is fun and playful, and sometimes it’s heated enough to leave us both turned on and panting a little, and sometimes it’s deep and slow and it matters so much that I think my heart’s about to beat right out of my chest. Eventually, though, he breaks away and says, “We need to leave. I have to get home, I’ve gotta get ready for work.”
“No, that’s dumb,” I protest, kissing along his jawline. “You’re dumb.” He mutters something that might be you’re such a fucking sweet-talker, dude, what the hell, but I’m too busy popping the top button on his shirt so that I can pull his collar aside and suck a mark into the side of his neck.
His hips stutter up against mine, and he pushes at my shoulders. “O-Okay, if you plan for us to not rush things, you’re going to need to not do that right now. And you’re going to need to bring me home.”
“Fine,” I grumble, reluctantly clambering off the bed after him. It takes more effort than it should to let him out of the basement, but I can’t keep my hands off him. It’s been months since I had free license to touch him, and he already looks so debauched, just from kissing. He just keeps grinning at me, like he thinks my wandering hands are cute; really, he keeps smiling at me all the way upstairs, out into the car, for the whole ride back to his place.
Once I’ve turned into his driveway, I expect some sort of awkwardness to set in. Truthfully, I’m expecting him to say something about how it was nice, but it can’t happen again. Instead, he says, “I’ll probably see you sometime tomorrow, won’t I? The odds of you making it through toy-shopping for hours without stopping by for coffee at least once are slim.”
“Yeah, definitely. I’ll totally stop by. I mean, if that’s okay. Like, if you want me to. Because if you—”
“I want you.” He catches the lapel of my jacket and drags me in, pressing his lips to mine with enough pressure to make his point clear, but still somehow just enough to tease. I don’t move back to my side of the car when he releases me—I’m too dazed to handle it, really—so he pushes against my upper arm until I slump back into my seat. I’m not aware of my eyes being closed until suddenly they’re open and he’s smirking a little as he amends, “To. I want you to. Stop by the Grind, that is.”
“Okay,” I say, my voice a little higher than I’d like it to be. “That’s—cool. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
He presses one last quick kiss to the corner of my mouth before he breathes, “Thanks again for dinner. Goodnight,” and gets out of the car. I stare shamelessly as he makes his way up to the porch. He opens the front door, but pauses and turns back to give me a wide smile and the world’s dorkiest fucking wave. I wave back. He disappears into the house, but it’s another ten solid minutes before I can stop shaking enough to drive.
There are right ways to tell people things that will hurt them, and there are wrong ways to tell them. At this point, I’m pretty sure Travis only knows how to do it the wrong way—somewhere between “hey, Mom, I’m dating my stepbrother; also, I think I’m gay,” and “welcome back, Garen! By the way, I’m now fucking your best friend in Lakewood,” the kid lost all capacity for tact. Somehow, though, it’s different, when people pick the wrong way to tell him something. It’s worse.
It happens suddenly, midway through Monday’s rehearsal. There’s a click from the speakers, and then Riley is saying, “I need Rizzo in the sound booth right now.”
I frown. My mic—a flesh-tone strip of stiff wire that hooks over my ear and runs halfway along my jaw—is already in place and seems to be working fine. There’s no feedback, no static, no awkward rustling sound of it moving against my skin. I raise a hand to shield my eyes from the stage lights and say, “What’s up, dude? I’m in the middle of—”
“Now.” The words are practically a growl, which is so unlike Riley that I’m stunned into motion. Shooting a bewildered glance at Christine, I hop off the stage and jog up the aisle to the back wall stairway that leads to the control booth. Riley is alone in the booth when I push open the door; he beckons for me to close it behind myself, and I do so without question. He checks to make sure all of the microphones are off, then says, “You need to find Travis. I think he’s in the hall behind the auditorium. Go now.”
“Uh, as much as I appreciate you playing messenger for whatever mid-rehearsal booty call he’s trying to initiate, I’ve actually got shit to do, in case you haven’t noticed,” I say, gesturing through the window that overlooks the auditorium. “Opening night is in nine days. Whatever he wants me for can wait until after rehearsal’s over. Or at least until my scene is over.”
Riley makes a vaguely frustrated noise in his throat and thrusts a hand out towards the sound board. “A few weeks into rehearsal, Travis asked me if I could set up his headset to record everything that’s said into it, so that he could keep track of his ideas and notes for the set pieces without having to stop every other minute to write things down. Every word that gets spoken near his microphone gets stored in my computer.”
“That’s—” really fucking creepy. “—nice for you. And for Travis. Wait, shit, does that mean you’ve got a recording of their breakup? And of him getting kicked in the nuts? Please tell me you do. And please tell me that if I steal his phone, you can set it as his ringtone, because that would be—”
“Garen. Stop,” Riley says, and I fall immediately, cautiously silent. He reaches for his laptop and cues up a track on it. There’s a moment of silence, and then--
“I need to talk to you,” I hear Joss’ voice saying.
There’s a pause, then, in a slightly louder, closer voice, Travis says, “Um. Sure. What’s up?” She doesn’t say anything in response. There’s a faint rustling noise, like maybe he’s still moving set pieces. Or like she’s handing him something. Then the rustling stops, and there’s a little hitch in his breathing, and he says, “That’s not funny, Joss.”
“It’s not meant to be,” she replies. “I just thought you should know.”
Two footsteps, and then another, slightly louder rustling, like he’s moving after her. “Stop. Wait, you can’t—we talked about this.” His voice sounds a little panicked now. Desperate. “You asked me what I thought about you doing that, and I said no, I said I didn’t want that, and you said okay. You said you’d keep it, that you’d let me keep it. Y-You promised, you said that even if you weren’t sure you were ready, that you’d respect the fact that I can do it—I know I can do it, Joss, and you said you’d let me. You promised.”
“I promised you that because we were together, and you swore to me you were willing to make an effort. You said you’d stop seeing him, and you’d stop speaking to him, and you didn’t. You lied to me, and you cheated on me, so fuck you, if you think I’m going to ruin my life just so you can take a baby I gave birth to and try to—what, raise it with him? What is this, ‘Heather Has Two Daddies: Teen Edition’? I know you don’t support abortion, and I know you think you wanted to have that baby, but this is my body, and I don’t owe you anything. So I got pregnant. Big fucking deal, okay? That doesn’t mean you can tell me what I should do with my body for the next nine months. That’s not fair. You’re not being fair. So, whatever, I’m done.”
“Please don’t do this,” Travis says, voice breaking a little. “Please, Joss, I’m fucking begging you, please don’t--”
“Too late.”
There’s silence. I am gripping the edge of the sound board so hard I’m worried I might crunch the material between my fingers. Riley still hasn’t moved, though he’s still staring at me. I can just barely hear Travis swallow on the recording before he says, “I don’t, um. You got it done already? You… it’s gone?”
“Yeah,” Joss says, voice soft enough to be almost apologetic. “It’s gone.”
Riley reaches out and stops the recording. He looks upset, but not entirely surprised. I wonder if it’s because he knows Joss well enough to have expected her to eventually get an abortion, or if it’s just because he’s used to hearing things he shouldn’t hear. Like their breakup. Like Travis kissing me on the cheek after his birthday lapdance and whispering, “Happy birthday to me.”
“Can you talk to him?” I ask. “H-He’s probably still wearing the headset, right?”
“Yeah, he, um—hang on.” Riley punches a button on the board and says, “Hey, Travis?” There’s no response. “Trav, bud, the light for your headset is still on. I know you can hear me. Garen’s in the booth with me, we heard what happened. Can you tell me where you are so I can send him to you?”
“I’m, um,” Travis says. He takes a deep, shuddering breath, and my heart breaks for him. That’s it, that’s all he gets out.
I gesture for Riley to connect me, and once he hits the button again, I lean in and say, “Hey, T? Tell me where you are, babe, I’m going to come find you.” No reply again. I turn to Riley and demand, “Can’t you use something up here to figure out where he is?”
He squints at me. “Like what, dude? A GPS? I run a high school drama club’s tech crew, not a friggin’ police station. Go look for him somewhere!”
I glare at him, then head back down the stairs to the auditorium. Christine shoots me an expectant glance and asks, “Is everything okay? Can we continue?”
“No,” I say shortly, hoisting myself up onto the stage so I can cut through the wings to get to the back hall. I add over my shoulder, “Do a scene without me. I have something important I need to do right now.”
The hall is empty. I poke my head into one of the classrooms, where most of the members of the crew are working on props. Right now, they seem to be hand-painting a collection of Styrofoam sundaes for the soda shop scenes. I say, as casually as I can manage, “Hey, guys. Anybody know where I can find your fearless leader?”
“He left here maybe fifteen minutes ago,” says a girl who I think might be named Marcellina. “He said he was going to drive his car around the back of the school so he could unload the jukebox mech he made this past weekend. I think it’s too heavy to bother carting through the front doors, so he’s using the ones in the sophomore wing.”
I have no idea what a jukebox mech is, or how he made it, or why we need one for the play, but I do know where the sophomore wing is. I mutter my thanks and take off down the hallway, looping through a side door to get to the right section of the building. The moment I pass through the wing doors, I freeze. Travis is sitting on the floor halfway down the hall, his back propped up against the wall between two classroom doors. There’s a large cardboard box next to him, and a crumpled paper on top of it. I take a step towards him. “Travis?”
He doesn’t speak. He doesn’t move. I close the distance between us and drop to my knees in front of him. His legs are kicked out limply in front of him, spread just enough that I can wedge myself between them to crowd up into his line of sight. He still doesn’t react. I carefully lift the headset off him and put it on myself. “Ry, you there?”
“Yeah, man,” is the immediate reply. “Is he alright?”
“I think he might be in shock?” I say. “And I don’t really know what to do. We’re in the sophomore hall.”
“I’ll be there in a minute. Just let me grab Annabelle. Don’t go anywhere, alright?”
Like I could if I wanted to. I push the headset off so it’s dangling around my neck and settle my palms on top of Travis’ shins. “Talk to me. Please, say anything. Do anything.”
He slides his hands down his thighs onto his knees and tugs his legs up until they’re bent at right angles. I take that as a sign and wriggle closer, until my own knees are touching the wall on either side of his hips and he’s practically sitting in my lap. Neither of us moves for a moment, and then he gestures to the box—rather, he gestures to the paper on top of it. I pick it up.
It’s a Planned Parenthood pamphlet about abortion.
“This is how she told you,” I say flatly. “This is how she told you that she aborted the baby you wanted—she handed you a fucking Planned Parenthood brochure.”
He nods. I sit back on my heels and drag a hand through my hair, trying desperately to resist the urge to hunt her down and murder her. Because it’s not that I necessarily expected her to keep the baby, and it’s not that I’m refusing to understand why she would want to get rid of it; it’s that I cannot even fathom anyone being so goddamn tactless that she would think it was okay to tell the boy who wanted to keep this baby, who loved it already and was stupidly excited about it, that she’d gotten rid of it with nothing more than a shrug and a fucking pamphlet.
“Is he going to be okay?” says a voice just to my right. I glance up. Annabelle, anxiously peering down at Travis, with Riley at her side.
“’M fine,” Travis finally says, though he still doesn’t move. His eyes are unfocused and staring straight ahead, somewhere in the vicinity of my neck.
Riley clears his throat. “G, I think maybe you need to take him home. He’s not alright right now. And I don’t think being in the same building as Joss and that—” He jerks his chin at the brochure, “—is going to help him at all.”
That does nothing to quell the fury that’s flaring up inside of me. Even the sound of her name makes me want to destroy something. I crumple up the paper and shove it into my pocket, mostly to get it out of sight. “Yeah, I know. Listen, if I drive him back to his place in his car, do you think one of you could pick me up after rehearsal and bring me back here to get mine? I’m not—”
“I can’t stay away from you anymore,” Travis says suddenly, looking up at me with a still-dazed expression on his face. “I want you, every last part of you, I want to be with you. I’m in love with you, G. I think I forgot that somewhere along the way, and then… the thing with Ben in the hospital happened. And Halloween happened. The fight happened. Christ, my birthday happened. And it all just—it made me remember. It made me want you more.” Riley and Annabelle are exchanging looks like wow, this is the most inappropriate time to ask someone out. But I can tell that’s not what he’s doing; he just needs me to listen to him right now. When I don’t try to cut him off, he says, “I don’t—I hoped I could ignore it, but after my birthday, I knew I was done. That’s why I had to break up with her. Because I knew things would keep happening between us, but I didn’t want to cheat on her again, so I had to end it. But I didn’t think she would… I’d hoped that she’d still let me keep it. I didn’t know she’d get rid of it just because I broke up with her.”
He sounds so broken, so betrayed, that for a moment I don’t know what to do. And then I find myself saying, “I have to go take care of something.”
He laughs at that. Or, he makes a sound that might be meant to be a laugh, but mostly it just sounds strangled and painful. “What, now?”
“Yes, right now,” I say firmly. I reach out and cup his jaw between my hands. “I’ll be right back, though, okay? There’s just one thing I’ve gotta do, and then I promise you, I’ll come right back here so that I can get you and bring you home.”
His eyes are wary, shuttered, like he’s two seconds away from closing himself off from everyone and everything. Then, as if he’s trying his hardest to give me an order, he says, “You promise you’ll come back to me.”
“Always have before, haven’t I?” I say. He nods and makes a vague flickering gesture with his hand, like he’s saying, yeah, go on, then. I tilt his head down so that I can press a kiss to his hair, then carefully clamber out from under his legs. I grip Riley’s elbow for a brief second and mutter, “Stay with him for a minute, alright?”
Without waiting for a reply from him or Annabelle, I turn and stride back in the direction I came from. My legs are a little cramped from my time curled up on the floor, but they work well enough to carry me down the hallway, through the wings, and out onto the stage. Joss is sitting on the very edge of it, her feet dangling over and her eyes focused on her knees. A very large part of me wants to shove her off, even though it’s only three or so feet to the ground. The part of me that’s desperately clinging to control, however, wanders over to her and sits down next to her, close enough that our thighs are almost touching. Close enough that only she can hear me when I all but growl, “How the fuck could you do that to him?”
“I wondered how long it would take for him to tell you,” she says simply. Neither of us is looking at the other. “You know, I’m not actually sure if you’re aware of this, Garen, but my body is sort of none of your business. The fact that we share an ex doesn’t mean you can tell me what to do.”
I can’t help it; I laugh. “You honestly think that this is some pro-life, abortion-is-bad bullshit? I’m a gay man. I can’t ever get knocked up, and if the soul-crushing disgust I felt last week when I kissed a girl for the first time is any indication, I can’t ever knock somebody up, either. There is no part of me that believes I’ve got any right to tell someone she has to keep a kid she doesn’t want. I don’t even know if it counts as a kid yet, to be honest. But I do know that my opinion on abortion is completely irrelevant.”
There’s that word again, hanging between us. Irrelevant. And when you see him and realize what happened, when you kiss him and remember where his mouth has been, then I want you to look me in the eyes and tell me again how irrelevant I am. I know she must be remembering it, too, because her lip curls. I clear my throat and keep going. “If you wanted to get an abortion, you should have been upfront about that. You should have just done it from the start, or told him you were going to, or made it clear that’s what you wanted. But stringing him along for a month, making him believe he was going to be a dad, and then getting rid of it the second he breaks up with you? That’s fucked. You should have at least told him you were planning to do it, not just tossed it off after the fact, like it meant nothing. Because even if that baby wasn’t important to you, or me, it was important to Travis. And you’re a piece of shit for not respecting that.”
I can’t think of a single other thing I could need to say to her right now, not when Travis is still waiting for me in the sophomore hallway; I stand up again, brush off my jeans, and take two steps back towards the wings.
“I don’t know how he can even stand to look at you right now,” she calls after me.
I wave a hand over my shoulder without turning back. “Yeah, I get it. I’m terrible, I’m awful, I’m a waste of flesh and bone, the world would be a better place if I—”
“All true things,” she agrees, “but I’m referring to the fact that it’s your fault I did it.”
My spine locks up, and my whole body goes rigid. Not rigid enough to stop me from turning in place to stare at her, though. “Excuse me?”
It takes nearly a full minute for her to stand up and approach me. I’m not sure if the hesitation is for effect, or because she’s debating whether or not to go through with saying what she wants to say. Eventually, she shrugs, makes her way over, and says, just low enough that only I can hear her, “You ruin every single thing you touch, Garen. You’re a total trainwreck, but everybody around here just acts like it’s cute. Oh, Garen came to school drunk and humiliated Travis and Joss in front of everyone? That’s so funny. Garen brought a sex worker to a sweet sixteen party? What a riot. Garen got his head bashed open on a lunch table and beat the shit out of Jack Thorne in front of half the school? Classic. Garen took his ex-boyfriend to bed, and made jokes about it, and ruined a relationship, and got somebody to cheat on his pregnant girlfriend, and thought it was all okay? That’s just… fucking lovely.”
“You don’t get to put this on me,” I say. Or, I think I’m the one who says it. I’m pretty sure that’s my voice I’m hearing, but I’m surprised it can get out around the huge lump I feel forming in my throat. “It’s not my fault you—”
“It is, actually. And sooner or later, Travis is going to figure that out. He’s going to realize that you and your selfishness and your total inability to keep your dick in your pants are the reasons he’s not going to be a dad anymore. Because at the end of the day, that’s what really happened. I got sick of putting up with your shit, so I had to get rid of the only thing that could ever tie us together,” she says. She takes one last step forward and adds, in little more than a breath, “You said you didn’t know if it even counted as a kid yet. It didn’t, not to me. But it did to Travis. And how much do you think he’s still going to love you, once he realizes that you’re the reason his baby is dead?”
“Stop,” I order, but it doesn’t come out the way I want it to. It comes out soft and weak and scared.
She smiles without humor. “You fuck up all the time, but this must be the first time you actually killed someone, huh?”
I stagger backward a step, nearly pitching off the edge of the stage. Considering my options are to either bolt or stay here and listen to her say that again, I scramble down off the stage and stride up the aisle, no goal in mind but getting away from her, from her words, from the awful, terrifying truth of what she’s saying.
The first place I can think to go where I might be able to be alone is back up the stairs to the sound booth. Riley is probably still in the sophomore wing with Travis and Annabelle, so it’ll give me somewhere to think. Somewhere to be silent, and still, and quite possibly sick. I push open the door to the booth and pause just inside the room. It takes me several fumbling minutes to properly extract myself from the tangle of microphones—mine and the headset. Fucking hell, the headset. I blink over at Riley’s computer; there’s a new file on the screen, time-stamped to about three seconds ago, the moment I turned off the mic. Swallowing hard, I scroll through most of it, then hit play.
“—this must be the first time you actually killed someone, huh?”
“Fuck,” I breathe, completely without intending to. I click the little diamond that marks the progress of the moment in the clip, drag it back, and release it. “You fuck up all the time, but this must be the first time you actually killed someone, huh?”
It’s dead. The baby that Joss and Travis were going to have, the one I hated from the second I heard about it, is dead.
Click. Drag. “You fuck up all the time, but this must be the first time you actually killed someone, huh?”
Travis’ baby is dead, and it’s dead because Joss couldn’t stand being pregnant with his kid after their breakup, and they broke up because he thought he couldn’t stay away from me, and he thought he couldn’t stay away from me because I wouldn’t have let him. Because I’ve spent the past year following him, and pushing him, and pressuring him, and wanting him, and needing him, and now his baby is dead, and it’s my fault.
Click. Drag. “You fuck up all the time, but this must be the first time you actually killed someone, huh?”
I don’t know what makes me do it. All I know is that one minute I’m clicking and dragging and restarting and listening and hating, and then I’m clicking and dragging and the file is moving to a blank CD shoved hastily into the drive, and then I’m tucking that—the evidence of my failings, my crimes, my bloodied hands—into the backpack I don’t remember getting from the auditorium. And then I’m walking outside. And I’m getting in my car. And I’m driving down the street. And I’m flicking my turn signal. And I’m putting the car in park.
And I’m taking out my fake ID.
And I’m walking into the liquor store.
And I’m buying a bottle of Jack.
And I fuck up all the time, but this must be the first time I’ve actually killed someone, huh?
70 days sober
I don’t sleep. Of course I don’t sleep. How the fuck could I, with that bottle sitting on my desk, and Joss’ words playing over and over in my head and on the CD on my computer, and the chiming of my phone on the nightstand where Riley and Annabelle keep messaging me, demanding to know where the hell I disappeared to?
Sometime around seven in the morning, after I’ve managed to burn my hand on my flat iron for the third time because I’m too tired and distracted to notice when I’m clamping the ceramic plates around my fingers instead of my fauxhawk, Travis finally sends a text: You didn’t come back yesterday. Ry says he hasn’t heard from you either. Hope you’re alright. See you at school. That, of all things, is what makes me stride from my bathroom to my bedroom to actually reach for the bottle of whiskey. It’s still unopened, and my hand trembles around the cap when I finally break the seal. I raise the bottle to my lips, and the sickly sweet smell hits me like a punch to the heart, but for some reason—my hand just won’t tip. It’s right there, the fucking glass is touching my mouth, all I have to do is tip the goddamn bottle, and I’ll be fine. But my muscles won’t move, which is fucking stupid, because they work just fine when I move to put the bottle back down on the desk.
I pick up my phone and scroll through my messages—first, I reread the one from Travis. Then I check out some of the ones from Riley and Annabelle.
Where did you go?
Dude, pick up your phone.
You said you were going to be right back, instead you disappeared completely. What the hell.
Where are you? Travis needs you.
I pick up the bottle again. This time, I get my mouth on the glass, I get the bottle tilted, but my lips remain stubbornly sealed. I can feel the booze lapping at them where they’re pressed to the bottle opening, and all I have to do is shift them apart ever so slightly, and I’ll be drinking. But it doesn’t happen. My body won’t let me. Squeezing my eyes shut tight, I set the bottle back down on the desk, screw the cap on, and wipe the back of my hand across my mouth. Christ, I can’t even manage to make myself lick my lips.
Arriving at school isn’t any easier. I’ve been standing at my locker for approximately six seconds when Travis comes up to me, touches my waist, and says, “Hey. Are you okay?”
Shouldn’t I be asking you that? I say. Or… try to say. The words are rattling around in my head, and it’s not that I don’t want to say them. It’s just that my throat seems to have completely closed up around them, caging them inside my chest. Nearly a year ago, I asked him to marry me, and he said yes, and then I left, and I took that future away from him. Now, he got his girlfriend pregnant, and I bitched and moaned and pushed until he finally cheated on her, and she aborted the baby. All I can think about right now is the spark in his eyes when he admitted he was sort of hoping for a daughter.
You fuck up all the time, but this must be the first time you actually killed someone, huh?
“Garen?” Travis says uncertainly. His hand isn’t even on top of my jacket; it has slipped beneath the leather to brush over the too-thin fabric of my t-shirt. I can feel the heat of his palm, but it’s not reassuring—it’s stifling. It’s burning me, torturing me, because I can’t understand why he would ever want to put his hands on me when I’m responsible for the thing he’s been dreading for weeks now. His grip on my waist tightens a little, and he says, “Did you hear what I—oh.”
He stares down at his hand, the one I’m prying off my waist and tucking into the pocket of his hoodie. Or--Patton Military Academy, Whitman Hall. Fuck, my hoodie, then. I grit my teeth, snatch my books off the top shelf of my locker, and slam the door. He can’t depend on me right now, not when I’m the one who’s at fault. Not when, soon enough, he’s going to figure out every last reason why he should hate me, and then everything will be ruined.
He slips his hand back out of his pocket and reaches for me again, but I walk away without a word.
If not drinking the whiskey was hard, and not speaking to him at his locker was hard, then trial law is harder. I sit in my usual seat, and Travis sits in his, right next to me. Ten minutes into class, he reaches over and ticks a tiny check mark off in the top margin of my notebook. It’s something he does all the time, multiple times during every class, honestly—it’s a way to get my attention when Mr. Esteves isn’t really paying attention, a way of summoning my eyes to his paper, which is where he’s constantly scribbling notes to me in the margins. He says it’s easier than actually trying to pass a note, but all of my papers are littered with tiny checks at the top, and looking at them usually makes me smile like an idiot. Today, they make me shift my paper further away.
“Dude, what the fuck is going on?” he whispers, the moment Mr. Esteves has turned to face the board.
Almost involuntarily, I glance over. In the margin at the top of his paper, he has written, Why aren’t you talking to me? I do my best not to acknowledge that I’ve even seen it. Below that, he now scribbles, Can you at least tell me what I did wrong? before leaning over to slash another check into the corner of my paper. I don’t move, and now it’s, You promised you’d come back yesterday, and you didn’t. I deserve to know why, and another check.
This time, when I don’t react, he snatches my notebook right out of my hands, scrawls, SAY ANYTHING, GAREN across the entire span of my paper, and shoves it back at me, not bothering to make any attempt at subtlety.
“Travis, pay attention,” Mr. Esteves scolds. Travis regards him with defiant, unapologetic eyes, but his hands remain in his own space for now, so our teacher continues. I make the mistake of meeting Travis’ gaze, and he just looks… broken. And confused. And lonely. And I did that to him. I’m always doing that to him.
I grip my pen so hard it snaps in half, leaking black all over my hand and dotting my desk with ink. A bewildered Mr. Esteves excuses me to go clean up, and I spend the rest of the period shakily scrubbing my palms in the men’s room. When I finally return to my desk, Travis’ message is still staring up at me.
SAY ANYTHING, GAREN.
And I still can’t.
71 days sober
I should be expecting him to show up. In a way, I think I am—maybe that’s why, when he pushes open my bedroom door and walks in, I’m sprawled out on my bed like all of my bones are missing. My blankets are pulled halfway up my chest, and I’m wearing pajamas, even though it’s the middle of the afternoon. There was early dismissal today for the Thanksgiving holiday tomorrow; I crawled into bed a little before one o’clock and haven’t budged since.
“Hi,” Travis says, shutting the door behind himself. “I rang the doorbell, but no one answered. I guess your dad’s not home. And you’re… you know, moping. Or whatever this is.” I still don’t move. I want to ask how he got in, because I’m positive I locked the door behind myself, but my throat is still too tight to speak to him. I want to get the words out, but I don’t want to choke on them. Luckily, he knows me well enough to add, “So, I sort of broke in, I guess. That electronic keypad you’ve got on the back door? Really dumb idea. Almost as dumb as the fact that—I guess you have multiple codes? Because Bill’s is actually just his name. B-I-L-L, two-four-five-five.” Oh wow, that is really dumb. I’m almost embarrassed on Dad’s behalf. “I used yours, though. Took me a couple tries to get it—there’s a ten second lock-out every time you punch in the wrong code. But I got it eventually.”
My code is ten thirty-one. Halloween. The first night we kissed. Neither one of us verbalizes this. I contemplate pointing out that he didn’t need to bother trying to find mine, if he figured out Dad’s already. I guess it was more a matter of principle than anything else. Maybe breaking into my house to see me just isn’t as much fun if he doesn’t use my house code to do it.
I can sense the exact moment when he notices the bottle of Jack on the desk, because he goes inhumanly still. His motionlessness is what finally prompts me to shift, to lift my head so that I can look at the bottle as well, which just draws his focus right back to me. He tips his head towards the bottle and says, “You haven’t had any of it.” I shrug. “That’s, um… that’s good. I’m glad.”
Another shrug. He lets out an aggravated sigh and says, “Garen, I need you to tell me what the fuck happened. I need you to talk to me. Why won’t you talk to me anymore?”
Because I don’t deserve to, I don’t say. Because I can’t think of a single word that doesn’t make me sick with guilt and disgust and shame at my own selfishness.
Travis is running his thumbnail down the seam between the door and its frame. “You and I, we, um… we’re part of this group, you know? You and me, and Ben, and Alex, and James. And when the shit hits the fan, everybody kind of pairs off. Alex and Ben go to each other first, and so do you and James, and it never bothered me that I didn’t have a partner or whatever. We’re not in third grade, I don’t need to have a best friend. But I think that… you’re the one I go to when I need somebody. You’re the person I count on, and I need you, and you’re not here.”
I don’t say, Holy fuck, please don’t count on me. Choose anybody else, because I keep letting you down, and I always ruin things, and your kid is dead, and it’s my fault.
“I’m sorry for whatever I did wrong,” he says.
That almost makes me look up. I don’t say, How the fuck can you think you did anything wrong?
“I keep trying to figure it out,” he continues. “And it’s—I’m sorry people found out about what happened on my birthday. I’m sorry if people are blaming you for the breakup, and I’m sorry Joss called you a slut. Though, I mean, she’s mostly calling me a slut, because I’m the one who cheated on her. But if that’s why you’re mad, I’m sorry.”
He waits for a response. I have none.
“I’m sorry I got you kicked in the nuts,” he tries, and I huff out a laugh. I can feel his eyes on me, hear the sad smile in his voice as he says, “So, you are listening to me. I was beginning to think I was hallucinating this entire conversation. Or that you’d gone fucking catatonic. But I guess you’re just deliberately choosing not to speak to me.”
I finally look up at him. That’s what breaks him; he sits down—collapses, honestly—on the edge of the bed and grips his knees so hard his knuckles turn white.
“I need you, and you’re not here,” he repeats, his words an accusation now. “I know you’re not mad about us almost sleeping together—or mad about it not really happening. You were still talking to me last week. And you were talking to me after I broke up with Joss. So, I’m still trying to figure it out. Was it—” He sneaks a glance at me, but when our eyes actually meet, his snap back to the floor. He licks his lips. “Is it because y-you’re just done with me? Because we’re both single right now, and I told you how I feel about you, and now you could have me, but you don’t want me anymore? Is that it? The chase is over, or it’s not funny unless it’s complicated, so there’s no point in talking to me anymore?”
I squeeze my eyes shut. You can’t honestly be stupid enough to think that, I don’t say.
But he must take my silence as confirmation, because I hear him swallow, and then the bed is shifting as he stands. “Alright, then. I guess I should go.”
The only thing that scares me more than the idea of him staying is the idea of him leaving. My eyes fly open, and I scramble out from under the blankets, startling him back a few steps with my sudden movement. I fling myself off the foot of the bed and onto my desk chair, clicking on the audio file I’ve been tormenting myself with.
“—how he can even stand to look at you right now.”
“Yeah, I get it. I’m terrible--”
I skip ahead, because he already knows those things; he doesn’t need to hear them all over again. What he needs to hear is--
“—ruin every single thing you touch, Garen. You’re a total trainwreck, but everybody around here just acts like it’s cute. Oh--” Skip ahead. “—ought a sex worker to a sweet sixteen party? What--” Skip ahead. “—actually. And sooner or later, Travis is going to figure that out. He’s going to realize that you and your selfishness and your total inability to keep your dick in your pants are the reasons he’s not going to be a dad any--” Skip ahead. “—how much do you think he’s still going to love you, once he realizes that you’re the reason his baby is dead?”
“Stop.”
“You fuck up all the time, but this must be the first time you actually killed someone, huh?”
The track ends, but I skip back to the last few seconds, playing the same six words over and over, until I’m sure he has to get it. “You fuck up all the time. You fuck up all the time. You fuck up all the time. You fuck--”
Travis snatches the mouse away from me and closes out of the audio player. I don’t think I’m supposed to notice that his hand is trembling. He doesn’t seem to know what to say to me, but the tightness in my throat has finally eased up enough that I can force out, “She killed it, and it’s my fault. The baby. She had an abortion because you dumped her, and you dumped her because I made you cheat.” My voice isn’t loud, but at least there are words coming out of my mouth in his general direction, for the first time in nearly two days. “I pushed you to hook up with me, Trav. That’s all I do—I push people until they do what I want them to do. B-But no one’s ever died because of it, and I don’t—she’s right. How can you stand to look at me? How—I never wanted you and her to have that kid, but in an ‘I wish she’d never gotten pregnant’ way, not an ‘I wish she’d abort the baby you begged her to keep’ way. Because you were going to be a dad, and you were going to be so fucking good at it, and I took that away from you—”
“That was never mine, Garen,” Travis says, spinning my chair to face him and dropping to his knees in front of me. “Did I want her to keep the baby? Yes. Completely. Am I sad that she had an abortion and didn’t even bother to tell me until it was too late for me to even try talking to her about it? Yes. I’m fucking shattered by it. But this—” He grabs the bottle and gives it a little shake, “—is probably the only thing that could make this situation hurt more. You don’t fuck up all the time, and you didn’t kill anyone, for shit’s sake. It’s not your fault that Joss had an abortion. It’s hers, and mine, and nobody’s, and this hurts me now, but someday I’ll get over it. You won’t get over this, though.” Another shake of the bottle.
I draw my legs up to my chest so that I can rest my forehead against my knees. “I’m just really, really sorry, okay? For everything. I don’t—”
“Stop,” he says, and I immediately fall silent. “You don’t need to apologize. You never made me do anything I didn’t want to do, so don’t blame yourself. And don’t expect me to blame you, either.”
If I can’t apologize, then I don’t know what to say. So instead of saying anything, I stand up, take the bottle into the bathroom, and upend it in the sink. The smell of it floods the enclosed space, but I’m not ashamed to say I pretty much bolt back to my bedroom. Travis is still sitting on the floor, though he has shifted so that his back is leaning against the foot of the bed. I sink onto the ground next to him, and he slips his hand into mine. Neither of us says anything, but neither of us leaves, either, and that’s a start.
72 days sober
“Garen, I swear, if you put your hand in that bowl one more time, I am going to chain you to the dining room table until it’s time to eat,” Dad says, dragging the bowl of cooked potato chunks out of my reach.
“It’s not my fault you’re taking forever to make dinner,” I say, scowling and inching towards the bowl again the moment his back is turned. “Can I help? I promise I won’t set anything on fire, or chop anything off anybody, or—”
“No,” Mom says from the table, and whatever, her opinion is invalid. She’s not even helping Dad cook; she shouldn’t even be here, they’re divorced, it’s completely creepy that Dad even asked her to come for Thanksgiving dinner. But I can’t say any of this—I’m pretty sure she’s only here because they assumed that my first sober holiday should be spent with as many members of the family as possible, and considering they’re both only children with dead parents, this is pretty much as big as an Anderson Family Holiday gets.
Instead, I glower at my mother and say, “Well, if I can’t be trusted to help, maybe you should. Because, you know, eating dinner sometime before Hanukkah might be cool.”
She snorts and says, “You get your cooking abilities from me. Any assistance that either of us tries to give will just ruin the food, and he’ll have to start over.”
“I gave up on the idea of your mother learning to cook sometime in the nineties,” Dad says. “You can set the table, if you’re that eager to help.”
I wrinkle my nose, but he rolls his eyes and looks away, so I do it. I am just finishing arranging the silverware when my phone rings. I dig it out of my pocket and glance down at the caller ID. Travis. My heart most definitely does not jump, because that would be lame. Instead, I clear my throat and answer the call with, “Hey, man. What’s up?”
“Hi,” he says, voice hushed as if he has ducked out of the room and doesn’t want his absence to be noticed. “What are you doing right now?”
I hop up onto the counter and snag another chunk of potato. Dad smacks my hand with the spoon he’s using, so I snap, “I’m hanging out in the kitchen and being physically abused by my food-fascist father.”
“He is not,” Dad says loudly. “He’s stealing pieces of potato out of the bowl before I can mash them properly. You’d think he was raised by wolves.”
“Alright, first of all, that makes no sense, because wolves don’t eat potatoes. Second of all, I am your only offspring, so stop being mean to me,” I say. Into the phone, I add, “Yeah, so, I’m not really doing anything important. What’s up?”
Travis hesitates, then says, “Oh. Okay. I mean, I asked because Bridget and I are, uh… we’re headed to the Grind for a while. Just to get coffee, hang out, take a break from what’s going on here. We were going to ask you if you wanted to come along, but if you’re doing family stuff—”
“I thought the Grind was closed today,” I say. I know it’s closed; all of the baristas there have been warning me about it for a week now, like they’re worried that I’m going to Hulk out and smash through the window to steal the espresso machine if I can’t get my coffee in the middle of the day.
“I have a key.”
I raise my eyebrows, even though he can’t see the gesture. “You’re going to break into your place of work during the middle of a holiday just to have coffee with your sister?”
Dad shoots me a quizzical look, but I wave him off.
“It’s not breaking in,” Travis says in a slightly pissier tone. “I told you, I have a key, and I know the alarm code, and I—Jerry said it’s fine. I asked him about it the other day. He told me that it’s cool, as long as I clean up and lock the doors after.”
I slip out of the living room, lowering my voice a little as I say, “Dude, is it really that bad at your house right now? With your mom and everything?”
He laughs, but the noise is humorless enough to just make me uncomfortable. “Worse, actually. Mom’s sisters are here, and my uncles, all my cousins. Ever since they got here, they’ve been interrogating me and making all these snide comments. Uncle Marcus keeps telling me I’m an idiot for giving up a varsity sport to do stage crew. He says I’m never going to get into a good college if I make decisions like that, which is fucking stupid, because if I managed to get into Harvard early admission, I’m pretty sure I can get into—”
“You got into Harvard?” I interrupt. I don’t even wait for him to confirm it—I know he will—before I launch myself back into the kitchen and say, “Guys, hey. Parental units. Travis got into Harvard.”
“He did?” Mom says brightly, raising her coffee in a toast. “Tell him I said congratulations.”
“Likewise,” Dad says. “Maybe I should’ve asked for custody of him in the divorce, too.”
“Might as well have, considering his own bitch of a mom is still leading the charge against him,” I whisper. Dad’s brow creases in confusion, but Mom shoots me a wary glance. Sometimes I forget that she was in the room for the admission about his mom’s silent treatment, too. I can tell she’s about to start quizzing me about the comment, and I’m really not in the mood to let her harsh the buzz I’m feeling from the news of his acceptance. I duck back out of the room and fling myself down onto the living room sofa to bury my face in a throw pillow. It’s so stupid—I’m grinning like an idiot, even though I’ve got no reason to be this excited for him. He’s not mine to brag about, nothing but my friend. After a moment, I lift my head and say, “My parents both extend their congratulations. And I extend mine, obviously. I’m… really happy for you, dude. I’m proud of you.”
“Thanks,” he says, a smile in his voice. I close my eyes to picture it. After a moment, he adds, “I, um. Northwestern, too. And Brown.”
“Shit, dude. You’re a total genius, I’m feeling really inadequate right now. I won’t even find out if I’ve gotten in anywhere until January at the earliest.”
“You’ll get in,” he says immediately. “You’re one of the most talented people I’ve ever met, and you’re pretty much only applying to music programs, aren’t you?”
I make a noise of agreement and say, “Auditions start up in a few weeks. I’m stupidly nervous about—”
There’s a muffled sound of a struggle on his end, and then Bree is saying, “You can have your heart-to-heart at the Daily Grind. Be on your porch in ten minutes, we’re picking you up. I cannot tolerate another minute in this house, and it’s really cute that you want to flirt with my baby brother and wax poetic about his dreams and aspirations, but I am going crazy, Garen. My aunt asked Travie if he’s ‘feeling any better’ now that he’s not living with you anymore. ‘Better’ as in ‘straighter,’ like he caught gayness—bisexuality, whatever, from you, and now that Mom and Bill are broken up, Trav would go back to being straight. It’s a trainwreck over here.”
“Wait,” I say, scrambling upright. “Hang on a second, I need to—” I poke my head back into the kitchen and cover the mic on the phone. “Dad, how much extra food do we have?”
Dad quirks a brow at me. “That depends on you and your inability to behave like a human when faced with a dish of mashed potatoes.”
“Mashed potatoes are delicious, and if you don’t understand why I need to eat all of them, you’re no parent of mine. Question stands, though.” I pause, then reluctantly add, “If I uh, if there were two people whose relatives were totally dicking out right now, would it be cool if they came here instead, maybe?”
“Travis and Bree?” Dad says, frowning at me. The are you seriously asking me if your ex-stepbrother-slash-ex-boyfriend can come to Thanksgiving dinner is heavily implied.
I swallow hard and say, “Come on. You don’t know what it’s like over there. Their aunt asked Travis if he’s feeling any more hetero now that I’ve moved out, okay? It’s fucked, and seriously, even if you say they can just come over for pie later or something, I’d—”
“Give me the phone,” Dad says, holding out his hand. I blink, but obey. He clears his throat and says, “Travis? Oh, Bree, hi. I just wanted to tell you that, if anything that’s happening at your house right now is making you or your brother uncomfortable, I would love to have you both join us for dinner. It’s just myself, Garen, and his mother here, and while I’m fairly certain that my son could polish off anything I put on the table, I—” He pauses, smiling, clearly having just been interrupted. “Excellent. We’ll see you soon.”
He ends the call and hands me the phone. I blink at it for a moment, but take it anyway. “Thanks.”
“Of course,” he says.
“Am I allowed to ask when you started speaking to Travis again?” Mom asks.
I fling myself down into the seat opposite her. “About a month ago.”
“Hm,” is all she says at first. We sit in silence for a moment before she takes a sip of her cider and says, “Am I allowed to ask if you still have feelings for him?”
I narrow my eyes at her. “No, you are not allowed to ask me that.”
There’s no point to my refusal to answer; I’m pretty sure she and Dad both know the answer, and if they don’t know it then, they sure as hell figure it out ten minutes later, when Dad goes to let our guests in, Travis walks into the kitchen, and I blurt out, “Oh my god, you look so hot.”
“Thank you,” he says, even though it really sounds more like wow, please stop talking. I don’t care—Evelyn must force her kids to dress up to impress the rest of the family, because Bree is wearing a short burgundy dress that makes her blond hair stand out brilliantly, and Travis is wearing a dark navy suit. He looks fucking gorgeous.
Bree ducks down to press a kiss to my cheek and plucks at the sleeve of my plain black t-shirt. “So glad to see you’ve dressed up as well.”
“Just for you,” I say, beaming at her. “You look beautiful, Bree. If I’d noticed you were this smoking a year ago, I might’ve tried to go two-for-two on banging stepsiblings.”
“Congratulations. In the minute I’ve been in this house, you’ve managed to work my little brother’s body into fifty percent of the sentences you’ve said,” Bree says, smiling too sweetly.
I open my mouth, but Travis cuts across with, “I swear to god, if you make a single comment about ‘working her little brother’s body,’ I’m going to crawl inside the oven next to the turkey and burn myself alive.” I raise my hands in surrender. Satisfied with my silence, he turns to Dad and says, “Is there anything I can do to help?”
“Everything’s nearly done. But if you’d like, you can grab yourself a pop from the fridge. Or grab a roll of duct tape from the desk in my study and tape your stepbrother’s mouth shut,” Dad suggests.
I have to fight the urge to gag as I say, “Can you please not call him that? It’s gross.”
“It’s true,” Mom says, grimacing. “At least, it is for the next few months.”
“Well, speed things up a little. And Dad, do me a favor? Make sure your next girlfriend or fiance, or wife, or whatever doesn’t have a son who’s got an ass like that,” I add, gesturing in the general direction of where Travis is still standing at the fridge, his back—and ass—turned to us. “Seriously, look at it, it’s fucking perfect.”
“Please don’t look at it,” Travis says over his shoulder. Dad doesn’t look, because he is a forty-something, heterosexual man, and Travis is still technically his eighteen-year-old stepson. Mom, however, spares a glance, because hey, I had to get my filthy, boy-obsessed perversions from somewhere. I flash her a thumbs up, and she rolls her eyes; apparently ‘check out Travis’ time never lasts as long for anyone else as it does for me.
Once the food is finished cooking, the five of us scatter ourselves around the table; it’s a large, perfect square, so Travis and Bree end up next to each other on one side, across from me. It’s my immediate instinct to nudge each of them with my toes until they glare at me and kick back. It’s my Mom’s immediate reaction, however, to turn expectant eyes on them and say, “It doesn’t look like the situation with your mother has improved very much since the last time I saw you.”
Travis just shrugs, but Bree scowls and says, “She still isn’t talking to him, if that’s what you mean.”
“Your mother doesn’t speak to you?” Dad says, frowning.
“Hasn’t in two and a half months,” Travis says. His voice is tight, and he’s meticulously arranging asparagus on his plate in a way that suggests he wants to focus on anything in the world but this conversation. For fuck’s sake, he’s only been here for ten minutes, and he’s already wishing he were elsewhere.
Mom opens her mouth to speak, but I cut across her with, “Hey, if either of you guys is free tomorrow, you should come do the Black Friday shopping thing with me. Well, Ben and me, technically. His mom gave him her credit card and a list of toys he’s supposed to buy for his siblings, and he was wise enough to realize that he’s going to get trampled by a bunch of soccer moms if he tries to navigate the biggest toy stores without help from a real-sized person. And Alex is too busy whining about Jamie dumping him to provide any necessary assistance. He’d probably just stand in the middle of an aisle looking wounded while some cow with a fanny pack beat Ben down for the last Tickle-Me-Elmo.”
“Alex and James broke up?” Travis says, frowning.
“Alex and James were dating?” Bree says, also frowning.
“I don’t think they make Tickle-Me-Elmos anymore,” Dad says, looking thoughtful.
I roll my eyes towards the ceiling and rattle off, for everyone’s benefit, “They’ve been sort of seeing each other for months, and at first it was in secret—well, a secret to everyone except that freckled douche sitting across from me, because no one ever bothered to teach him that secrets don’t make friends—and Jamie’s been wanting to make things official, but Alex is being a bag of dicks and still won’t stop pining over Ben—”
“Wait, Alex and Ben are involved?” Mom asks, squinting. “I thought you and Ben were together.”
“You had a Tickle-Me-Elmo,” Dad continues, glaring at me. “Stood in line for four hours to get that thing, and you broke it in a week.”
“Mom, no, Ben and I were—look, we weren’t together, not really, but even if we had been, we stopped seeing each other weeks ago. The week before Halloween, I think. Anyway, Alex and Ben aren’t involved, Alex just has a total boner for Ben, which just makes that whole thing with Jamie and the living room floor so much worse.”
Travis raises his eyebrows and says, “Alright, I was following along fine until that. The floor. Is that an Alex-and-James thing?”
“Absolutely,” I lie, spearing a bite of turkey and very pointedly not thinking, you’re really just better off not knowing about the hatefucking thing right now. We’re all better off not knowing about that.
Dad is still frowning at his water glass. “And it’s not that children don’t sometimes break their toys, but did you have to break all of them? It was like you couldn’t hold onto something for a week before it ended up in pieces. God only knows how you managed to shred that Fisher-Price guitar the way you did. I was terrified when you asked for the Fender when you were in middle school—”
I snap my fingers in front of his face and say, “Dad? Focus.”
He sighs. “Right. Please, Garen, go back to tell me about your sex life, because I really feel like that’s the best holiday conversation we could have. Ever. Please, keep talking.”
“Thanks, I will!” I say brightly, before turning back to the others and saying, “Whatever, anyway, Jamie’s got this girl in New York who told him she wanted him to be all-in or completely out by Thanksgiving, and since Alex is still wavering on the whole commitment thing, James texted me last night to tell me he guesses he’s going to call things off with Alex for good. So, yeah. That’s my life.”
“To answer the earliest question,” Travis says, raising his eyebrows and poking at his mashed potatoes without taking a bite, “thanks for the invitation to your shopping festivities, but I have to work. We’re doing this horrible all-nighter thing at the Grind so that people who are up for the midnight sales can have someplace to get their coffee before they go shopping. I’m working from ten at night to six in the morning.”
“That sounds awful,” I announce. He’s still just poking at his potatoes, and I know exactly what he wants, but for whatever reason, he won’t go get it, even though he knows where everything is by now. Rolling my eyes, I retrieve a bottle of barbecue sauce from the fridge and set it down in front of him before returning to my seat. He nods his thanks, unscrews the cap, and tips a generous amount onto his mashed potatoes. At Bree’s questioning glance, I say, “What? Don’t tell me you lived with the guy for seventeen years and never noticed he does that.”
She shrugs. “Guess I haven’t spent nearly as much time staring at him over the dinner table as you have.”
“No one has spent as much time staring at him over the dinner table as I have,” I agree. “Or touching him under the dinner table, either.”
Travis looks mortified, Bree looks appalled, and Dad just stabs viciously at his turkey and grits out, “So, are they giving you some sort of bonus for working the odd shift?”
“They’re counting it as a holiday so I get time-and-a-half,” Travis answers. “I’m pretty much planning to leave the shop at six, go home, and pass out for a few hours before I go back for the three-to-eleven shift. I’d be totally useless with picking out toys for Ben’s sisters anyway. I don’t even know any kids other than the girls, since I’m the youngest person in the family.”
“That’s such a lie,” Bree says. “What about Christian and Zachary?”
My brow furrows. “Who are Christian and Zachary?”
“Dad’s kids,” she says, shrugging. Travis freezes halfway through the act of accepting the bowl of green beans from Mom, who fumbles for the dish so it won’t slip between them and hit the table. Bree stares back at her brother. “Okay, please tell me you know about Dad and Monica having the boys.”
I gesture to him. “Is that the face of someone who knew that? Because it looks more like the face of someone who just awkwardly had that revealed to him during the middle of a holiday dinner in which he already feels disconnected from his family, but I could be wrong—”
“I have brothers?” Travis says, staring at his sister.
She looks wildly uncomfortable. “They’re twins. They were born in the first Saturday of October. I don’t—Dad called me at school to tell me. He said he was going to call you next.”
“Travis works on Saturdays,” I say, setting my fork down so that I can slip my hands beneath the table and clench them into fists. “Hank must have called while he was out, and I guess Evelyn just didn’t think it was important to pass along the message.”
That self-important, child-neglecting, petty little bitch. How the fuck could she keep something like that from him? Even taking her silent treatment situation into account, how could she not grant a reprieve for five fucking minutes to tell him that his dad had just fathered two more kids? Or at least tell him to call his dad back?
Travis is still just staring at Bree as he repeats, “I have brothers.” It’s not a question this time. It’s a statement, or an announcement, like he’s trying to get himself used to the idea. Fucking hell, this revelation couldn’t be coming at a worse time—I can’t imagine how he feels right now, finding out that there are more McCall babies in the world, right after Joss has gotten rid of his.
Not really caring if anyone realizes what I’m doing, I slouch a little lower in my seat so that I can kick a leg over towards him and slip my toes under the hem of his pant leg, just a reassuring touch to his ankle so that he knows I’m here for him. He flicks a smile in my direction and turns to his sister to ask, “How’s that econ class of yours going?”
The rest of the early evening carries on like that. We wind our way through casual conversation for the duration of dinner, and then into dessert. It’s a little before six, and I’m loading the dishwasher when Mom stands up and says, “I should really be heading back to the city soon. I can’t even imagine how horrible the traffic is going to be, and I’d rather not be getting home at two in the morning.”
“We should be going, too,” Bree says, rising from her seat as well. “I was planning on hanging out at Josh’s for a bit tonight, and I’ve got to drop Trav at home before I go. Want me to grab our coats?”
He must nod, because she strides out of the room to wherever the coats have been left—the study, probably. Dad goes with her to retrieve Mom’s coat, but Mom herself comes over and pulls me away from the dishes and into a hug. “Happy Thanksgiving, Garen. Don’t forget to call. I’d like to hear from you sometime before Hanukkah.”
“Obviously. How will you know what awesome presents to buy me if I don’t call you to tell you what I want first?” I say.
She rolls her eyes at me--why does everyone in my life insist on doing that so much?—and moves to where Travis is still standing next to the table. To both our surprise, she squeezes his shoulder, kisses him on the top of the head and says, “Happy Thanksgiving, Travis. I look forward to seeing you again soon.”
“Yeah,” he says, looking so stunned at a maternal display of affection that I have to turn quickly to face the dishwasher again. “I, um—you, too. Thank you.”
Mom slips back out of the kitchen, and for a long moment, there is silence. I’m reaching for the last dessert plate when a pair of arms winds around my waist and draws me back against the warmth of Travis’ chest. He buries his face against the nape of my neck and mumbles, “Today meant a lot to me. Thank you for asking us over.”
I can’t feel his heartbeat through all the layers of clothing between us, but I’m sure he must be able to hear mine. I dry my hands on a dish towel so that I won’t ruin his suit when I reach to cover his forearms with my palms. “Technically, Dad asked you.”
“It was your idea,” Travis says. I don’t deny it; I’m too busy trying not to turn around in the circle of his arms and kiss him. Will there ever be a time when he touches me and I don’t want to crawl inside his soul and stay there forever?
I can hear the click of Bree’s high heels on the floor down the hall. Travis must be able to hear it too, because he sighs and steps back. I’ve never felt colder than I do in that moment, but I still manage to turn around, lean back against the counter, and smile. Bree sails back into the room and tosses Travis his coat. “Ready to go?”
“Yeah,” Travis says, though his eyes are fixed on mine and he’s practically vibrating from how hard he’s mentally chanting, ask me to stay, ask me to stay, ask me to stay. “I’ll, uh, we can head—”
“Or you could hang out for a little while longer,” I say, rolling my eyes up towards the ceiling so that I can pretend not to see the smirk that Bree is shooting at me from across the room. “I don’t have plans. And if Bree’s taking the car to go see her boyfriend, I can just drop you off later.”
He’s nodding almost before my sentence is complete. “Yeah, that would be awesome.”
“Awesome,” Bree says, clearly mocking both of us. She snatches Travis’ coat away from him and tosses it over the back of the nearest chair before stepping close to me and giving me a firm hug. “Great seeing you again, G.”
“Mm. I’ll text you,” I offer, and she nods, whacking her brother’s arm one last time before she strolls back out towards the front door, leaving Travis and I alone in the silent kitchen.
“Gotta tell you, dude, you’re kind of ruining my Thanksgiving plans,” I finally say. “I usually go for the cliche, post-meal sleeping.”
He shrugs. “You could sleep, if you wanted to.”
“And that would leave you doing what, exactly?” I ask, latching the dishwasher shut and punching the ‘start’ button.
“I could, um,” he says, scratching the back of his neck and avoiding my eyes. “I could sleep, too, maybe. Since I’ve got to work a crazy shift in a few hours anyway.”
The last time he slept in my bed with me, he ended up with his hand on my dick, which led to me getting kicked in the nuts. In retrospect, it was kind of worth it. But he doesn’t have a girlfriend anymore. Now it’s just me, and Travis, and my bed, and a pile of warm blankets I want to burrow into so that I can lull myself into a food coma with him beside me. The image is so clear in my mind that all I can think to say is, “That sounds perfect.”
The smile he offers me in response is sweet and shy. “Okay.”
I lead the way down to my bedroom without another word, but once we’re inside and I’ve shut the door, he strips off his jacket and hangs it over the back of my desk chair. I try not to ogle the slim cut of his Oxford in favor of offering, “If you want to borrow some clothes so you don’t have to worry about going home in a wrinkled suit, I can give you some stuff to wear.”
His sweet smile turns a little bit wry as he admits, “I’m sort of looking forward to seeing my mom’s face when I come home from your house in messed-up clothes.”
I yawn. “If I weren’t about to fall asleep, I’d offer to help you mess them up in an entirely different way.”
“I’m sure you would. It’s the thought that counts,” he says, patting my wrist. I think I’m still smiling at him when I fade into sleep a few minutes later.
When I wake up next, probably around an hour later, my legs are tangled up with Travis’, who seems to be just awakening as well, and there’s only one thought in my mind. The moment he blinks over and catches my eye, I say somberly, “Pie.”
He shifts to prop himself up on his elbows, though his head remains twisted to the side so that he can stare down at me in disbelief. “Pie. You ate two plates of real food, polished off three slices of pie, passed out for an hour or two, and now you’re awake and ready for—”
“—more pie, yes,” I say. “I’m really not understanding your confusion here, man. That’s the whole point of a Thanksgiving power nap. Tricking your body into thinking it wants more delicious treats inside of it. Right now, all I’m trying to decide is whether I’m going to want pumpkin or pecan.”
“Have a small slice of each,” Travis suggests, and I think he’s just being an asshole, but it’s a good idea, and I think my enthusiasm shows on my face, because he’s grinning at me.
Because it’s a holiday, and holidays are a time for generosity, I allow, “You can have some pie, too. A small piece. Of the pecan. Because sometimes I can have that on random days throughout the year, but I only ever really get pumpkin pie on Thanksgiving, and you’re great and all, but not as great as—”
“Can I kiss you?”
“—pumpkin pie,” I finish slowly. His eyebrows are a little raised, but he’s still smiling—the sort of smile that’s still kind of forming, like the start of a laugh. I say, “That was me finishing my sentence, not me… doing some uh, some weird nickname thing, and can you what me?”
“Can I kiss you?” he repeats. His smile is fading a little, replacing itself with hesitation, as if he’s honestly unsure of my answer. The answer I can’t even manage to get out right now, because I’m not entirely sure that he really asked the question. I’ve got to be hallucinating this, right? He can’t really be saying these words to me, not when I’ve been waiting so long to hear them. Whatever face I’m making must not be particularly reassuring, because he sits up quickly and says, “I-It’s okay, if you say no. That’s completely fine, I just thought maybe I’d ask, and—do you still, um. Do you still want more—”
“Yes,” I interrupt once I’ve finally found my voice. His eyes shoot back to my face, hesitantly hopeful, but he still hasn’t moved, so I sit up and repeat, “Yes.”
Without another word, he curls a hand over the back of my neck and leans in to kiss me. From the instant our lips touch, I feel like I’ve lost my fucking mind. My hands are shaking a little, but I manage to grip the front of his shirt to keep him anchored to me. His own hand shifts from my neck to my hair, twining the strands between his fingers and tugging just gently enough to remind me that this is really happening. My entire body feels like it has been taken over by a bone-deep, earth-shattering happiness. This is what I’ve been craving for months now, and it’s too much and not enough all at once. I break away and let my forehead drop to his shoulder.
“Is this okay?” he whispers, fingertips still working against my scalp. My heart is pounding too hard for me to speak; my breath is coming in shaky little huffs, and holy shit, this is so embarrassing. I can’t believe I’m freaking out right now, like a middle-school girl who’s just gotten her first kiss. Travis shifts both his hands to my jaw so that he can guide my head back until our eyes meet again. His voice is more urgent now as he says, “Garen, is this o—”
I nod sharply, hauling him in by his shirt, and our mouths crash together with enough force to almost cause us to overbalance. He just goes with it, pushes me onto my back and sinks down to cover my body with his. His hands won’t stop roving over me, palms skimming up my sides, across my chest, from my shoulders down my biceps and forearms to tangle his fingers with mine. Even that contact must still not be enough to satisfy him, because he pulls back enough to speak, but I chase his mouth with mine. He tries again, but it just keeps happening, back further and further, until we’re both upright again. He’s settled in my lap, his legs on either side of my hips, and I’ve got an arm wound around his waist, but he catches my face between his palms to push me back enough that he can finally say, in a voice so urgent it nearly breaks me, “I’ve missed you so much, G.”
“I know,” I say, still digging my fingers into any part of him I can reach. I just need to be sure that he’s here, that he’s real, that I’m not letting myself be taken over by another one of my impossible fantasies. But then he’s kissing me again, it’s the realest thing I’ve ever felt. After a moment, it’s my turn to separate our mouths just enough to say, “I-I’m not going to say it right now, I don’t think it’s—but you know, don’t you? You know how I feel about you, even without me saying it?”
He nods. “I know. God, of course I know. Me too, okay? I feel that way, too. I—”
I swallow up the rest of his words. For the first time in forever, we’re kissing like we did when we were together. Neither of us is holding back, or resisting, or focusing on anything but the brush of lips and slide of tongues. I think I must be wrinkling the material of his shirt from how I keep gripping it, though Travis’ solution his end of that problem seems to be to tug the hem of my shirt up and duck down to mouth across my skin. The second his tongue comes in contact with one of my nipples, I practically pass out, because it’s just like it was with the body shots, but with so much more intent, like this is going somewhere right now.
Because it is. It’s going somewhere. Fuck.
“Wait, stop, stop, stop,” I say, catching his shoulders and pulling him back up. “This is a bad idea.”
He snorts. “I’m sorry, but have you seen what you look like without a shirt on? This is literally the best idea I’ve ever had.”
“No, I mean, obviously, but…” I hesitate long enough to push his hair back and press a kiss to his forehead. “I want you, but I want… slower. Please, dude, I can’t—” I have to break off to swallow, even though my mouth has never been this dry before. “I can’t fuck this up by rushing into something you might not want tomorrow.”
His face softens a little. He pulls my shirt back into place and says, “I’ll want it tomorrow. You know I will. But if you say you want to go slower, we will. Okay?”
I nod, smooth the fabric of my shirt down a little, and kiss him again. He hesitates now, though, like he thinks I’m likely to shove him off and declare the whole thing a mistake. It’s the stupidest thing ever, but cute-stupid, not awful-stupid. I pull him closer and say, “Dude, that was a yellow light, not a red one. Fucking kiss me already.”
We’re both still grinning into the next kiss, and we end up tangled up together in bed for hours. Sometimes the meeting of our mouths is fun and playful, and sometimes it’s heated enough to leave us both turned on and panting a little, and sometimes it’s deep and slow and it matters so much that I think my heart’s about to beat right out of my chest. Eventually, though, he breaks away and says, “We need to leave. I have to get home, I’ve gotta get ready for work.”
“No, that’s dumb,” I protest, kissing along his jawline. “You’re dumb.” He mutters something that might be you’re such a fucking sweet-talker, dude, what the hell, but I’m too busy popping the top button on his shirt so that I can pull his collar aside and suck a mark into the side of his neck.
His hips stutter up against mine, and he pushes at my shoulders. “O-Okay, if you plan for us to not rush things, you’re going to need to not do that right now. And you’re going to need to bring me home.”
“Fine,” I grumble, reluctantly clambering off the bed after him. It takes more effort than it should to let him out of the basement, but I can’t keep my hands off him. It’s been months since I had free license to touch him, and he already looks so debauched, just from kissing. He just keeps grinning at me, like he thinks my wandering hands are cute; really, he keeps smiling at me all the way upstairs, out into the car, for the whole ride back to his place.
Once I’ve turned into his driveway, I expect some sort of awkwardness to set in. Truthfully, I’m expecting him to say something about how it was nice, but it can’t happen again. Instead, he says, “I’ll probably see you sometime tomorrow, won’t I? The odds of you making it through toy-shopping for hours without stopping by for coffee at least once are slim.”
“Yeah, definitely. I’ll totally stop by. I mean, if that’s okay. Like, if you want me to. Because if you—”
“I want you.” He catches the lapel of my jacket and drags me in, pressing his lips to mine with enough pressure to make his point clear, but still somehow just enough to tease. I don’t move back to my side of the car when he releases me—I’m too dazed to handle it, really—so he pushes against my upper arm until I slump back into my seat. I’m not aware of my eyes being closed until suddenly they’re open and he’s smirking a little as he amends, “To. I want you to. Stop by the Grind, that is.”
“Okay,” I say, my voice a little higher than I’d like it to be. “That’s—cool. I’ll see you tomorrow, then.”
He presses one last quick kiss to the corner of my mouth before he breathes, “Thanks again for dinner. Goodnight,” and gets out of the car. I stare shamelessly as he makes his way up to the porch. He opens the front door, but pauses and turns back to give me a wide smile and the world’s dorkiest fucking wave. I wave back. He disappears into the house, but it’s another ten solid minutes before I can stop shaking enough to drive.