Author's Note: This chapter contains graphic sexual content, descriptions of past domestic violence, and... some minor child abuse, I guess?
"Some couples divorce because of a misunderstanding; others, because they understand each other too well." -Evan Esar
36 days sober
Wednesday comes more quickly than I expect it to, and with it, the meeting with the divorce lawyers. One minute, I’m hanging out with Stohler, then I’m sitting in class, then I’m trudging down the hall to rehearsal, and then suddenly, I’m wearing a suit and sitting on the edge of a chair outside the main conference room in my mom’s office building. The suit is her idea, of course; she’d shoved a garment bag into my hands the second I stepped off the train at Grand Central that afternoon. Apparently, my standard attire of jeans, boots, and a leather jacket is just as shameful for a meeting as it was for the nice dinner she took me to last month. I kind of hate the suit, or at least, I hate the jacket. It’s made of some too-thin material that had made the lapel bulge when I’d tried to stash my cigarettes in the inside pocket. I’d had no choice but to toss the half-full pack before coming inside, and now, all I want is a fucking smoke. I settle for sending a disgruntled text to Jamie. this stupid meeting better not take too long, i’m already bored & it hasn’t even started.
It’s a few minutes before he replies, Have you and the she-bitch started bickering yet?
she’s not even here, am still waiting in the hall for her to show up, I type. btw, if you don’t already have plans tonight, wanna get dinner after I’m done here?
Come over instead. I’ve been on this weird cooking binge ever since your travel-size sex slave tried to one-up me in front of Alexander by making those pancakes. I want to get back at him by cooking his boyfriend a fantastic meal and then convincing you to fuck me on my kitchen table. And possibly sending pictures of it to him. There’s a beat, then another text arrives. ‘It’ meaning the fucking, not the meal. A few seconds, then a third text. Maybe the meal, too.
Before I have time to respond, a voice from halfway down the hall calls out, “Hey, Garen. Miss me?”
My face splits into a smile when I look up and find myself staring at Bree McCall. College has been good to her; her once-long blond hair has been chopped off into a pixie cut that makes her eyes look bigger and her cheekbones look razor-sharp. She’s wearing a dark blue dress and a pair of gray heels that are high enough to look painful, but not high enough to stop her from trotting down the hall and flinging her arms around my neck the moment I’ve stood up. I hug her tightly and murmur, “You look fucking beautiful, Bridget.”
“Not so bad yourself, Anderson. Except for this,” she says, making a face and flicking my lip ring with the tip of her finger.
I laugh. “It looks dumb as shit because of the suit, but I haven’t had it long enough to be able to take it out without having to worry about it healing up.”
“You say that like it would be a bad thing,” she says, moving to sit down. “So, how have you been? How’s school? Are you seeing anyone?”
“Fine, boring, and yes, in that order,” I say, and she raises her eyebrows at my final answer. It’s hard to miss the way her attention flickers back over her shoulder, to where her brother and mother are both lingering by the elevator twenty feet away. I shake my head once, a quick confirmation that I haven’t actually started banging her brother again, like I had the last time I told her I was seeing someone. She looks… relieved, maybe, but also a little confused. In the interest of not continuing this awkward conversational train, I gesture to the conference room door. “We’re all supposed to go in, now that you guys are here.”
She turns and calls, “Mom, Trav. This is the room.”
Travis shoves his hands into the pockets of his dark blue trousers and edges past me into the conference room without saying a word or making eye contact. I do my best to school my face into a neutral expression, but Bree looks unconvinced, as does Evelyn. My stepmother’s approach is slower, more purposeful; just outside the door, she shoots me the sort of look she might give something disgusting she’s just stepped in.
I feel unimaginably small.
The moment her mother has cleared the door, Bree grabs my wrist to prevent me from following and quietly asks, “How have you really been?”
I swallow hard and try to force a smile, but it won’t come. After a few too many seconds pass, I have to say, “Not that great. Kind of shitty, actually. I, um… did your brother tell you about what happened last month?” Her curious expression tells me no. I take a deep breath before I admit, “I had a pretty bad relapse in early September. I’ve been clean for over a month now, but it’s still a hell of a lot harder than I thought it would be. And today—this fucking meeting isn’t going to make it any easier. I hate the way your mom looks at me, and I hate that your brother and I can’t talk to each other anymore, and—”
“Wait, why can’t you talk to each other anymore?” Bree interrupts, frowning.
Fuck, of course Travis hasn’t told his family about the agreement with Joss, about the pregnancy. His sister has no idea that she’s going to have a niece or nephew in less than a year, his mom has no idea she’ll be a grandmother right around the time her son graduates high school. My stomach is rolling, like the confession is rattling around inside of me, trying to get out, but I’ve kept quiet about it ever since last Friday, when I told Stohler. I haven’t even told Jamie, or Ben. I can’t fuck that up now. I shake my head and step into the conference room without answering.
There are six chairs at the conference table, three on each side. My mother is sitting at one end, opposite Evelyn’s smarmy, balding lawyer. Evelyn herself is sitting next to her lawyer; I drop into the seat across from her, next to my mom. Travis takes a hesitant step towards the table, and his sister gives him a rough shove into the chair next to me. He scowls at her, and she smiles beatifically at him as she takes the remaining seat next to their mother.
There is a half-second of silence, and then I roll my eyes and rise slightly from my chair to extend my hand to the other lawyer. “We haven’t met. Garen Anderson.”
“Darryl Kimball,” he says, accepting my handshake even though he seems vaguely surprised at the fact that I’ve actually got enough manners to introduce myself. I can just imagine all the horror stories Evelyn has told him about me. But the introduction is enough to break that instant of tension, and Kimball continues, “Well, now that we’re all acquainted, let’s talk about how this meeting is going to go. This is an informal interview—” I glare at my mother and wish once more that I could be wearing my own clothes for this apparently informal interview, “—so that we’re all on the same page for the particulars of this situation. Everything that’s said here will be recorded and may be referred back to in the future, if we can’t reach a full agreement and need to bring this to court.”
“Essentially, this is an opportunity for Mr. Kimball and I to hear a fresh perspective on the living situation that existed during the time that Mr. Anderson and Mrs. McCall were married,” Mom says. “We’re going to address each of you individually. If any of you is uncomfortable conducting your interview in the presence of the others, you can request that the room be cleared of everyone except for the two of us. We will both have a chance to ask you questions, but it’s best if you all provide as much of your own testimony as possible. Any questions?”
Bree shakes her head. Travis shrugs. I don’t move.
Kimball rubs his hands together, like a cartoon villain. “Excellent. Shall we start with the oldest, then?”
That’s Bree by six months. I wait to see if we’re going to be sent to wait in the hall, but she just sits up a little straighter and says, “Yes, sure.”
Apparently Kimball has already gotten his share of interview time with her, because he gestures for my mom to go ahead. That’s not too surprising—I doubt my mom will have many questions for me, considering she’s been hearing my version of events for months now. She turns her attention to Bree and asks, “During the time you were living together, did you and William ever have any conflict? Any arguments, altercations, anything of that nature?”
Bree shakes her head. “No, Bill and I got along really well. He’s a nice guy.”
“Did you ever witness any conflict between him and your brother?” Mom presses.
“Um,” Bree says, considering. “Sort of? I mean, when we first moved in, they didn’t really talk much. Travis was kind of being a brat about the whole thing.” Travis kicks her under the table, and she kicks him right back. They glare at each other, and I stifle a smile. “Anyway, the only argument I ever saw between them was, um… the day Garen left. Travis yelled at Bill, but that was it. Bill didn’t even yell back. And things got better after that. I never saw them fight again.”
In another universe, things could have been even better. If Dad hadn’t married Evelyn, if I’d been able to bring Travis home as my boyfriend, they probably would have gotten along perfectly. He would have realized how good things were, how much better I was when I had Travis. Under the table, I ball my hands into fists tight enough to hurt.
“Did you ever witness any conflict between your mother and Garen?” Mom asks.
I can’t help it; I burst out laughing. Mom shoots me a warning glance, and Evelyn glares daggers at me across the table. I clamp a hand over my mouth to try to stifle the sounds, but that mostly just results in me quietly snorting into my palm, like a total fucking moron. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see that a muscle in Travis’ jaw is working as he tries to keep a straight face. I drop my hand and clear my throat, trying my hardest to be a real adult. I say, “So sorry about that. Didn’t mean to interrupt. You were saying, Bridget?”
Travis turns sharply to face in the opposite direction, but his refusal to let us see his face does nothing to stop us from seeing the slight trembling of his shoulders as he tries to control his laughter. Bree shoots an exasperated look at each of us and mutters, “Honestly, you’re both complete idiots. No wonder you’re so perfect for each other.”
That instantly sobers both of us up, and earns her another, harder kick from Travis.
Kimball coughs discreetly into his fist, and Mom says mildly, “You know, I did ask a question.”
“Right, sorry,” Bree says, reddening. “Um. Yes. Mom and Garen fought all the time, after he came back.”
“About what?”
“Everything,” Bree says with a faint laugh. She hesitates, shoots her mom an apologetic glance and says, “Mom, um… Mom used to say that Garen h-had molested Travis, and I think that caused a lot of tension between her and Bill. I heard them fighting a lot, but Garen never really got involved with that. He never denied it, he never talked about it, not after he came back from New York in April. All the arguments they had were about… I don’t know. Stupid things? Mom would get mad when Garen would go out without telling her and Bill where he was going, or when he’d stay out late. She was so pissed when he got his piercings, too.” She gestures to my face, and I sneak the tip of my tongue out to wiggle my lip ring at her. She rolls her eyes and says, “He had two then, and Mom told him he had to take them out, even though he’s eighteen. His dad didn’t really care, but Mom did. She got mad about the tattoo, too. They had a huge blowout that night, but I didn’t want to deal with it, so I went to go spend the night at my friend Molly’s house. This is the first time I’ve seen them in the same room since then.”
Mom, who has been taking periodic notes this whole time, sets her pen down and steeples her fingers together. “And what about when they weren’t in the same room? What type of things did you mom say about Garen when he wasn’t around, and what type of things did he say about her?”
Oh, Christ. Mom knows exactly what type of things I say about Evelyn when she’s not around. Thankfully, I don’t think Bree does—after I came back from New York, the things I said to her were pretty much limited to bullshit. No, it doesn’t bother me that Travis and Ben are together. Yeah, I’m totally sober right now. What, this black eye? I walked into a door, it doesn’t even hurt.
Bree’s hesitation returns in full force, and after a few too many seconds, she says, “I think I’d like to clear the room after all. You know, if that’s still okay?”
“Of course it’s okay,” Kimball reassures her. Travis is the first out of the room. I take my time, but mainly because I want to hear Evelyn’s protests get denied. She huffs and scoffs and pouts like a kid, but eventually, we’re both forced out into the hall. She spares me one disgusted look before storming off in the direct of the office’s break room, presumably to make herself the cup of coffee my mom suggested. Travis is pacing the hallway; I return to my previously vacated chair, extract my iPod from my suit pocket and pop one of the earbuds in. It’s the only refuge I have from this godawful silence, and I’ve got no idea how long Bree’s going to take to say whatever it is she doesn’t think I can handle hearing.
I manage to tolerate about forty-five seconds of Travis’ pacing before I fling a leg out in front of him and try to trip him. He stays upright, but turns to shoot me a bewildered stare. I arch an eyebrow and incline my head to the seat next to me, offering up the other earbud to him. He casts a quick glance over his shoulder towards where his mom disappeared, but she’s still missing. He sinks into the seat and accepts the earbud, and I cue up a song from some Canadian pop-punk band I know he listens to—I’d put some of their songs on the iPod I gave him for his last birthday, and I’ve heard him humming a few of their songs on occasion. The song has only been playing for one verse before he plucks the iPod from my hand and scrolls through the music until he has settled on another, slower, sadder song by the same band. I roll my eyes, but don’t change it back.
Wednesday comes more quickly than I expect it to, and with it, the meeting with the divorce lawyers. One minute, I’m hanging out with Stohler, then I’m sitting in class, then I’m trudging down the hall to rehearsal, and then suddenly, I’m wearing a suit and sitting on the edge of a chair outside the main conference room in my mom’s office building. The suit is her idea, of course; she’d shoved a garment bag into my hands the second I stepped off the train at Grand Central that afternoon. Apparently, my standard attire of jeans, boots, and a leather jacket is just as shameful for a meeting as it was for the nice dinner she took me to last month. I kind of hate the suit, or at least, I hate the jacket. It’s made of some too-thin material that had made the lapel bulge when I’d tried to stash my cigarettes in the inside pocket. I’d had no choice but to toss the half-full pack before coming inside, and now, all I want is a fucking smoke. I settle for sending a disgruntled text to Jamie. this stupid meeting better not take too long, i’m already bored & it hasn’t even started.
It’s a few minutes before he replies, Have you and the she-bitch started bickering yet?
she’s not even here, am still waiting in the hall for her to show up, I type. btw, if you don’t already have plans tonight, wanna get dinner after I’m done here?
Come over instead. I’ve been on this weird cooking binge ever since your travel-size sex slave tried to one-up me in front of Alexander by making those pancakes. I want to get back at him by cooking his boyfriend a fantastic meal and then convincing you to fuck me on my kitchen table. And possibly sending pictures of it to him. There’s a beat, then another text arrives. ‘It’ meaning the fucking, not the meal. A few seconds, then a third text. Maybe the meal, too.
Before I have time to respond, a voice from halfway down the hall calls out, “Hey, Garen. Miss me?”
My face splits into a smile when I look up and find myself staring at Bree McCall. College has been good to her; her once-long blond hair has been chopped off into a pixie cut that makes her eyes look bigger and her cheekbones look razor-sharp. She’s wearing a dark blue dress and a pair of gray heels that are high enough to look painful, but not high enough to stop her from trotting down the hall and flinging her arms around my neck the moment I’ve stood up. I hug her tightly and murmur, “You look fucking beautiful, Bridget.”
“Not so bad yourself, Anderson. Except for this,” she says, making a face and flicking my lip ring with the tip of her finger.
I laugh. “It looks dumb as shit because of the suit, but I haven’t had it long enough to be able to take it out without having to worry about it healing up.”
“You say that like it would be a bad thing,” she says, moving to sit down. “So, how have you been? How’s school? Are you seeing anyone?”
“Fine, boring, and yes, in that order,” I say, and she raises her eyebrows at my final answer. It’s hard to miss the way her attention flickers back over her shoulder, to where her brother and mother are both lingering by the elevator twenty feet away. I shake my head once, a quick confirmation that I haven’t actually started banging her brother again, like I had the last time I told her I was seeing someone. She looks… relieved, maybe, but also a little confused. In the interest of not continuing this awkward conversational train, I gesture to the conference room door. “We’re all supposed to go in, now that you guys are here.”
She turns and calls, “Mom, Trav. This is the room.”
Travis shoves his hands into the pockets of his dark blue trousers and edges past me into the conference room without saying a word or making eye contact. I do my best to school my face into a neutral expression, but Bree looks unconvinced, as does Evelyn. My stepmother’s approach is slower, more purposeful; just outside the door, she shoots me the sort of look she might give something disgusting she’s just stepped in.
I feel unimaginably small.
The moment her mother has cleared the door, Bree grabs my wrist to prevent me from following and quietly asks, “How have you really been?”
I swallow hard and try to force a smile, but it won’t come. After a few too many seconds pass, I have to say, “Not that great. Kind of shitty, actually. I, um… did your brother tell you about what happened last month?” Her curious expression tells me no. I take a deep breath before I admit, “I had a pretty bad relapse in early September. I’ve been clean for over a month now, but it’s still a hell of a lot harder than I thought it would be. And today—this fucking meeting isn’t going to make it any easier. I hate the way your mom looks at me, and I hate that your brother and I can’t talk to each other anymore, and—”
“Wait, why can’t you talk to each other anymore?” Bree interrupts, frowning.
Fuck, of course Travis hasn’t told his family about the agreement with Joss, about the pregnancy. His sister has no idea that she’s going to have a niece or nephew in less than a year, his mom has no idea she’ll be a grandmother right around the time her son graduates high school. My stomach is rolling, like the confession is rattling around inside of me, trying to get out, but I’ve kept quiet about it ever since last Friday, when I told Stohler. I haven’t even told Jamie, or Ben. I can’t fuck that up now. I shake my head and step into the conference room without answering.
There are six chairs at the conference table, three on each side. My mother is sitting at one end, opposite Evelyn’s smarmy, balding lawyer. Evelyn herself is sitting next to her lawyer; I drop into the seat across from her, next to my mom. Travis takes a hesitant step towards the table, and his sister gives him a rough shove into the chair next to me. He scowls at her, and she smiles beatifically at him as she takes the remaining seat next to their mother.
There is a half-second of silence, and then I roll my eyes and rise slightly from my chair to extend my hand to the other lawyer. “We haven’t met. Garen Anderson.”
“Darryl Kimball,” he says, accepting my handshake even though he seems vaguely surprised at the fact that I’ve actually got enough manners to introduce myself. I can just imagine all the horror stories Evelyn has told him about me. But the introduction is enough to break that instant of tension, and Kimball continues, “Well, now that we’re all acquainted, let’s talk about how this meeting is going to go. This is an informal interview—” I glare at my mother and wish once more that I could be wearing my own clothes for this apparently informal interview, “—so that we’re all on the same page for the particulars of this situation. Everything that’s said here will be recorded and may be referred back to in the future, if we can’t reach a full agreement and need to bring this to court.”
“Essentially, this is an opportunity for Mr. Kimball and I to hear a fresh perspective on the living situation that existed during the time that Mr. Anderson and Mrs. McCall were married,” Mom says. “We’re going to address each of you individually. If any of you is uncomfortable conducting your interview in the presence of the others, you can request that the room be cleared of everyone except for the two of us. We will both have a chance to ask you questions, but it’s best if you all provide as much of your own testimony as possible. Any questions?”
Bree shakes her head. Travis shrugs. I don’t move.
Kimball rubs his hands together, like a cartoon villain. “Excellent. Shall we start with the oldest, then?”
That’s Bree by six months. I wait to see if we’re going to be sent to wait in the hall, but she just sits up a little straighter and says, “Yes, sure.”
Apparently Kimball has already gotten his share of interview time with her, because he gestures for my mom to go ahead. That’s not too surprising—I doubt my mom will have many questions for me, considering she’s been hearing my version of events for months now. She turns her attention to Bree and asks, “During the time you were living together, did you and William ever have any conflict? Any arguments, altercations, anything of that nature?”
Bree shakes her head. “No, Bill and I got along really well. He’s a nice guy.”
“Did you ever witness any conflict between him and your brother?” Mom presses.
“Um,” Bree says, considering. “Sort of? I mean, when we first moved in, they didn’t really talk much. Travis was kind of being a brat about the whole thing.” Travis kicks her under the table, and she kicks him right back. They glare at each other, and I stifle a smile. “Anyway, the only argument I ever saw between them was, um… the day Garen left. Travis yelled at Bill, but that was it. Bill didn’t even yell back. And things got better after that. I never saw them fight again.”
In another universe, things could have been even better. If Dad hadn’t married Evelyn, if I’d been able to bring Travis home as my boyfriend, they probably would have gotten along perfectly. He would have realized how good things were, how much better I was when I had Travis. Under the table, I ball my hands into fists tight enough to hurt.
“Did you ever witness any conflict between your mother and Garen?” Mom asks.
I can’t help it; I burst out laughing. Mom shoots me a warning glance, and Evelyn glares daggers at me across the table. I clamp a hand over my mouth to try to stifle the sounds, but that mostly just results in me quietly snorting into my palm, like a total fucking moron. Out of the corner of my eye, I can see that a muscle in Travis’ jaw is working as he tries to keep a straight face. I drop my hand and clear my throat, trying my hardest to be a real adult. I say, “So sorry about that. Didn’t mean to interrupt. You were saying, Bridget?”
Travis turns sharply to face in the opposite direction, but his refusal to let us see his face does nothing to stop us from seeing the slight trembling of his shoulders as he tries to control his laughter. Bree shoots an exasperated look at each of us and mutters, “Honestly, you’re both complete idiots. No wonder you’re so perfect for each other.”
That instantly sobers both of us up, and earns her another, harder kick from Travis.
Kimball coughs discreetly into his fist, and Mom says mildly, “You know, I did ask a question.”
“Right, sorry,” Bree says, reddening. “Um. Yes. Mom and Garen fought all the time, after he came back.”
“About what?”
“Everything,” Bree says with a faint laugh. She hesitates, shoots her mom an apologetic glance and says, “Mom, um… Mom used to say that Garen h-had molested Travis, and I think that caused a lot of tension between her and Bill. I heard them fighting a lot, but Garen never really got involved with that. He never denied it, he never talked about it, not after he came back from New York in April. All the arguments they had were about… I don’t know. Stupid things? Mom would get mad when Garen would go out without telling her and Bill where he was going, or when he’d stay out late. She was so pissed when he got his piercings, too.” She gestures to my face, and I sneak the tip of my tongue out to wiggle my lip ring at her. She rolls her eyes and says, “He had two then, and Mom told him he had to take them out, even though he’s eighteen. His dad didn’t really care, but Mom did. She got mad about the tattoo, too. They had a huge blowout that night, but I didn’t want to deal with it, so I went to go spend the night at my friend Molly’s house. This is the first time I’ve seen them in the same room since then.”
Mom, who has been taking periodic notes this whole time, sets her pen down and steeples her fingers together. “And what about when they weren’t in the same room? What type of things did you mom say about Garen when he wasn’t around, and what type of things did he say about her?”
Oh, Christ. Mom knows exactly what type of things I say about Evelyn when she’s not around. Thankfully, I don’t think Bree does—after I came back from New York, the things I said to her were pretty much limited to bullshit. No, it doesn’t bother me that Travis and Ben are together. Yeah, I’m totally sober right now. What, this black eye? I walked into a door, it doesn’t even hurt.
Bree’s hesitation returns in full force, and after a few too many seconds, she says, “I think I’d like to clear the room after all. You know, if that’s still okay?”
“Of course it’s okay,” Kimball reassures her. Travis is the first out of the room. I take my time, but mainly because I want to hear Evelyn’s protests get denied. She huffs and scoffs and pouts like a kid, but eventually, we’re both forced out into the hall. She spares me one disgusted look before storming off in the direct of the office’s break room, presumably to make herself the cup of coffee my mom suggested. Travis is pacing the hallway; I return to my previously vacated chair, extract my iPod from my suit pocket and pop one of the earbuds in. It’s the only refuge I have from this godawful silence, and I’ve got no idea how long Bree’s going to take to say whatever it is she doesn’t think I can handle hearing.
I manage to tolerate about forty-five seconds of Travis’ pacing before I fling a leg out in front of him and try to trip him. He stays upright, but turns to shoot me a bewildered stare. I arch an eyebrow and incline my head to the seat next to me, offering up the other earbud to him. He casts a quick glance over his shoulder towards where his mom disappeared, but she’s still missing. He sinks into the seat and accepts the earbud, and I cue up a song from some Canadian pop-punk band I know he listens to—I’d put some of their songs on the iPod I gave him for his last birthday, and I’ve heard him humming a few of their songs on occasion. The song has only been playing for one verse before he plucks the iPod from my hand and scrolls through the music until he has settled on another, slower, sadder song by the same band. I roll my eyes, but don’t change it back.
Even with the music between us, the silence is still a little awkward. I wonder if I can get away with making polite conversation. What even counts as ‘polite conversation’ between people with our history? Should I ask about school, work, stage crew? Joss and the fucking baby? Even the idea of bringing up that topic makes me want to be violently, painfully ill, and I kind of get the impression he’d feel the same way.
Over our shared headphones, the singer is crooning out, I know some things should just stay broken, I’m well aware this should remain unspoken, and I can’t help but agree. And that moment—halfway through the damn song—is when I realize that the song change was intentional, not just for the sake of being contrary and dicking around with my iPod. He’s selected this song because of the lyrics, of what it’s saying, and right now, when we’re not speaking to each other, he’s doing his best to communicate with me in the only language I really understand: music.
Against my better judgment, I sneak a glance at Travis’ face. He’s watching me, nervous eyes flitting all over my face, trying to pick up any sign that I’ve understood what he’s trying to do. I don’t know what to do, or how to let him know I understand, so I reach for his hand… and lose my nerve three-quarters of the way through. My fingers end up wound loosely around his wrist, which is arguably worse, because now my thumb is brushing shakily against the inside of his wrist, right over the tattoo of my initial. He sucks in a shuddering breath.
And we both swore we were done speaking to each other, we haven’t spoken in five days now, but I think it’s probably okay for me to give a little shrug and whisper along to the next line of lyrics, “I don’t want to see you happier with somebody else.”
He opens his mouth to speak, but the conference room door swings open once more. Travis tears his hand away from mine, and I give a sharp yank to the cord of my headphones, pulling the buds from both our ears—and okay, ow, that was dumb and uncomfortable. He’s still holding the iPod, but it quickly exchanges hands, and I shove it into my pocket before looking up at the door. Bree is staring down at us, unimpressed. “Where’s Mom?”
“Down the hall,” Travis says, gesturing.
“Can I go back inside now?” I ask.
She nods. “Yeah. It’s your turn to be interviewed.”
I stand up and pause outside the door just long enough to mutter, “You guys can come in, if you want. It’s not like I’m going to say anything that you don’t both already know. I don’t really have secrets these days. But if one of you could hang out here until your mom gets back, just to make sure she doesn’t think she’s allowed to come in… that would be appreciated.”
I trudge back into the room and sink into my previous seat. Travis enters after me and still sits down on my other side, even though there are two empty seats across the table. My hand is itching with the urge to reach over and lace my fingers with his under the table, or at least grip his wrist again, but I remain completely still.
Kimball smiles genially at me. “Alright, Garen. I don’t have that many questions for you, to be frank. We all have a fairly good idea of your relationship with your stepmother—” I roll my eyes, “—so I think we can skip that. I have something I’d like you to take a look at, though.”
“I’m sure I’ll be absolutely thrilled to see whatever it is,” I say tonelessly. The door cracks back open, and Bree slips inside, thankfully alone. She offers me a tight smile before returning to her seat across from me.
“Garen, these are copies of your credit card and bank statements from the past six months,” Kimball says, sliding a stack of papers across the table. “Can you tell me how these card payments are made?”
I blink. It’s definitely not what I was expecting him to ask about. “The cards are all in my name. I make the payments using the cash that my parents deposit into my account at the beginning of every month,” I say. Part of me wants to ask how it’s any of his business, but Mom hasn’t protested, so I assume it makes sense in some roundabout legal way. Maybe because it’s Dad’s money—the money that’s being contested in this divorce—that pays the bills. Whatever.
Kimball gestures to the papers. “Can you read through the yellow-highlighted sections and tell me what those transactions are?”
The top page of the statement is from April, when I’d been holed up at Patton with Jamie. Most of the transactions are for takeout places, putting gas in my car; at the bottom of that page, a liquor store transaction is highlighted in blue, but the douche across the table had only asked about yellow. I flip to the next page, and there’s the first one—forty bucks, the day after I came back to Lakewood. Eighty bucks, the following Saturday. Another forty, the first day of May. There’s a three week gap in all of the charges after that, and then they’re back again in full force, forties and sixties and eighties every week or two, right up until the second week of June. And I remember exactly what each and every one was for.
I shove the papers back across the table. “They’re cash withdrawals.”
“Cash for what?” Kimball asks.
“How is he supposed to remember every cash purchase he’s made in the past six months?” Mom demands.
“Mom, don’t bother,” I say. It’s not like what I’m about to say will surprise anyone at this table. “I spent it on cocaine, okay? But I would wager that you already know that, or you wouldn’t be bringing it up.”
Kimball flips back to the first page and taps the liquor store charge. “And the blue-highlighted portions, what are they?”
“Well, let’s see,” I say in mock interest, paging through the documents. “Alcohol. Cigarettes. Alcohol. Alcohol. Ooh, a head shop, that’s exciting. I’m pretty sure that was a glass pipe, which means that I was mistaken earlier, this next cash withdrawal was probably for pot, not coke. Anyway, alcohol again. Cigarettes. Alcohol.” I drop the papers on the table. “You know something, Mr. Kimball? It looks like those blue-highlighted charges are mostly related to my questionable life choices.”
“Close to two thousand dollars’ worth of questionable life choices,” Kimball confirms. “I just want to make sure we’re very clear on something. All of the drugs, paraphernalia, and alcohol were purchased with your father’s money, correct?”
It sounds so much worse when he says it like that. I sigh and rub the back of my neck. “Yeah. I bought it all with my dad’s money.”
“And was he aware of this?”
“Oh, totally,” I say, nodding enthusiastically. “Whenever I needed it, I’d just be like, ‘hey, Daddy, can I have three hundred bucks for an eight ball?’ and he’d be like, ‘sure, G, just make sure that shitsnack of a dealer you use doesn’t cut it with Ritalin again.’ That was a fucking biweekly conversation in the Anderson household.”
“Garen,” Bree says softly, and I slouch down in my chair, glowering at the table.
“No, okay? My dad didn’t realize what I was doing with the money, and the second he figured out I had a problem, he emptied my account so I wouldn’t be able to buy anything else,” I snap. I haven’t exactly made a secret about how bad things got for me last summer, so I don’t feel bad about adding, “Except, you know, joke’s on him, that just means I started fucking for cash. Pretty sure he’s the only guy to ever accidentally turn his only child into a prostitute in a misguided attempt to help him.” I can feel my mom and Travis both go rigid on either side of me. Their discomfort should probably rattle me more than it does, but at this point, I’m so used to saying the wrong thing that I can barely spare it a second though. I focus my eyes on Kimball and say, “Any more questions for me?”
“Just two,” he says. “What are your plans for the fall? School-wise, that is.”
“Does it matter?” I ask. He merely shrugs. I drag a hand through my hair. “I’m still in the process of filling out my applications, so I’ve got no idea. There are five different schools I’m applying to, at my dad’s request. Some are music programs, which require auditions in the winter. As of right now, I have no idea what I’ll be doing next fall.”
When I gesture for him to continue with his final question, he smiles and asks, “How long have you been sober?”
“Fuck you,” I bite out. Next to me, Mom is clearly torn between telling me to calm down and telling Kimball to eat shit. Either way, she remains silent when I add, “Like, seriously, man? It’s really shitty that you’re trying to make it seem like my drug use is the reason Dad wanted a divorce, but we all know that’s not true. I know what she said about me, okay? I know that she called me a kike and said she wished my ex had killed me years ago. They’re getting a divorce because Bill Anderson is a good fucking father, and he didn’t want to stay married to someone who could hate his son as thoroughly as Ev hates me. And, okay, whatever—you want a fucking number? You want to quantify the progress I’ve made towards becoming a better man? Fine. I’m thirty-six days sober. And I wouldn’t have made it through a single one of those days if I was still living in the same house as that vicious, soulless bitch. Feel free to put that in your notes.”
Kimball sighs and turns to my mom. “Do you have any questions for your son?”
“No,” she says flatly. “I’ll go get Evelyn so that we can begin Travis’ interview now.”
Once Ev has been retrieved from the hall, Mom takes the lead on interviewing Travis and prompts, “Tell me about your initial relationship with your stepfather. When you first moved in together, was he welcoming? Hostile? Indifferent?”
“He was nice,” Travis says, shrugging. “We got along fine, I guess, but we honestly didn’t see much of each other. He was at work a lot, I was at work a lot, I focus on my schoolwork most of the time. We pretty much only saw each other at dinner, but when we did interact, he was cool.”
“Is that how things remained, or did you become closer, more distant, what?” she presses.
He folds his hands together on the table and says, in a voice of forced neutrality, “Things got better with Bill at pretty much the same speed that things got worse with my mom.” Evelyn gives him a sharp look, which I know he must feel, but he keeps his eyes on the table. “After I came out, Mom kind of had a hard time dealing with it, but Bill was already used to having a gay son. He said that me liking boys—” Evelyn rolls her eyes and shifts around loudly in her seat. Travis sighs and tries again, “He said me liking boys wasn’t the problem, me liking my own stepbrother was. When I started dating my next boyfriend, Ben, Bill was completely fine with it. He wanted Ben to come over for dinner, he said it was okay if I brought him to the wedding as my date. He just made me feel like what I was going through was okay, it was normal. And… I don’t know. I guess I just got more comfortable with Bill, as time went on. He’s a nice guy. And he was a good stepdad.”
Dad keeps telling me that divorce isn’t a competition, but if it is, he’s so obviously winning.
“What about your relationship with your stepbrother?” Kimball asks, barely managing to control a wolfish smile. “How was that?”
“My relationship with Garen is none of your fucking business,” Travis says sharply. I expect some sort of reproach from Evelyn, the same as the day I’d gotten kicked out and been unable to stop myself from laughing as Travis had yelled back at her, I just fucking told you I’m gay, and your fucking problem is with my fucking swearing? No retort comes today, though. When Kimball’s only response is to raise his eyebrows, Travis scowls and says, “Everyone in this room knows how our relationship was. It was good, and it was a secret, and then it wasn’t a secret anymore, and then it wasn’t a relationship anymore. That’s it.”
That’s so not it, but I don’t know how to protest.
“When your stepbrother initiated the relationship with you, did he urge you to keep it a secret from your mother?” Kimball asks.
“No,” Travis says, and I blink over at him, because yes, I definitely did. Sensing my eyes on him, he clarifies, “Sorry, what I meant was—okay, I’m the one who initiated the relationship. Not Garen.”
Evelyn scoffs. “That’s not true.”
“Mrs. McCall, your son is being interviewed, not you,” Mom says sharply, and Evelyn glowers at her, but falls silent.
All eyes return to Travis, who is staring back at his mom. For a long moment, no one speaks. Finally, he clears his throat and looks down at the table. “Would it be possible to maybe clear the room for my interview? I know I’m only seventeen, and I know I can have my mom in here, but I’d… I don’t know. I sort of prefer it if maybe she, you know, wasn’t.”
“I’m not leaving my minor child alone to be questioned,” Evelyn snaps. Strangely, her words don’t really seem to be directed towards Travis. I don’t think any of them have been, actually.
“It’s an informal interview, I’m not being questioned. I’m not being charged with anything, they’re not cops, it’s fine,” Travis says. “I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be a pain in anyone’s ass, but I am extremely uncomfortable with my mom being in the room while I’m talking about Garen.”
I scowl. For fuck’s sake, I’m not contagious. Being in the same room as someone who’s talking about me isn’t going to make Ev catch whatever it is that she’s convinced I have. Evelyn begins to protest, but Kimball leads her outside under the guise of “wanting a word with her.” Within two minutes, he has returned alone. He sinks back into his seat, gestures for Travis to continue.
The words spill out almost in a single breath, like Travis is convinced that he only has a few seconds to explain himself before his mom comes swooping back in to interrupt him. “When we first moved into the house together, Garen would flirt with me, but that’s it. My mom keeps trying to say that he took advantage of me, or that he molested me, or whatever, but that’s not how it happened. He never pressured me. Ever. The first time anything happened between us, I’m the one who came onto him. I—”
“He groped me at a costume party because he liked my raccoon costume, told me I had a nice ass, and snuck into my bedroom to make out with me when we got home,” I whisper, and he blushes. His sister snorts, my mom shoots me a warning look, and I fall obediently silent.
Travis says, “That’s… not exactly how it happened, but it’s pretty close. And it’s—I’m the one who was always pushing things to go further between us. Everything about our relationship—that first night, the exclusivity, the sex, everything. All of it was my idea, and he never pushed me into it. I want to be very clear on that.”
For the past year, I’ve known that Travis was the one who initiated things between us. I’ve known that I haven’t done anything wrong by falling in love with him. Still, it’s nice to see that he remembers that, too.
“And how are things between the two of you now?” Kimball asks. “Have you remained friends even now that your parents have filed for divorce?”
Travis and I exchange a very long look; I’m the one who finally breaks eye contact. He sighs and says, “Not really, no. We did at first, but we don’t really talk anymore.”
“Why not?”
“My girlfriend kind of hates him,” Travis admits.
I snort. “The feeling is mutual.”
“They can barely be in the same room together,” he continues. “They’re in the school play together, and they have a lot of the same friends, but every time they interact with each other directly, they end up fighting. Last week, Joss told me that I had to choose between them, and… I mean, she’s my girlfriend. He and I were barely speaking to each other at that point. It shouldn’t have been that hard of a choice.” His tone very clearly states that it was a hard choice, and I will cling to that knowledge with an embarrassing ferocity. But then he shrugs and says, “Besides, I’m not exactly a fan of his relationship choices, either.”
That’s enough of a shock to make me address him directly for the first time in five days. I turn to stare and say, “Since when do you have a problem with Ben? He’s one of your best friends. You dated him, too, you know he’s a good guy to date.”
“He’s a good guy to date, yes, but you shouldn’t be dating him,” Travis says tightly. “You shouldn’t be dating anyone. That’s one of the most basic guidelines for your first year of sobriety—don’t date anyone until you know you’re secure enough with your health to be able to handle an argument, or a breakup, or anything without reaching for the substances you’re supposed to be avoiding. You barely waited a month before you got involved with him, and I don’t think that’s okay. I don’t think you should be dating him.”
I roll my eyes towards the ceiling and say, “Yeah, well, it’s not really any of your business, is it?”
He sighs, but says nothing. Mom clears her throat. “Moving on from that, I have a few questions about you specifically, not just your relationships with William and Garen. First of all, you have a job, correct?”
“Yes,” he says. “I’m a barista at the Daily Grind, a coffee shop in Lakewood, Connecticut.”
“How often do you work?”
“Every day, unless I use vacation time. I work eight-hour shifts on Saturday and Sunday, then four-hour shifts from two-thirty to six-thirty on Monday through Thursday,” he answers. “I’m only allowed to work thirty-two hours a week because I’m still a minor, but my boss says that when I turn eighteen next month, he’ll let me pick up the closing shift on Friday, from three to eleven.”
Mom scribbles a note on her paper now, suddenly reminding me too much of Doctor Howard. I look away. She says, “Do you pay your own bills?”
Travis nods. “I pay my cell phone bill, my car insurance bill. I pay for all the gas and maintenance for my—well, it used to be Bree’s car. But she doesn’t need it on campus, so I bought it from her.”
“With your own money?” Mom confirms. He nods again. “What else do you pay for around the house? Do you buy your own clothes, your own school supplies?”
“I pay for everything except food and rent,” he says. “I mean, I try not to waste money, though? Like, I try to avoid buying stuff unless I absolutely need it, because I’ve been saving for college since I turned sixteen.”
Out of the corner of my idea, I see Mom take a personal moment to celebrate the fact that Travis has obviously just said exactly what she was hoping he would. She clears her throat and says, “Your mother isn’t going to help you pay for college?”
“The places I applied are expensive. I don’t blame her,” is Travis’ roundabout way of saying, no, my mom’s a bitch and isn’t going to help me at all.
“Where have you applied?” Mom asks.
He ticks the names off on his fingers. “Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Yale, Northwestern, Brown, Dartmouth, Cal Tech.”
“Jesus, Trav, what did you do? Google ‘hardest schools to get into’ and apply to all of them?” Bree demands.
“Googled ‘hardest schools to get into’ and applied early action to all of them,” he says, and they sneer at each other.
“Well, best case scenario, where would be your first choice?” Mom asks.
Travis goes strangely silent at that. Silent enough that Mom repeats her question, and I shoot him a curious look. His jaw is set, his eyes fixed on the table once more, and then I realize—he was serious about not going to college, when he first told me about Joss and the baby. He has applied to almost every Ivy League university, and he’ll probably get into most of them, but he’s going to give that up so that he can live in Lakewood, work in a coffee shop, and raise his bastard with his high school girlfriend. Oh, fuck. I’m gripping the edge of the table so hard I might carve grooves into the wood; it takes everything I have in me to not start screaming at him for being that fucking stupid that he’d give up his entire future for her. Eventually, he swallows and says, “I don’t know. I want to wait until I have all of my responses before I start thinking about that. I, um… there are a lot of things to consider. A lot of options.”
“Understandable,” Mom says, dropping her pen on the table again. “I just have one last thing I’m curious about. How have things been since William and Garen moved out?”
“Fine,” Travis says, but his voice breaks on that one syllable.
My hands are hot from how determinedly I’m staring at them. There’s silence, and then it’s Kimball who asks uncertainly, “Travis? Are you alright?”
I chance a glance sideways at him; his eyes are focused on the table, and his jaw is trembling. Sensing the attention on him, he forces a bland smile and says, “I’m fine. It’s just… I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but Mom doesn’t really talk to me anymore.”
“You mean, she doesn’t talk to you about the divorce?” Mom asks, brow creased.
“No, I mean she doesn’t talk to me at all,” Travis says, giving a delicate shrug like it’s no big deal. Like it’s not the biggest deal. “My mom, she, um… she hasn’t spoken to me in forty-four days.”
My hands ball up into fists under the conference table. The idea of my mom ignoring me for forty-four days is unfathomable. I don’t even live with her, I haven’t since I was fourteen, but I still can’t remember a time we ever went more than two weeks without some form of contact. It’s sick that Evelyn would just avoid him like that.
Even sicker, now that I’m piecing together memories of things Travis has told me, things Ben has told me, about the last time Evelyn pulled something like. How she checked out on her son during her first divorce and didn’t speak to him for weeks just because he looked like his father. How last time, this ended with him swallowing a bottle of pills to try to escape the discomfort of living in that silent household. How lonely he must be, as lonely as I am every day I have to hide out in the music room or take the long way around the cafeteria to avoid getting beaten on by people who hate me for things they don’t understand.
Just like out in the hall, I’m overcome with the urge to touch him, to comfort him in the stupidest, most meaningless of ways. Before I can talk myself out of it, I reach over and curl a hand over the back of his neck, dipping my fingers below the collar of his shirt and rubbing soothing circles into his skin. He shivers and leans into the touch, but his helpless eyes move right past me as he says to Mom and Kimball, “Look, it’s not a big deal, okay? Things are just really tense at home right now, and last month, we had a bad argument, and I said some stuff that pissed her off, and it’s taking her some time to get over it. It’s fine, I’m fine, it’s just a weird time right now.”
“Travie, why didn’t you tell me this?” Bree practically begs, leaning across the table to take his hands.
He shakes her off, then shakes me off, and mutters, “Because it’s not a big deal, I told you. We’re going to figure it out, it’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it, okay?”
It’s not okay. I am so close to storming out of this room and letting Evelyn know exactly how much of a piece of shit she is, but then my mom asks, “What was the bad argument about?”
After a long minute of silence, Travis asks, “Can I take you up on that offer to clear the room?”
It’s obvious that he’s not asking this because he cares if his sister hears what he has to say, so I direct my response to my mother instead of him. “I don’t want to leave.”
“Garen, there was an agreement,” Mom says reproachfully.
“I don’t care,” I protest. “I didn’t kick him out for my questions, it’s not fair for him to make me leave now.”
Frowning, Kimball says, “You had just as much of a right to request an empty room as Travis does now. You’ve both chosen to have Mrs. McCall wait outside, and now Travis is asking you to do the same.”
“I don’t want—”
“Forty-four days ago, I came home from work, had dinner with Mom, and listened to her rant about the divorce,” Travis interrupts, propping his elbows up on the table and resting his forehead against his upturned palms. Clearly, he no longer gives a shit whether I’m in the room or not. “She was really mad that day, and she kept saying shit about Garen. She said a bunch of things about him being Jewish, and she called him a ‘cocksucking little junkie’—”
“Not an inaccurate description,” I admit in an undertone, but he continues as though I haven’t said a word.
“—and I kind of lost it. We started arguing, and I told her not to talk about him like that. And I guess that really got to her, because she started telling me that I’ve been a really shitty son for the past few months, and it’s no wonder my dad doesn’t call anymore, if I don’t even have the decency to be loyal to my own family.” God, my heart aches for him. I reach for him again, but he cringes away from my hand, like physical contact would be too much right now. I let my hand fall limply back to my side. He takes a deep breath and continues, “She asked me if I was still sleeping with Garen—well, I think her exact words were, ‘Tell me you’re not letting that diseased whore put his hands all over you.’ I told her that I wasn’t—all we’d done lately was hold hands, but she didn’t believe me. She said, ‘I didn’t raise you to be like this, I didn’t raise you to be a lying little faggot.’ She said there was no other reason for me to still care what she said about him. And then she demanded to know if I was still in love with him.”
Oh, fuck. I don’t want to hear this. Please don’t say it. Please don’t say you don’t love me. Please don’t say you do love me if it doesn’t mean anything. Now I know why he wanted me to leave—there is no right answer here. If he says no, I’ll die a little, knowing I’m the only one who still feels this way. If he says yes, I’ll still die a little, knowing it doesn’t change a thing. He’s still with someone else, his girlfriend is still pregnant, I still don’t get to call him mine.
“I told her that, um… yes, I still was,” he says, and my chest tightens around my traitorous, hammering heart. He swallows and amends softly, “Am. I still am, I always have been.”
“Jesus fuck,” somebody whispers, and I’m belatedly aware of the fact that it’s probably me, but I can’t even begin to feel anything about that. I can’t feel anything at all, except for a faint buzzing all over my body. He’s still in love with me. Travis Daniel McCall is still in love with me. Even though we’ve been broken up for almost a year, even though he’s got a pregnant girlfriend, even though Ben is my not-boyfriend, even though we don’t talk, even though everything… he still loves me like I love him. I don’t know whether I want to run out, or kiss him, or cry. I settle for remaining unbelievably still.
This revelation has clearly unsettled everyone else as much as it has unsettled me, because Kimball clears his throat and says, “Alright, well… I think that about wraps it up. We, ah… it was a pleasure meeting you, Garen. I’ll contact you through your mother if I have any further questions.”
I give a very jerky nod and stand; my legs are almost too rubbery to hold my weight. All I need to do is get out of this room. I need to leave this building, I need to clear my head, I need to go to Jamie’s place and have a quiet dinner and probably fuck him until I can forget what I just heard, because Travis loves me, and I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.
“Are you okay?” I hear Bree murmuring to her little brother behind me as I slip from the room. He makes a noise of acknowledgment, and even that sound from him is enough to make my knees shake so much that I sink down into my old chair in the hall without even thinking about the fact that Evelyn is sitting right next to it. She jumps to her feet and skitters away from me, towards her children.
“Well, I hope you see why this was so necessary,” she says. She’s only addressing her daughter; I don’t have to look up to know that, but I do anyway. Bree is still watching her brother, and Travis is pointedly avoiding her eyes by scrolling through his text messages on his phone. “Darryl told me about those bank statements. He told me that the little junkie admitted to stealing thousands of dollars of his father’s money to fund his habit. I can’t even begin to understand how his parents can still look at him, knowing that. I mean, God only knows what else he took!”
Without looking up from his phone, Travis says, “Mom, knock it off. The only thing he took was my virginity, and I’m not sure it’s possible for him to give that back. But if it bothers you that much, just tell him to come over here and get his cock out, and we’ll give it a shot.”
She slaps him across the face so viciously that he drops his phone; the battery comes out and goes skittering across the floor.
“Evelyn!” Mom barks from the doorway of the conference room, and then, “Garen, don’t,” but I’ve already launched myself off the chair at Travis. I curve my hands over his shoulders and guide him a few feet away from his mother—out of striking distance, honestly. He doesn’t tell me he’s okay, and I don’t ask. Neither of us speaks, because I’m not sure there’s a single word that could pass between us that wouldn’t be unimaginably painful. All I’ll allow myself to do is duck down to examine his face. A dark pink handprint is blooming across the surface of his cheek, but he’s not bleeding, and I doubt it will bruise.
“Get your hands off of my son,” Evelyn growls, seizing my shoulder and trying to drag me away from Travis. I want to hit her, but I won’t. I’m not that sort of man, no matter how furious I am right now. Still, I’ve been hit harder by stronger people than her, so I’m not afraid to step closer to her, to get up in her face.
“You forfeited your right to say those words to me the second I saw you bitch-slap him,” I say. “People don’t hit the people they really care about, okay? Believe me, I learned that lesson while I was blacking out and bleeding all over the floor of that pretty little house you’re so obsessed with keeping. It doesn’t matter what he said, or how pissed off it made you. You hit your own kid, and that is fucked.”
Evelyn scoffs. “Not everyone is as lax in disciplining their children as your parents clearly have been with you. Thank god for that, really, because quite honestly, the world already has one too many Garen Andersons in it, and I shudder to think what might happen if there were more people like you around. And I have raised my children to respect their parents, not to say such disgusting, offensive—”
“What, the word ‘cock’ is really so gravely offensive to you that you needed to hit him? Or, was it the fact that he said I took his virginity? Because guess what, Ev: that happened. Hitting him or hating me won’t change that, so suck it the fuck up, and stop being such a shitty mother,” I order. She glares at me, but says nothing. I’m so close to putting my fist into the wall that I actually have to step back from everyone to make sure I keep my hands to myself. Bree reaches for my elbow, and I shake her off. “I can’t fucking deal with this right now. I’m just—I have to go.”
I make it five blocks before I’ve calmed down enough to even think about checking my phone for directions. The second my Blackberry is out of my pocket, I’m almost overcome by the impulse to call Travis. I don’t even know what I’d say—I’m so sorry she hit you because of me, you are better than she’ll let you believe you are, I’m still in love with you, too—I just want to talk to him. Hear his voice some more, instead of sitting through more days of complete radio silence. But his sister is with him now, and I trust her to take care of him. I sigh, open up my GPS app, and program in Jamie’s address.
I’m so used to just wandering into Ben and Alex’s place that I’m actually a little surprised to find that the door to Jamie’s apartment is locked when I arrive. I knock, and after a few moments, the door swings open, revealing a blond girl wearing nothing but one of Jamie’s button-down shirts. She smiles and says, “Hi. You must be Garen, right? Wow. You look exactly like I pictured you would.”
“Uh,” I say, because saying who the fuck are you is almost never considered proper etiquette. “Yeah. I’m Garen. Is—Jamie’s here, right? James Goldwyn?”
She laughs and steps aside, leaving me room to enter the apartment. “Yeah, he’s in the kitchen. I’m just about to get dressed and head out, sorry. I won’t be in your hair much longer.”
I don’t say anything, and she pads down the hallway to Jamie’s bedroom. I blink over at Jamie, who is indeed standing in the kitchen, beginning to prepare dinner. He’s at least had the decency to shower and get dressed in a pair of gray sweatpants and a soft-looking blue sweater. I sneak up behind him and grab his ass, which he barely reacts to. I press a quick kiss to the back of his neck and say, “Didn’t realize you had company over.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be ready to go again by the time dinner’s over,” he says, grinning at me. I open my mouth to reply, but the girl reappears, now having added jeans and a pair of heels to her ensemble. She snatches up her purse from the couch and comes into the kitchen to say goodbye to Jamie. He leans around me to kiss her—I wrinkle my nose and back away from the breeder touching—and says, “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
Strangely enough, he doesn’t sound like he’s lying.
“You better,” the girl says, laughing, like it’s a usual exchange between them. She offers me a sunny smile and a wave, then lets herself out of the apartment.
No explanation is offered, so I don’t request one. I wash my hands at the sink and move to lean against the counter, waiting for some sort of instruction as to what Jamie expects me to do in order to help him make the meal. Honestly, I can’t even tell what we’re having, but it seems like it’s going to involve a lot of vegetables. Possibly some noodles. Maybe some of that weird, spongy-looking shit that’s sitting in a bowl near the sink.
“So,” Jamie says finally, offering me a wry smile, as if he knows it’s killing me not to ask. “That was Rachael. We met at the political science department’ open house last month.”
“Seems like she’s made herself right at home here. That wasn’t the first time she’s been over, was it?” I ask, holding my hand out for a piece of the onion he’s chopping. He hands me a knife instead.
“Cut up the peppers for me,” he orders, then adds, “No. She comes over fairly often. We first hooked up towards the middle of September, but it’s become a bit of a regular thing since then. She’s… actually the only girl I’m involved with now. About two weeks ago, she asked me to stop sleeping with other girls, and I agreed.”
I am very carefully excising that top part of the pepper, the gross one that’s attached to all the seeds inside. When I have completed that task on each of the peppers, I say, “She’s cool with you still hooking up with dudes, though, right?”
Jamie shrugs. “For now. Tonight, she told me she’d like it if I’d consider giving that up, too. Said I could take a few weeks to think about it, but by Thanksgiving, she wants me to have either broken things off with her, or broken things off with anyone else I’m sleeping with.”
“Hmm,” I say. What I really want to ask is, What the fuck are you going to do about the guy you’ve been trying to get to be your boyfriend since summer? Instead, I ask, “So, does this mean that I get to fuck you tonight, just so you’ve got enough empirical data to make a truly informed decision on your chick-or-dick debate?”
He knocks his shoulder against mine and says, “Don’t worry, I already told her that I’m not giving up sex with you, no matter how exclusive she wants me to get. If none of the girls in high school managed it, I doubt any of the ones in college will.”
I grin. “How’d she take that?”
“She was initially displeased, but now that she’s seen you, I think she gets it,” he says. I pause my work long enough to give him a lingering kiss, but I can’t help thinking it’s sort of funny—even after seeing Jamie, none of the guys I’ve dated would ever have found his looks great enough to justify me continuing to sleep with him while in a relationship. Dave made that abundantly, brutally clear pretty early on in our relationship; Travis would never have gone along with the idea of me screwing anyone else while we were together. I’m not even really dating Ben, but I’m pretty sure his hatred of Jamie is enough to outweigh his insistence that we’re not exclusive.
That’s enough to make me stop chopping again. Shit. Am I supposed to ask Ben’s permission before I do anything with Jamie? We’ve agreed not to be exclusive, but they honestly can’t even pretend to tolerate each other. Maybe it’s some sort of unspoken boundary, hooking up with someone who my not-boyfriend doesn’t approve of. Or, fuck, am I supposed to ask Alex’s permission? It’s not like I did before, when I sucked Jamie off last month, but I hadn’t even known they were involved then. And Al had still gotten sort of pissed, though nowhere near as pissed as Jamie had gotten when he found out I’d let Alex fuck me during the relapse.
Purely for the sake of covering my own ass, I pull my phone out and open up a group text, add Jamie, Alex, and Ben to the recipients list, and type out, mass text to all concerned parties: seeking permission to have sexual relations with jamie goldwyn tonight. granted/denied? I send off the text, and Jamie’s phone chimes from the other end of the counter. He leans over, unlocks his phone, and rolls his eyes. “You know, I’m pretty sure that you’ve lost some of your finesse since moving to Connecticut. You used to have some decent moves.”
“I still do, I just don’t feel the need to waste them on you, considering you pretty much already agreed,” I say.
Both of our phones chime out message alerts, and I glance down at the reply. It’s from Ben: Didn’t we cover this last week? You don’t need my permission to sleep with other people. But use a condom, that kid is chlamydia in a polo shirt, and I’m never letting you touch me again if you do it raw.
Next to me, Jamie makes a barely stifled noise of outrage. “‘Chlamydia in a polo shirt,’ what the fuck? Who the hell is five-five-five-eight-four—is that the fucking midget? Is that his number?”
“Yeah, that’s Ben,” I laugh, and Jamie frantically rinses his hands under the faucet, gives them a cursory toweling-off, and begins to type out a furious reply. They trade barbs for several minutes, and I allow the text alerts to pile up in my inbox without bothering to read them. Only when Ben’s texts have stopped and one from Alex has arrived do I bother to open my messages.
confiscated ben’s phone until he learns how 2 play nice. its on top of our kitchen cabinets & he cant reach it. Jamie lets out a shout of laughter at that. g, i’m advising u 2 steal jamie’s, they’re children & cant be trusted. A minute later, another text arrives. btw, permission granted, idc.
Idc.
I don’t care.
That silences Jamie’s laughter. It silences everything about him for a moment, and then he says, “I don’t think I like him anymore.”
“Who, Ben? You never liked him,” I say. I frown down at the massacre of vegetables, then pick up a piece of pepper and hold it questioningly in front of Jamie’s face to see if it’s even close to what it should look like.
He rolls his eyes and says, “No, G, that’s huge. Cut them about half that size, for Christ’s sake.” When I return, scowling, to my chopping, he sighs. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Yeah, you don’t like him anymore. Who are we even talking about?” I ask.
“Alexander. I don’t think I like him anymore. In fact, I think I might actively dislike him now.”
I blink and say, “Because he doesn’t care if I fuck you?”
“No, that’s—I’m not saying this because of that text. I’m saying it because it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Something I’ve been feeling for weeks now.”
Fuck, this is what I’d been afraid of. Jamie is the most important person in the world to me right now, but Alex is my friend, too. I don’t want to choose sides if they decide that things are going badly between them, but I’ll have to. Everyone always ends up choosing a side during a breakup. I’ll go with Jamie, and Ben will go with Alex, and then things will be awkward between everyone, and this is probably why everyone says it’s a shitty idea to date your friends.
Eventually, I settle for the vaguely neutral reply of, “Things seemed like they were going well between you two when you came to Connecticut for the show.”
“No, they were terrible,” Jamie says, now sounding absolutely miserable. “It’s just—everything was normal between us, but the last time I visited—the weekend of that little concert, when you and the midget started fucking again—suddenly, it was different and just… every time he looked at me, I’d feel this hideous swooping sensation in my stomach, like when you’re going up a flight of stairs and you think there’s one more step than there is, and you feel like you’re going to pitch over. O-Or, when we were messing around—alright, have you ever looked at someone and found yourself getting pissed at them because of how attractive they are? Like, have you ever been making out with a guy and suddenly all you can think is ‘oh my Lord, you and your perfect body and your stupid blond hair are so unfairly hot that I want to punch you or myself or both of us in the fact right now’?”
“No,” I lie, squashing the mental image of Travis and his perfect body and his stupid blond hair and his unfair hotness. Travis, who is beautiful and fragile in ways I’ve been too blind to notice. Travis, who still loves me. I grit my teeth and give a particularly vicious chop to the peppers. “Nope, never thought that.”
“See? Because that’s weird. Those aren’t normal, reasonable thoughts. So, I’ve realized it must be one of two things; either I’m entering the early stages of psychosis, or I’m over my fixation on him. At this point, I’m pretty sure it’s the latter, because I’m not having this reaction to anyone else, you know? It’s not a sudden aversion to the entire human race, it’s just Alexander. I look at him, or I call him, or I get a text from him, and suddenly I feel like I’m going to vomit. But, you know, a weird, special kind of—I mean, maybe I’d be vomitting up a kitten, or something else furry, roughly that size. Like a rat. One of those giant, diseased rats I see running across the subway tracks on the nights that I’m drunk enough to let my Columbia friends convince me to use public transportation. That’s not a normal reaction to have about someone, not unless you just fucking hate them, right?”
I stare very intently at my hands and continue to slice up the peppers. If I look at Jamie, I’m pretty sure I’m going to start laughing, and there are too many knives around for it to be a good idea for me to make fun of him. When I think I can speak without losing it completely, I say, “James, those are called ‘feelings.’”
“What are you talking about?”
“Okay, I’m pretty sure most people would say ‘he gives me butterflies,’ not ‘I feel like there are rats inside of my stomach.’ But yeah. That missed-a-step sensation? Feeling sick, but in a warm, fuzzy way? Feeling legitimately offended that anyone has the balls to be as mind-breakingly hot as him? That’s what having feelings for someone is like. You know, real feelings, not just I want you to suck my dick feelings.”
Jamie looks revolted. “You mean to tell me that this is what you’ve been going on about for the past year? This—” He gestures towards his chest, presumably indicating his heart, “—is what you’re so obsessed with, why you say you need Travis so much? Because he makes you feel the fucking vomit rats?” I nod. “But this is awful.”
“Yeah,” I say, “but also sort of awesome, right?”
“No,” he says vehemently, even though I think that what he really means is, yes.
My suspicions must be wrong. With every second that passes, he’s looking more and more nervous, more and more furious at himself. I drop my knife in the sink and move closer to him, curving a hand over the back of his neck and drawing him closer until our foreheads touch. “Jamie. Hey, Jamie, stop. I don’t—what’s going on?”
“I don’t want to like anyone, especially not him,” Jamie protests. “This fucking sucks. Rachael’s great and all, and usually I’d be more than willing to start dating her exclusively, but I can’t, because some stupid part of me is still hoping that Alexander’s going to finally agree that we can be exclusive. I keep asking, and he keeps turning me down, keeps saying he’s not ready, but what he really means is that he’s holding out to see if he can manage a better offer. I won’t give Rach a straight answer because I’m waiting on Al, and he won’t give me a straight answer because he’s waiting on your Pygmy boyfriend. And it’s dumb, alright? It’s dumb that I’m feeling this way even though I know he’s not. What’s the point of wanting someone who doesn’t want you back?”
I don’t know what to tell him. At this point, I’m not sure what the point is of wanting someone who does want you back. So I clamp my mouth shut, take his hand, and drag him down the hall to his bedroom, abandoning the half-prepared meal on the counter and trying to make this night better for him in the only way I know how.
It’s the first time we’ve really slept together in over a year, but we’re both taking comfort in the familiarity of it. After all this time, I’m more comfortable being literally inside of him than I am with being in any part of myself. I fuck him face-to-face, and he keeps pulling me in for deep, searching kisses. And neither one of us closes our eyes for any longer than it takes to blink, both terrified we might end up imagining an unavailable, blond boy. I wrap an arm around his neck, partially because it gives me better leverage to fuck him harder, but more because he still looks kind of sad, and I think he needs the closeness. When he kisses me again, I murmur into his mouth, “You know I love you, Jamie, right? More than anything?”
He nods, knocking his forehead roughly against mine. “Yeah, I know,” he says, reaching up to lace his fingers together at the back of my neck so that I can’t move away—not that I’d even planned to. He kisses me again and repeats, “I know. Love you, too, G.”
It’s all we’ve got to give each other, and it’s still not enough.
41 days sober
“What’d you do this summer, Andy?” Geoffrey, the sophomore playing Francois—our toolish version of Frenchy, the beauty school drop-out—asks.
John-as-Andy smiles bashfully and says, “Oh, I spent most of it at the beach. I met a girl there.”
Lounging back on one of the two rickety benches we’re rehearsing with until the stage crew finishes construction of the cafeteria set pieces, I-as-Rizzo scoff, “You hauled your cookies all the way to the beach for some chick?”
“Well, she was sort of special,” John-as-Andy protests.
I smirk. “There ain’t no such thing.”
Across the stage, the girls playing the Pink Ladies start cajoling Joss-as-Dani until she finally laughs out, “Alright, alright, I’ll tell you!”
“Great!” Ms. Markland cuts us off from the front row. “I don’t want to waste time going over the musical number tonight, you guys are already making great progress. But this is the point where we’d go into ‘Summer Nights.’ Move the benches back, we’re going to pick up after the song with—”
There’s a collective groan. Surprisingly, it’s John, who’s almost always too eager to drag rehearsal out, who objects, “Rehearsal was supposed to end at eight. Are we really going to keep going?”
“Yes,” Nate says in a voice that dares any of us to protest. His eyes are flashing, so none of us do. Triumphant, he adds, “We’re staying until nine, alright? It’s not that late, and you all had an extra-long break in the middle. So, move the benches upstage, and pick up with Mikey’s line, ‘She sounds real nice.’”
As usual, ‘move the benches back’ turns out to be an order that only I follow. I hook one arm under each of the benches, hoist them both up, and move them to the back curtain. Any time set pieces need to be moved and the crew members are busy painting or building in the hallway, I end up being the one who does all the heavy lifting. At first, Nate would bitch at people to help me, but now I think he mostly just likes to watch the way my biceps flex when I do it.
The moment I’ve returned to the spot downstage where the rest of the guys playing T-Birds are waiting, Mikey-as-Jon says, “She sounds real nice.”
“True love, and she didn’t let you lay a hand on her? Sounds like a tease to me,” I-as-Rizzo remark.
“Well, she wasn’t,” John-as-Andy snaps. “She was a lady.”
His last word is punctuated by a very faint, scratchy screaming from the front row, and I cringe. I’d forgotten to put my phone on silent before rehearsal; the noise is the ringtone I set for Ben ages ago. Usually he doesn’t text or call when I’m in rehearsal, but it’s not surprising that he’s calling me now, not if we’re really running this late.
Over our shared headphones, the singer is crooning out, I know some things should just stay broken, I’m well aware this should remain unspoken, and I can’t help but agree. And that moment—halfway through the damn song—is when I realize that the song change was intentional, not just for the sake of being contrary and dicking around with my iPod. He’s selected this song because of the lyrics, of what it’s saying, and right now, when we’re not speaking to each other, he’s doing his best to communicate with me in the only language I really understand: music.
Against my better judgment, I sneak a glance at Travis’ face. He’s watching me, nervous eyes flitting all over my face, trying to pick up any sign that I’ve understood what he’s trying to do. I don’t know what to do, or how to let him know I understand, so I reach for his hand… and lose my nerve three-quarters of the way through. My fingers end up wound loosely around his wrist, which is arguably worse, because now my thumb is brushing shakily against the inside of his wrist, right over the tattoo of my initial. He sucks in a shuddering breath.
And we both swore we were done speaking to each other, we haven’t spoken in five days now, but I think it’s probably okay for me to give a little shrug and whisper along to the next line of lyrics, “I don’t want to see you happier with somebody else.”
He opens his mouth to speak, but the conference room door swings open once more. Travis tears his hand away from mine, and I give a sharp yank to the cord of my headphones, pulling the buds from both our ears—and okay, ow, that was dumb and uncomfortable. He’s still holding the iPod, but it quickly exchanges hands, and I shove it into my pocket before looking up at the door. Bree is staring down at us, unimpressed. “Where’s Mom?”
“Down the hall,” Travis says, gesturing.
“Can I go back inside now?” I ask.
She nods. “Yeah. It’s your turn to be interviewed.”
I stand up and pause outside the door just long enough to mutter, “You guys can come in, if you want. It’s not like I’m going to say anything that you don’t both already know. I don’t really have secrets these days. But if one of you could hang out here until your mom gets back, just to make sure she doesn’t think she’s allowed to come in… that would be appreciated.”
I trudge back into the room and sink into my previous seat. Travis enters after me and still sits down on my other side, even though there are two empty seats across the table. My hand is itching with the urge to reach over and lace my fingers with his under the table, or at least grip his wrist again, but I remain completely still.
Kimball smiles genially at me. “Alright, Garen. I don’t have that many questions for you, to be frank. We all have a fairly good idea of your relationship with your stepmother—” I roll my eyes, “—so I think we can skip that. I have something I’d like you to take a look at, though.”
“I’m sure I’ll be absolutely thrilled to see whatever it is,” I say tonelessly. The door cracks back open, and Bree slips inside, thankfully alone. She offers me a tight smile before returning to her seat across from me.
“Garen, these are copies of your credit card and bank statements from the past six months,” Kimball says, sliding a stack of papers across the table. “Can you tell me how these card payments are made?”
I blink. It’s definitely not what I was expecting him to ask about. “The cards are all in my name. I make the payments using the cash that my parents deposit into my account at the beginning of every month,” I say. Part of me wants to ask how it’s any of his business, but Mom hasn’t protested, so I assume it makes sense in some roundabout legal way. Maybe because it’s Dad’s money—the money that’s being contested in this divorce—that pays the bills. Whatever.
Kimball gestures to the papers. “Can you read through the yellow-highlighted sections and tell me what those transactions are?”
The top page of the statement is from April, when I’d been holed up at Patton with Jamie. Most of the transactions are for takeout places, putting gas in my car; at the bottom of that page, a liquor store transaction is highlighted in blue, but the douche across the table had only asked about yellow. I flip to the next page, and there’s the first one—forty bucks, the day after I came back to Lakewood. Eighty bucks, the following Saturday. Another forty, the first day of May. There’s a three week gap in all of the charges after that, and then they’re back again in full force, forties and sixties and eighties every week or two, right up until the second week of June. And I remember exactly what each and every one was for.
I shove the papers back across the table. “They’re cash withdrawals.”
“Cash for what?” Kimball asks.
“How is he supposed to remember every cash purchase he’s made in the past six months?” Mom demands.
“Mom, don’t bother,” I say. It’s not like what I’m about to say will surprise anyone at this table. “I spent it on cocaine, okay? But I would wager that you already know that, or you wouldn’t be bringing it up.”
Kimball flips back to the first page and taps the liquor store charge. “And the blue-highlighted portions, what are they?”
“Well, let’s see,” I say in mock interest, paging through the documents. “Alcohol. Cigarettes. Alcohol. Alcohol. Ooh, a head shop, that’s exciting. I’m pretty sure that was a glass pipe, which means that I was mistaken earlier, this next cash withdrawal was probably for pot, not coke. Anyway, alcohol again. Cigarettes. Alcohol.” I drop the papers on the table. “You know something, Mr. Kimball? It looks like those blue-highlighted charges are mostly related to my questionable life choices.”
“Close to two thousand dollars’ worth of questionable life choices,” Kimball confirms. “I just want to make sure we’re very clear on something. All of the drugs, paraphernalia, and alcohol were purchased with your father’s money, correct?”
It sounds so much worse when he says it like that. I sigh and rub the back of my neck. “Yeah. I bought it all with my dad’s money.”
“And was he aware of this?”
“Oh, totally,” I say, nodding enthusiastically. “Whenever I needed it, I’d just be like, ‘hey, Daddy, can I have three hundred bucks for an eight ball?’ and he’d be like, ‘sure, G, just make sure that shitsnack of a dealer you use doesn’t cut it with Ritalin again.’ That was a fucking biweekly conversation in the Anderson household.”
“Garen,” Bree says softly, and I slouch down in my chair, glowering at the table.
“No, okay? My dad didn’t realize what I was doing with the money, and the second he figured out I had a problem, he emptied my account so I wouldn’t be able to buy anything else,” I snap. I haven’t exactly made a secret about how bad things got for me last summer, so I don’t feel bad about adding, “Except, you know, joke’s on him, that just means I started fucking for cash. Pretty sure he’s the only guy to ever accidentally turn his only child into a prostitute in a misguided attempt to help him.” I can feel my mom and Travis both go rigid on either side of me. Their discomfort should probably rattle me more than it does, but at this point, I’m so used to saying the wrong thing that I can barely spare it a second though. I focus my eyes on Kimball and say, “Any more questions for me?”
“Just two,” he says. “What are your plans for the fall? School-wise, that is.”
“Does it matter?” I ask. He merely shrugs. I drag a hand through my hair. “I’m still in the process of filling out my applications, so I’ve got no idea. There are five different schools I’m applying to, at my dad’s request. Some are music programs, which require auditions in the winter. As of right now, I have no idea what I’ll be doing next fall.”
When I gesture for him to continue with his final question, he smiles and asks, “How long have you been sober?”
“Fuck you,” I bite out. Next to me, Mom is clearly torn between telling me to calm down and telling Kimball to eat shit. Either way, she remains silent when I add, “Like, seriously, man? It’s really shitty that you’re trying to make it seem like my drug use is the reason Dad wanted a divorce, but we all know that’s not true. I know what she said about me, okay? I know that she called me a kike and said she wished my ex had killed me years ago. They’re getting a divorce because Bill Anderson is a good fucking father, and he didn’t want to stay married to someone who could hate his son as thoroughly as Ev hates me. And, okay, whatever—you want a fucking number? You want to quantify the progress I’ve made towards becoming a better man? Fine. I’m thirty-six days sober. And I wouldn’t have made it through a single one of those days if I was still living in the same house as that vicious, soulless bitch. Feel free to put that in your notes.”
Kimball sighs and turns to my mom. “Do you have any questions for your son?”
“No,” she says flatly. “I’ll go get Evelyn so that we can begin Travis’ interview now.”
Once Ev has been retrieved from the hall, Mom takes the lead on interviewing Travis and prompts, “Tell me about your initial relationship with your stepfather. When you first moved in together, was he welcoming? Hostile? Indifferent?”
“He was nice,” Travis says, shrugging. “We got along fine, I guess, but we honestly didn’t see much of each other. He was at work a lot, I was at work a lot, I focus on my schoolwork most of the time. We pretty much only saw each other at dinner, but when we did interact, he was cool.”
“Is that how things remained, or did you become closer, more distant, what?” she presses.
He folds his hands together on the table and says, in a voice of forced neutrality, “Things got better with Bill at pretty much the same speed that things got worse with my mom.” Evelyn gives him a sharp look, which I know he must feel, but he keeps his eyes on the table. “After I came out, Mom kind of had a hard time dealing with it, but Bill was already used to having a gay son. He said that me liking boys—” Evelyn rolls her eyes and shifts around loudly in her seat. Travis sighs and tries again, “He said me liking boys wasn’t the problem, me liking my own stepbrother was. When I started dating my next boyfriend, Ben, Bill was completely fine with it. He wanted Ben to come over for dinner, he said it was okay if I brought him to the wedding as my date. He just made me feel like what I was going through was okay, it was normal. And… I don’t know. I guess I just got more comfortable with Bill, as time went on. He’s a nice guy. And he was a good stepdad.”
Dad keeps telling me that divorce isn’t a competition, but if it is, he’s so obviously winning.
“What about your relationship with your stepbrother?” Kimball asks, barely managing to control a wolfish smile. “How was that?”
“My relationship with Garen is none of your fucking business,” Travis says sharply. I expect some sort of reproach from Evelyn, the same as the day I’d gotten kicked out and been unable to stop myself from laughing as Travis had yelled back at her, I just fucking told you I’m gay, and your fucking problem is with my fucking swearing? No retort comes today, though. When Kimball’s only response is to raise his eyebrows, Travis scowls and says, “Everyone in this room knows how our relationship was. It was good, and it was a secret, and then it wasn’t a secret anymore, and then it wasn’t a relationship anymore. That’s it.”
That’s so not it, but I don’t know how to protest.
“When your stepbrother initiated the relationship with you, did he urge you to keep it a secret from your mother?” Kimball asks.
“No,” Travis says, and I blink over at him, because yes, I definitely did. Sensing my eyes on him, he clarifies, “Sorry, what I meant was—okay, I’m the one who initiated the relationship. Not Garen.”
Evelyn scoffs. “That’s not true.”
“Mrs. McCall, your son is being interviewed, not you,” Mom says sharply, and Evelyn glowers at her, but falls silent.
All eyes return to Travis, who is staring back at his mom. For a long moment, no one speaks. Finally, he clears his throat and looks down at the table. “Would it be possible to maybe clear the room for my interview? I know I’m only seventeen, and I know I can have my mom in here, but I’d… I don’t know. I sort of prefer it if maybe she, you know, wasn’t.”
“I’m not leaving my minor child alone to be questioned,” Evelyn snaps. Strangely, her words don’t really seem to be directed towards Travis. I don’t think any of them have been, actually.
“It’s an informal interview, I’m not being questioned. I’m not being charged with anything, they’re not cops, it’s fine,” Travis says. “I’m sorry, I’m not trying to be a pain in anyone’s ass, but I am extremely uncomfortable with my mom being in the room while I’m talking about Garen.”
I scowl. For fuck’s sake, I’m not contagious. Being in the same room as someone who’s talking about me isn’t going to make Ev catch whatever it is that she’s convinced I have. Evelyn begins to protest, but Kimball leads her outside under the guise of “wanting a word with her.” Within two minutes, he has returned alone. He sinks back into his seat, gestures for Travis to continue.
The words spill out almost in a single breath, like Travis is convinced that he only has a few seconds to explain himself before his mom comes swooping back in to interrupt him. “When we first moved into the house together, Garen would flirt with me, but that’s it. My mom keeps trying to say that he took advantage of me, or that he molested me, or whatever, but that’s not how it happened. He never pressured me. Ever. The first time anything happened between us, I’m the one who came onto him. I—”
“He groped me at a costume party because he liked my raccoon costume, told me I had a nice ass, and snuck into my bedroom to make out with me when we got home,” I whisper, and he blushes. His sister snorts, my mom shoots me a warning look, and I fall obediently silent.
Travis says, “That’s… not exactly how it happened, but it’s pretty close. And it’s—I’m the one who was always pushing things to go further between us. Everything about our relationship—that first night, the exclusivity, the sex, everything. All of it was my idea, and he never pushed me into it. I want to be very clear on that.”
For the past year, I’ve known that Travis was the one who initiated things between us. I’ve known that I haven’t done anything wrong by falling in love with him. Still, it’s nice to see that he remembers that, too.
“And how are things between the two of you now?” Kimball asks. “Have you remained friends even now that your parents have filed for divorce?”
Travis and I exchange a very long look; I’m the one who finally breaks eye contact. He sighs and says, “Not really, no. We did at first, but we don’t really talk anymore.”
“Why not?”
“My girlfriend kind of hates him,” Travis admits.
I snort. “The feeling is mutual.”
“They can barely be in the same room together,” he continues. “They’re in the school play together, and they have a lot of the same friends, but every time they interact with each other directly, they end up fighting. Last week, Joss told me that I had to choose between them, and… I mean, she’s my girlfriend. He and I were barely speaking to each other at that point. It shouldn’t have been that hard of a choice.” His tone very clearly states that it was a hard choice, and I will cling to that knowledge with an embarrassing ferocity. But then he shrugs and says, “Besides, I’m not exactly a fan of his relationship choices, either.”
That’s enough of a shock to make me address him directly for the first time in five days. I turn to stare and say, “Since when do you have a problem with Ben? He’s one of your best friends. You dated him, too, you know he’s a good guy to date.”
“He’s a good guy to date, yes, but you shouldn’t be dating him,” Travis says tightly. “You shouldn’t be dating anyone. That’s one of the most basic guidelines for your first year of sobriety—don’t date anyone until you know you’re secure enough with your health to be able to handle an argument, or a breakup, or anything without reaching for the substances you’re supposed to be avoiding. You barely waited a month before you got involved with him, and I don’t think that’s okay. I don’t think you should be dating him.”
I roll my eyes towards the ceiling and say, “Yeah, well, it’s not really any of your business, is it?”
He sighs, but says nothing. Mom clears her throat. “Moving on from that, I have a few questions about you specifically, not just your relationships with William and Garen. First of all, you have a job, correct?”
“Yes,” he says. “I’m a barista at the Daily Grind, a coffee shop in Lakewood, Connecticut.”
“How often do you work?”
“Every day, unless I use vacation time. I work eight-hour shifts on Saturday and Sunday, then four-hour shifts from two-thirty to six-thirty on Monday through Thursday,” he answers. “I’m only allowed to work thirty-two hours a week because I’m still a minor, but my boss says that when I turn eighteen next month, he’ll let me pick up the closing shift on Friday, from three to eleven.”
Mom scribbles a note on her paper now, suddenly reminding me too much of Doctor Howard. I look away. She says, “Do you pay your own bills?”
Travis nods. “I pay my cell phone bill, my car insurance bill. I pay for all the gas and maintenance for my—well, it used to be Bree’s car. But she doesn’t need it on campus, so I bought it from her.”
“With your own money?” Mom confirms. He nods again. “What else do you pay for around the house? Do you buy your own clothes, your own school supplies?”
“I pay for everything except food and rent,” he says. “I mean, I try not to waste money, though? Like, I try to avoid buying stuff unless I absolutely need it, because I’ve been saving for college since I turned sixteen.”
Out of the corner of my idea, I see Mom take a personal moment to celebrate the fact that Travis has obviously just said exactly what she was hoping he would. She clears her throat and says, “Your mother isn’t going to help you pay for college?”
“The places I applied are expensive. I don’t blame her,” is Travis’ roundabout way of saying, no, my mom’s a bitch and isn’t going to help me at all.
“Where have you applied?” Mom asks.
He ticks the names off on his fingers. “Stanford, Columbia, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Yale, Northwestern, Brown, Dartmouth, Cal Tech.”
“Jesus, Trav, what did you do? Google ‘hardest schools to get into’ and apply to all of them?” Bree demands.
“Googled ‘hardest schools to get into’ and applied early action to all of them,” he says, and they sneer at each other.
“Well, best case scenario, where would be your first choice?” Mom asks.
Travis goes strangely silent at that. Silent enough that Mom repeats her question, and I shoot him a curious look. His jaw is set, his eyes fixed on the table once more, and then I realize—he was serious about not going to college, when he first told me about Joss and the baby. He has applied to almost every Ivy League university, and he’ll probably get into most of them, but he’s going to give that up so that he can live in Lakewood, work in a coffee shop, and raise his bastard with his high school girlfriend. Oh, fuck. I’m gripping the edge of the table so hard I might carve grooves into the wood; it takes everything I have in me to not start screaming at him for being that fucking stupid that he’d give up his entire future for her. Eventually, he swallows and says, “I don’t know. I want to wait until I have all of my responses before I start thinking about that. I, um… there are a lot of things to consider. A lot of options.”
“Understandable,” Mom says, dropping her pen on the table again. “I just have one last thing I’m curious about. How have things been since William and Garen moved out?”
“Fine,” Travis says, but his voice breaks on that one syllable.
My hands are hot from how determinedly I’m staring at them. There’s silence, and then it’s Kimball who asks uncertainly, “Travis? Are you alright?”
I chance a glance sideways at him; his eyes are focused on the table, and his jaw is trembling. Sensing the attention on him, he forces a bland smile and says, “I’m fine. It’s just… I don’t know if any of you have noticed, but Mom doesn’t really talk to me anymore.”
“You mean, she doesn’t talk to you about the divorce?” Mom asks, brow creased.
“No, I mean she doesn’t talk to me at all,” Travis says, giving a delicate shrug like it’s no big deal. Like it’s not the biggest deal. “My mom, she, um… she hasn’t spoken to me in forty-four days.”
My hands ball up into fists under the conference table. The idea of my mom ignoring me for forty-four days is unfathomable. I don’t even live with her, I haven’t since I was fourteen, but I still can’t remember a time we ever went more than two weeks without some form of contact. It’s sick that Evelyn would just avoid him like that.
Even sicker, now that I’m piecing together memories of things Travis has told me, things Ben has told me, about the last time Evelyn pulled something like. How she checked out on her son during her first divorce and didn’t speak to him for weeks just because he looked like his father. How last time, this ended with him swallowing a bottle of pills to try to escape the discomfort of living in that silent household. How lonely he must be, as lonely as I am every day I have to hide out in the music room or take the long way around the cafeteria to avoid getting beaten on by people who hate me for things they don’t understand.
Just like out in the hall, I’m overcome with the urge to touch him, to comfort him in the stupidest, most meaningless of ways. Before I can talk myself out of it, I reach over and curl a hand over the back of his neck, dipping my fingers below the collar of his shirt and rubbing soothing circles into his skin. He shivers and leans into the touch, but his helpless eyes move right past me as he says to Mom and Kimball, “Look, it’s not a big deal, okay? Things are just really tense at home right now, and last month, we had a bad argument, and I said some stuff that pissed her off, and it’s taking her some time to get over it. It’s fine, I’m fine, it’s just a weird time right now.”
“Travie, why didn’t you tell me this?” Bree practically begs, leaning across the table to take his hands.
He shakes her off, then shakes me off, and mutters, “Because it’s not a big deal, I told you. We’re going to figure it out, it’ll be fine. Don’t worry about it, okay?”
It’s not okay. I am so close to storming out of this room and letting Evelyn know exactly how much of a piece of shit she is, but then my mom asks, “What was the bad argument about?”
After a long minute of silence, Travis asks, “Can I take you up on that offer to clear the room?”
It’s obvious that he’s not asking this because he cares if his sister hears what he has to say, so I direct my response to my mother instead of him. “I don’t want to leave.”
“Garen, there was an agreement,” Mom says reproachfully.
“I don’t care,” I protest. “I didn’t kick him out for my questions, it’s not fair for him to make me leave now.”
Frowning, Kimball says, “You had just as much of a right to request an empty room as Travis does now. You’ve both chosen to have Mrs. McCall wait outside, and now Travis is asking you to do the same.”
“I don’t want—”
“Forty-four days ago, I came home from work, had dinner with Mom, and listened to her rant about the divorce,” Travis interrupts, propping his elbows up on the table and resting his forehead against his upturned palms. Clearly, he no longer gives a shit whether I’m in the room or not. “She was really mad that day, and she kept saying shit about Garen. She said a bunch of things about him being Jewish, and she called him a ‘cocksucking little junkie’—”
“Not an inaccurate description,” I admit in an undertone, but he continues as though I haven’t said a word.
“—and I kind of lost it. We started arguing, and I told her not to talk about him like that. And I guess that really got to her, because she started telling me that I’ve been a really shitty son for the past few months, and it’s no wonder my dad doesn’t call anymore, if I don’t even have the decency to be loyal to my own family.” God, my heart aches for him. I reach for him again, but he cringes away from my hand, like physical contact would be too much right now. I let my hand fall limply back to my side. He takes a deep breath and continues, “She asked me if I was still sleeping with Garen—well, I think her exact words were, ‘Tell me you’re not letting that diseased whore put his hands all over you.’ I told her that I wasn’t—all we’d done lately was hold hands, but she didn’t believe me. She said, ‘I didn’t raise you to be like this, I didn’t raise you to be a lying little faggot.’ She said there was no other reason for me to still care what she said about him. And then she demanded to know if I was still in love with him.”
Oh, fuck. I don’t want to hear this. Please don’t say it. Please don’t say you don’t love me. Please don’t say you do love me if it doesn’t mean anything. Now I know why he wanted me to leave—there is no right answer here. If he says no, I’ll die a little, knowing I’m the only one who still feels this way. If he says yes, I’ll still die a little, knowing it doesn’t change a thing. He’s still with someone else, his girlfriend is still pregnant, I still don’t get to call him mine.
“I told her that, um… yes, I still was,” he says, and my chest tightens around my traitorous, hammering heart. He swallows and amends softly, “Am. I still am, I always have been.”
“Jesus fuck,” somebody whispers, and I’m belatedly aware of the fact that it’s probably me, but I can’t even begin to feel anything about that. I can’t feel anything at all, except for a faint buzzing all over my body. He’s still in love with me. Travis Daniel McCall is still in love with me. Even though we’ve been broken up for almost a year, even though he’s got a pregnant girlfriend, even though Ben is my not-boyfriend, even though we don’t talk, even though everything… he still loves me like I love him. I don’t know whether I want to run out, or kiss him, or cry. I settle for remaining unbelievably still.
This revelation has clearly unsettled everyone else as much as it has unsettled me, because Kimball clears his throat and says, “Alright, well… I think that about wraps it up. We, ah… it was a pleasure meeting you, Garen. I’ll contact you through your mother if I have any further questions.”
I give a very jerky nod and stand; my legs are almost too rubbery to hold my weight. All I need to do is get out of this room. I need to leave this building, I need to clear my head, I need to go to Jamie’s place and have a quiet dinner and probably fuck him until I can forget what I just heard, because Travis loves me, and I don’t know what I’m doing anymore.
“Are you okay?” I hear Bree murmuring to her little brother behind me as I slip from the room. He makes a noise of acknowledgment, and even that sound from him is enough to make my knees shake so much that I sink down into my old chair in the hall without even thinking about the fact that Evelyn is sitting right next to it. She jumps to her feet and skitters away from me, towards her children.
“Well, I hope you see why this was so necessary,” she says. She’s only addressing her daughter; I don’t have to look up to know that, but I do anyway. Bree is still watching her brother, and Travis is pointedly avoiding her eyes by scrolling through his text messages on his phone. “Darryl told me about those bank statements. He told me that the little junkie admitted to stealing thousands of dollars of his father’s money to fund his habit. I can’t even begin to understand how his parents can still look at him, knowing that. I mean, God only knows what else he took!”
Without looking up from his phone, Travis says, “Mom, knock it off. The only thing he took was my virginity, and I’m not sure it’s possible for him to give that back. But if it bothers you that much, just tell him to come over here and get his cock out, and we’ll give it a shot.”
She slaps him across the face so viciously that he drops his phone; the battery comes out and goes skittering across the floor.
“Evelyn!” Mom barks from the doorway of the conference room, and then, “Garen, don’t,” but I’ve already launched myself off the chair at Travis. I curve my hands over his shoulders and guide him a few feet away from his mother—out of striking distance, honestly. He doesn’t tell me he’s okay, and I don’t ask. Neither of us speaks, because I’m not sure there’s a single word that could pass between us that wouldn’t be unimaginably painful. All I’ll allow myself to do is duck down to examine his face. A dark pink handprint is blooming across the surface of his cheek, but he’s not bleeding, and I doubt it will bruise.
“Get your hands off of my son,” Evelyn growls, seizing my shoulder and trying to drag me away from Travis. I want to hit her, but I won’t. I’m not that sort of man, no matter how furious I am right now. Still, I’ve been hit harder by stronger people than her, so I’m not afraid to step closer to her, to get up in her face.
“You forfeited your right to say those words to me the second I saw you bitch-slap him,” I say. “People don’t hit the people they really care about, okay? Believe me, I learned that lesson while I was blacking out and bleeding all over the floor of that pretty little house you’re so obsessed with keeping. It doesn’t matter what he said, or how pissed off it made you. You hit your own kid, and that is fucked.”
Evelyn scoffs. “Not everyone is as lax in disciplining their children as your parents clearly have been with you. Thank god for that, really, because quite honestly, the world already has one too many Garen Andersons in it, and I shudder to think what might happen if there were more people like you around. And I have raised my children to respect their parents, not to say such disgusting, offensive—”
“What, the word ‘cock’ is really so gravely offensive to you that you needed to hit him? Or, was it the fact that he said I took his virginity? Because guess what, Ev: that happened. Hitting him or hating me won’t change that, so suck it the fuck up, and stop being such a shitty mother,” I order. She glares at me, but says nothing. I’m so close to putting my fist into the wall that I actually have to step back from everyone to make sure I keep my hands to myself. Bree reaches for my elbow, and I shake her off. “I can’t fucking deal with this right now. I’m just—I have to go.”
I make it five blocks before I’ve calmed down enough to even think about checking my phone for directions. The second my Blackberry is out of my pocket, I’m almost overcome by the impulse to call Travis. I don’t even know what I’d say—I’m so sorry she hit you because of me, you are better than she’ll let you believe you are, I’m still in love with you, too—I just want to talk to him. Hear his voice some more, instead of sitting through more days of complete radio silence. But his sister is with him now, and I trust her to take care of him. I sigh, open up my GPS app, and program in Jamie’s address.
I’m so used to just wandering into Ben and Alex’s place that I’m actually a little surprised to find that the door to Jamie’s apartment is locked when I arrive. I knock, and after a few moments, the door swings open, revealing a blond girl wearing nothing but one of Jamie’s button-down shirts. She smiles and says, “Hi. You must be Garen, right? Wow. You look exactly like I pictured you would.”
“Uh,” I say, because saying who the fuck are you is almost never considered proper etiquette. “Yeah. I’m Garen. Is—Jamie’s here, right? James Goldwyn?”
She laughs and steps aside, leaving me room to enter the apartment. “Yeah, he’s in the kitchen. I’m just about to get dressed and head out, sorry. I won’t be in your hair much longer.”
I don’t say anything, and she pads down the hallway to Jamie’s bedroom. I blink over at Jamie, who is indeed standing in the kitchen, beginning to prepare dinner. He’s at least had the decency to shower and get dressed in a pair of gray sweatpants and a soft-looking blue sweater. I sneak up behind him and grab his ass, which he barely reacts to. I press a quick kiss to the back of his neck and say, “Didn’t realize you had company over.”
“Don’t worry, I’ll be ready to go again by the time dinner’s over,” he says, grinning at me. I open my mouth to reply, but the girl reappears, now having added jeans and a pair of heels to her ensemble. She snatches up her purse from the couch and comes into the kitchen to say goodbye to Jamie. He leans around me to kiss her—I wrinkle my nose and back away from the breeder touching—and says, “I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”
Strangely enough, he doesn’t sound like he’s lying.
“You better,” the girl says, laughing, like it’s a usual exchange between them. She offers me a sunny smile and a wave, then lets herself out of the apartment.
No explanation is offered, so I don’t request one. I wash my hands at the sink and move to lean against the counter, waiting for some sort of instruction as to what Jamie expects me to do in order to help him make the meal. Honestly, I can’t even tell what we’re having, but it seems like it’s going to involve a lot of vegetables. Possibly some noodles. Maybe some of that weird, spongy-looking shit that’s sitting in a bowl near the sink.
“So,” Jamie says finally, offering me a wry smile, as if he knows it’s killing me not to ask. “That was Rachael. We met at the political science department’ open house last month.”
“Seems like she’s made herself right at home here. That wasn’t the first time she’s been over, was it?” I ask, holding my hand out for a piece of the onion he’s chopping. He hands me a knife instead.
“Cut up the peppers for me,” he orders, then adds, “No. She comes over fairly often. We first hooked up towards the middle of September, but it’s become a bit of a regular thing since then. She’s… actually the only girl I’m involved with now. About two weeks ago, she asked me to stop sleeping with other girls, and I agreed.”
I am very carefully excising that top part of the pepper, the gross one that’s attached to all the seeds inside. When I have completed that task on each of the peppers, I say, “She’s cool with you still hooking up with dudes, though, right?”
Jamie shrugs. “For now. Tonight, she told me she’d like it if I’d consider giving that up, too. Said I could take a few weeks to think about it, but by Thanksgiving, she wants me to have either broken things off with her, or broken things off with anyone else I’m sleeping with.”
“Hmm,” I say. What I really want to ask is, What the fuck are you going to do about the guy you’ve been trying to get to be your boyfriend since summer? Instead, I ask, “So, does this mean that I get to fuck you tonight, just so you’ve got enough empirical data to make a truly informed decision on your chick-or-dick debate?”
He knocks his shoulder against mine and says, “Don’t worry, I already told her that I’m not giving up sex with you, no matter how exclusive she wants me to get. If none of the girls in high school managed it, I doubt any of the ones in college will.”
I grin. “How’d she take that?”
“She was initially displeased, but now that she’s seen you, I think she gets it,” he says. I pause my work long enough to give him a lingering kiss, but I can’t help thinking it’s sort of funny—even after seeing Jamie, none of the guys I’ve dated would ever have found his looks great enough to justify me continuing to sleep with him while in a relationship. Dave made that abundantly, brutally clear pretty early on in our relationship; Travis would never have gone along with the idea of me screwing anyone else while we were together. I’m not even really dating Ben, but I’m pretty sure his hatred of Jamie is enough to outweigh his insistence that we’re not exclusive.
That’s enough to make me stop chopping again. Shit. Am I supposed to ask Ben’s permission before I do anything with Jamie? We’ve agreed not to be exclusive, but they honestly can’t even pretend to tolerate each other. Maybe it’s some sort of unspoken boundary, hooking up with someone who my not-boyfriend doesn’t approve of. Or, fuck, am I supposed to ask Alex’s permission? It’s not like I did before, when I sucked Jamie off last month, but I hadn’t even known they were involved then. And Al had still gotten sort of pissed, though nowhere near as pissed as Jamie had gotten when he found out I’d let Alex fuck me during the relapse.
Purely for the sake of covering my own ass, I pull my phone out and open up a group text, add Jamie, Alex, and Ben to the recipients list, and type out, mass text to all concerned parties: seeking permission to have sexual relations with jamie goldwyn tonight. granted/denied? I send off the text, and Jamie’s phone chimes from the other end of the counter. He leans over, unlocks his phone, and rolls his eyes. “You know, I’m pretty sure that you’ve lost some of your finesse since moving to Connecticut. You used to have some decent moves.”
“I still do, I just don’t feel the need to waste them on you, considering you pretty much already agreed,” I say.
Both of our phones chime out message alerts, and I glance down at the reply. It’s from Ben: Didn’t we cover this last week? You don’t need my permission to sleep with other people. But use a condom, that kid is chlamydia in a polo shirt, and I’m never letting you touch me again if you do it raw.
Next to me, Jamie makes a barely stifled noise of outrage. “‘Chlamydia in a polo shirt,’ what the fuck? Who the hell is five-five-five-eight-four—is that the fucking midget? Is that his number?”
“Yeah, that’s Ben,” I laugh, and Jamie frantically rinses his hands under the faucet, gives them a cursory toweling-off, and begins to type out a furious reply. They trade barbs for several minutes, and I allow the text alerts to pile up in my inbox without bothering to read them. Only when Ben’s texts have stopped and one from Alex has arrived do I bother to open my messages.
confiscated ben’s phone until he learns how 2 play nice. its on top of our kitchen cabinets & he cant reach it. Jamie lets out a shout of laughter at that. g, i’m advising u 2 steal jamie’s, they’re children & cant be trusted. A minute later, another text arrives. btw, permission granted, idc.
Idc.
I don’t care.
That silences Jamie’s laughter. It silences everything about him for a moment, and then he says, “I don’t think I like him anymore.”
“Who, Ben? You never liked him,” I say. I frown down at the massacre of vegetables, then pick up a piece of pepper and hold it questioningly in front of Jamie’s face to see if it’s even close to what it should look like.
He rolls his eyes and says, “No, G, that’s huge. Cut them about half that size, for Christ’s sake.” When I return, scowling, to my chopping, he sighs. “Did you hear what I said?”
“Yeah, you don’t like him anymore. Who are we even talking about?” I ask.
“Alexander. I don’t think I like him anymore. In fact, I think I might actively dislike him now.”
I blink and say, “Because he doesn’t care if I fuck you?”
“No, that’s—I’m not saying this because of that text. I’m saying it because it’s something I’ve been thinking about for a while. Something I’ve been feeling for weeks now.”
Fuck, this is what I’d been afraid of. Jamie is the most important person in the world to me right now, but Alex is my friend, too. I don’t want to choose sides if they decide that things are going badly between them, but I’ll have to. Everyone always ends up choosing a side during a breakup. I’ll go with Jamie, and Ben will go with Alex, and then things will be awkward between everyone, and this is probably why everyone says it’s a shitty idea to date your friends.
Eventually, I settle for the vaguely neutral reply of, “Things seemed like they were going well between you two when you came to Connecticut for the show.”
“No, they were terrible,” Jamie says, now sounding absolutely miserable. “It’s just—everything was normal between us, but the last time I visited—the weekend of that little concert, when you and the midget started fucking again—suddenly, it was different and just… every time he looked at me, I’d feel this hideous swooping sensation in my stomach, like when you’re going up a flight of stairs and you think there’s one more step than there is, and you feel like you’re going to pitch over. O-Or, when we were messing around—alright, have you ever looked at someone and found yourself getting pissed at them because of how attractive they are? Like, have you ever been making out with a guy and suddenly all you can think is ‘oh my Lord, you and your perfect body and your stupid blond hair are so unfairly hot that I want to punch you or myself or both of us in the fact right now’?”
“No,” I lie, squashing the mental image of Travis and his perfect body and his stupid blond hair and his unfair hotness. Travis, who is beautiful and fragile in ways I’ve been too blind to notice. Travis, who still loves me. I grit my teeth and give a particularly vicious chop to the peppers. “Nope, never thought that.”
“See? Because that’s weird. Those aren’t normal, reasonable thoughts. So, I’ve realized it must be one of two things; either I’m entering the early stages of psychosis, or I’m over my fixation on him. At this point, I’m pretty sure it’s the latter, because I’m not having this reaction to anyone else, you know? It’s not a sudden aversion to the entire human race, it’s just Alexander. I look at him, or I call him, or I get a text from him, and suddenly I feel like I’m going to vomit. But, you know, a weird, special kind of—I mean, maybe I’d be vomitting up a kitten, or something else furry, roughly that size. Like a rat. One of those giant, diseased rats I see running across the subway tracks on the nights that I’m drunk enough to let my Columbia friends convince me to use public transportation. That’s not a normal reaction to have about someone, not unless you just fucking hate them, right?”
I stare very intently at my hands and continue to slice up the peppers. If I look at Jamie, I’m pretty sure I’m going to start laughing, and there are too many knives around for it to be a good idea for me to make fun of him. When I think I can speak without losing it completely, I say, “James, those are called ‘feelings.’”
“What are you talking about?”
“Okay, I’m pretty sure most people would say ‘he gives me butterflies,’ not ‘I feel like there are rats inside of my stomach.’ But yeah. That missed-a-step sensation? Feeling sick, but in a warm, fuzzy way? Feeling legitimately offended that anyone has the balls to be as mind-breakingly hot as him? That’s what having feelings for someone is like. You know, real feelings, not just I want you to suck my dick feelings.”
Jamie looks revolted. “You mean to tell me that this is what you’ve been going on about for the past year? This—” He gestures towards his chest, presumably indicating his heart, “—is what you’re so obsessed with, why you say you need Travis so much? Because he makes you feel the fucking vomit rats?” I nod. “But this is awful.”
“Yeah,” I say, “but also sort of awesome, right?”
“No,” he says vehemently, even though I think that what he really means is, yes.
My suspicions must be wrong. With every second that passes, he’s looking more and more nervous, more and more furious at himself. I drop my knife in the sink and move closer to him, curving a hand over the back of his neck and drawing him closer until our foreheads touch. “Jamie. Hey, Jamie, stop. I don’t—what’s going on?”
“I don’t want to like anyone, especially not him,” Jamie protests. “This fucking sucks. Rachael’s great and all, and usually I’d be more than willing to start dating her exclusively, but I can’t, because some stupid part of me is still hoping that Alexander’s going to finally agree that we can be exclusive. I keep asking, and he keeps turning me down, keeps saying he’s not ready, but what he really means is that he’s holding out to see if he can manage a better offer. I won’t give Rach a straight answer because I’m waiting on Al, and he won’t give me a straight answer because he’s waiting on your Pygmy boyfriend. And it’s dumb, alright? It’s dumb that I’m feeling this way even though I know he’s not. What’s the point of wanting someone who doesn’t want you back?”
I don’t know what to tell him. At this point, I’m not sure what the point is of wanting someone who does want you back. So I clamp my mouth shut, take his hand, and drag him down the hall to his bedroom, abandoning the half-prepared meal on the counter and trying to make this night better for him in the only way I know how.
It’s the first time we’ve really slept together in over a year, but we’re both taking comfort in the familiarity of it. After all this time, I’m more comfortable being literally inside of him than I am with being in any part of myself. I fuck him face-to-face, and he keeps pulling me in for deep, searching kisses. And neither one of us closes our eyes for any longer than it takes to blink, both terrified we might end up imagining an unavailable, blond boy. I wrap an arm around his neck, partially because it gives me better leverage to fuck him harder, but more because he still looks kind of sad, and I think he needs the closeness. When he kisses me again, I murmur into his mouth, “You know I love you, Jamie, right? More than anything?”
He nods, knocking his forehead roughly against mine. “Yeah, I know,” he says, reaching up to lace his fingers together at the back of my neck so that I can’t move away—not that I’d even planned to. He kisses me again and repeats, “I know. Love you, too, G.”
It’s all we’ve got to give each other, and it’s still not enough.
41 days sober
“What’d you do this summer, Andy?” Geoffrey, the sophomore playing Francois—our toolish version of Frenchy, the beauty school drop-out—asks.
John-as-Andy smiles bashfully and says, “Oh, I spent most of it at the beach. I met a girl there.”
Lounging back on one of the two rickety benches we’re rehearsing with until the stage crew finishes construction of the cafeteria set pieces, I-as-Rizzo scoff, “You hauled your cookies all the way to the beach for some chick?”
“Well, she was sort of special,” John-as-Andy protests.
I smirk. “There ain’t no such thing.”
Across the stage, the girls playing the Pink Ladies start cajoling Joss-as-Dani until she finally laughs out, “Alright, alright, I’ll tell you!”
“Great!” Ms. Markland cuts us off from the front row. “I don’t want to waste time going over the musical number tonight, you guys are already making great progress. But this is the point where we’d go into ‘Summer Nights.’ Move the benches back, we’re going to pick up after the song with—”
There’s a collective groan. Surprisingly, it’s John, who’s almost always too eager to drag rehearsal out, who objects, “Rehearsal was supposed to end at eight. Are we really going to keep going?”
“Yes,” Nate says in a voice that dares any of us to protest. His eyes are flashing, so none of us do. Triumphant, he adds, “We’re staying until nine, alright? It’s not that late, and you all had an extra-long break in the middle. So, move the benches upstage, and pick up with Mikey’s line, ‘She sounds real nice.’”
As usual, ‘move the benches back’ turns out to be an order that only I follow. I hook one arm under each of the benches, hoist them both up, and move them to the back curtain. Any time set pieces need to be moved and the crew members are busy painting or building in the hallway, I end up being the one who does all the heavy lifting. At first, Nate would bitch at people to help me, but now I think he mostly just likes to watch the way my biceps flex when I do it.
The moment I’ve returned to the spot downstage where the rest of the guys playing T-Birds are waiting, Mikey-as-Jon says, “She sounds real nice.”
“True love, and she didn’t let you lay a hand on her? Sounds like a tease to me,” I-as-Rizzo remark.
“Well, she wasn’t,” John-as-Andy snaps. “She was a lady.”
His last word is punctuated by a very faint, scratchy screaming from the front row, and I cringe. I’d forgotten to put my phone on silent before rehearsal; the noise is the ringtone I set for Ben ages ago. Usually he doesn’t text or call when I’m in rehearsal, but it’s not surprising that he’s calling me now, not if we’re really running this late.
“Garen, your phone is ringing,” Nate says from the front row, like I don’t know. I extend a hand, and he gives it an unimpressed look. I roll my eyes, wiggle my fingers a little, and he rolls his eyes right back, but digs the Blackberry out of my jacket pocket anyway. He frowns down at the display, hands me the phone, and snipes, “Make it quick. And can you please ask your boyfriend not to call you during rehearsal?”
“He’d be calling me after rehearsal, if you weren’t actively in the process of ruining my social life,” I protest. “We were supposed to be done ten minutes ago, and he’s my ride home. Just give me thirty seconds so I can tell him to wait inside, since clearly you’re planning to make us run this scene fifty more times.”
Nate mutters something about only as long as he doesn’t interrupt us, but that comment doesn’t deserve a response, so I turn away and answer the call with a murmured, “Hey, man. You here?”
“Yeah, I’ve been parked in the lot for like, five minutes. Are you going to be done with rehearsal soon?” Ben asks.
“Not until nine. I’d have called to let you know, but I only just found out. Come inside and wait in the auditorium, your car’s probably cold as fuck,” I say. Behind me, I hear Nate tittering in the front row. I turn to face him; he’s glaring at me, as though I’ve overstepped some huge boundary by allowing my not-boyfriend to come watch the last half hour of rehearsal. I grin at him and say, “Don’t give me that look, Nathan.”
“What look?” he says.
“That jealous look,” I say without thinking. From across the stage, Christine shoots me a warning glare, and I belatedly realize that my comment is probably hitting a little too close to home. To cover, I pin my phone between my shoulder and my ear so that I can form my fingers into the shape of a heart. “Calm down, my beloved director. You know I only have eyes for you.”
On the other end of the phone, Ben says dryly, “I thought you were supposed to have eyes for me.”
“McCutcheon, you only get to claim property rights on one of my facial features, and based on what went down last night—name, me—you’ve chosen to claim my mouth. Don’t get greedy,” I say.
The sound system clicks on, and Riley’s chuckling voice says over the speakers, “Seriously, dude?”
I toss him the finger and say into the phone, “Come in, sit in the auditorium, put your phone on silent if you’re going to have it out, and don’t distract me. See you in a few.”
I end the call, silence my phone, and slip right back into the relaxed, strolling posture that Nate has coached me into adopting when I’m acting as Bobby Rizzo. Taking the cue from me, Geoffrey-as-Francois says to John-as-Andy, “Hey, what was her name, anyway?”
“Danielle,” John-as-Andy replies dreamily. “Danielle Zukko.”
The rest of the T-Birds start laughing, and I land a hard smack to Geoffrey-as-Francois’ arm, trying to make my best oh shit, he’s talking about a girl I know and have hooked up with face, but mostly just doing my best not to appear revolted at the mental image of myself-as-Rizzo having sex with Joss-as-Dani. Based on the semi-amused, semi-exasperated expressions on my castmates’ faces, I don’t succeed.
Ben enters the auditorium so quietly and carefully that I barely hear the click of the door shutting behind him. We make eye contact, and he offers a tiny wave before sinking into a seat in the back row. I want to make an obscene gesture at him, but the phone call had me on thin ice already, and I’m doing my best to convince people that I can be professional; I remain in character, offer up my fakest smile, and say to John-as-Andy, “Well, I think she sounds peachy keen! And maybe if you believe in miracles, your princess will show up again someday, somewhere unexpected… see you later.” I shoot a glance at Geoffrey and Gabe and say, in my regular, slightly harsher tone, “Come on, boys.”
We exit, stage right.
“Okay,” Nate cuts us off. “You guys are good for right now, so if you could just go run lines in the back classrooms for a little while, that would be fantastic. I need Joss and John onstage, please.”
I lean back out onto the stage and beckon to Ben, who stands and approaches the side stairs. When Nate has finally looked away, I admit, “We never actually run lines when he tells us to run lines in the back classrooms. We just hang out, listen to music, do our homework. Sometimes play poker.”
“One guess whose idea that is,” Ben says, and I smirk at him. He allows me to lace our fingers and tow him through the wing and down the back steps, into the hall of classrooms where we hang out and where stage crew does work on the smaller props.
Tonight, most people have congregated in an empty English classroom. The other players are hanging out in the front of the room, listening to music from Annabelle’s iPhone and dancing around. The members of stage crew are set up in the back, carefully painting a long piece of wood that I think will eventually be turned into the side panel of the car. The car designs are actually sort of awesome—last week, the day after the godawful meeting with the divorce lawyers, Travis had stomped into rehearsal with a stack of sloppy sketches and an unshakable determination to build a three-quarters scale replica of a 1948 Ford Deluxe convertible. Ms. Markland and Nate had just sort of exchanged glassy-eyed glances while Travis had gone on and on about it can do three-hundred and sixty degree turns during the Greased Lightning number if I put swivel caster wheels under the base, and blah blah install handles under the bumpers so it can be turned on its side and moved offstage between numbers, and just need people to help me build and paint the skeleton of the car, I’ll install all the lights myself, how hard can it be to learn how to solder? Eventually, Ms. Markland had approved it, but I think that was mostly to get him to shut up.
Right now, Travis is arguing with one of the sophomores about the proper placement of the lightning bolts on the side panels. I still can’t handle looking at him for any longer than five seconds at a time; I duck my head and announce, “Joss, Markland wants you onstage with John.”
She says nothing, but makes a bit of a show of going over to give Travis a lingering kiss on the cheek before she leaves. Travis is too distracted with his argument to even acknowledge her. Ben quirks an eyebrow at me, and I answer with a shrug.
“So,” Annabelle says, cocking her head to the side and gesturing to Ben, “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Ben,” I say, settling a palm in the small of his back. “Ben, this is Annabelle, our choreographer. That’s Christine, that’s Miranda, that’s—”
“Hang on, hang on, hang on,” Miranda says, flapping her hands. I flap mine back at her. “This is Ben, the not-boyfriend from Yale?”
Ben snorts. “You actually call me your not-boyfriend in casual conversation? That’s so lame.”
“Yes, it is, but as my not-boyfriend, you’re obligated to think it’s cute,” I say.
Travis twists to look over his shoulder, and Ben notices the movement, acknowledges him with a small wave, a smile, and a, “Hey, Travis.” Travis turns back around without a word. Ben blinks and says, “Or not.”
“Ignore him,” I mutter, leaning down to press a kiss to his temple—Miranda places her hand over her heart, like that one little kiss is enough to melt her. I roll my eyes. Ben nods once, but still seems a little confused as to why he’s getting the freeze-out. There’s no right way to tell him that Travis is pissed at him for having the supposed indecency to date me before I’ve been sober for a year, so I don’t say anything.
A new song starts up on the iPhone, a horrendous pop song I haven’t been able to escape on the radio lately. Ben groans, “Oh fuck, I hate this song so much. You people have terrible taste in music.”
“He’d be calling me after rehearsal, if you weren’t actively in the process of ruining my social life,” I protest. “We were supposed to be done ten minutes ago, and he’s my ride home. Just give me thirty seconds so I can tell him to wait inside, since clearly you’re planning to make us run this scene fifty more times.”
Nate mutters something about only as long as he doesn’t interrupt us, but that comment doesn’t deserve a response, so I turn away and answer the call with a murmured, “Hey, man. You here?”
“Yeah, I’ve been parked in the lot for like, five minutes. Are you going to be done with rehearsal soon?” Ben asks.
“Not until nine. I’d have called to let you know, but I only just found out. Come inside and wait in the auditorium, your car’s probably cold as fuck,” I say. Behind me, I hear Nate tittering in the front row. I turn to face him; he’s glaring at me, as though I’ve overstepped some huge boundary by allowing my not-boyfriend to come watch the last half hour of rehearsal. I grin at him and say, “Don’t give me that look, Nathan.”
“What look?” he says.
“That jealous look,” I say without thinking. From across the stage, Christine shoots me a warning glare, and I belatedly realize that my comment is probably hitting a little too close to home. To cover, I pin my phone between my shoulder and my ear so that I can form my fingers into the shape of a heart. “Calm down, my beloved director. You know I only have eyes for you.”
On the other end of the phone, Ben says dryly, “I thought you were supposed to have eyes for me.”
“McCutcheon, you only get to claim property rights on one of my facial features, and based on what went down last night—name, me—you’ve chosen to claim my mouth. Don’t get greedy,” I say.
The sound system clicks on, and Riley’s chuckling voice says over the speakers, “Seriously, dude?”
I toss him the finger and say into the phone, “Come in, sit in the auditorium, put your phone on silent if you’re going to have it out, and don’t distract me. See you in a few.”
I end the call, silence my phone, and slip right back into the relaxed, strolling posture that Nate has coached me into adopting when I’m acting as Bobby Rizzo. Taking the cue from me, Geoffrey-as-Francois says to John-as-Andy, “Hey, what was her name, anyway?”
“Danielle,” John-as-Andy replies dreamily. “Danielle Zukko.”
The rest of the T-Birds start laughing, and I land a hard smack to Geoffrey-as-Francois’ arm, trying to make my best oh shit, he’s talking about a girl I know and have hooked up with face, but mostly just doing my best not to appear revolted at the mental image of myself-as-Rizzo having sex with Joss-as-Dani. Based on the semi-amused, semi-exasperated expressions on my castmates’ faces, I don’t succeed.
Ben enters the auditorium so quietly and carefully that I barely hear the click of the door shutting behind him. We make eye contact, and he offers a tiny wave before sinking into a seat in the back row. I want to make an obscene gesture at him, but the phone call had me on thin ice already, and I’m doing my best to convince people that I can be professional; I remain in character, offer up my fakest smile, and say to John-as-Andy, “Well, I think she sounds peachy keen! And maybe if you believe in miracles, your princess will show up again someday, somewhere unexpected… see you later.” I shoot a glance at Geoffrey and Gabe and say, in my regular, slightly harsher tone, “Come on, boys.”
We exit, stage right.
“Okay,” Nate cuts us off. “You guys are good for right now, so if you could just go run lines in the back classrooms for a little while, that would be fantastic. I need Joss and John onstage, please.”
I lean back out onto the stage and beckon to Ben, who stands and approaches the side stairs. When Nate has finally looked away, I admit, “We never actually run lines when he tells us to run lines in the back classrooms. We just hang out, listen to music, do our homework. Sometimes play poker.”
“One guess whose idea that is,” Ben says, and I smirk at him. He allows me to lace our fingers and tow him through the wing and down the back steps, into the hall of classrooms where we hang out and where stage crew does work on the smaller props.
Tonight, most people have congregated in an empty English classroom. The other players are hanging out in the front of the room, listening to music from Annabelle’s iPhone and dancing around. The members of stage crew are set up in the back, carefully painting a long piece of wood that I think will eventually be turned into the side panel of the car. The car designs are actually sort of awesome—last week, the day after the godawful meeting with the divorce lawyers, Travis had stomped into rehearsal with a stack of sloppy sketches and an unshakable determination to build a three-quarters scale replica of a 1948 Ford Deluxe convertible. Ms. Markland and Nate had just sort of exchanged glassy-eyed glances while Travis had gone on and on about it can do three-hundred and sixty degree turns during the Greased Lightning number if I put swivel caster wheels under the base, and blah blah install handles under the bumpers so it can be turned on its side and moved offstage between numbers, and just need people to help me build and paint the skeleton of the car, I’ll install all the lights myself, how hard can it be to learn how to solder? Eventually, Ms. Markland had approved it, but I think that was mostly to get him to shut up.
Right now, Travis is arguing with one of the sophomores about the proper placement of the lightning bolts on the side panels. I still can’t handle looking at him for any longer than five seconds at a time; I duck my head and announce, “Joss, Markland wants you onstage with John.”
She says nothing, but makes a bit of a show of going over to give Travis a lingering kiss on the cheek before she leaves. Travis is too distracted with his argument to even acknowledge her. Ben quirks an eyebrow at me, and I answer with a shrug.
“So,” Annabelle says, cocking her head to the side and gesturing to Ben, “Who’s your friend?”
“This is Ben,” I say, settling a palm in the small of his back. “Ben, this is Annabelle, our choreographer. That’s Christine, that’s Miranda, that’s—”
“Hang on, hang on, hang on,” Miranda says, flapping her hands. I flap mine back at her. “This is Ben, the not-boyfriend from Yale?”
Ben snorts. “You actually call me your not-boyfriend in casual conversation? That’s so lame.”
“Yes, it is, but as my not-boyfriend, you’re obligated to think it’s cute,” I say.
Travis twists to look over his shoulder, and Ben notices the movement, acknowledges him with a small wave, a smile, and a, “Hey, Travis.” Travis turns back around without a word. Ben blinks and says, “Or not.”
“Ignore him,” I mutter, leaning down to press a kiss to his temple—Miranda places her hand over her heart, like that one little kiss is enough to melt her. I roll my eyes. Ben nods once, but still seems a little confused as to why he’s getting the freeze-out. There’s no right way to tell him that Travis is pissed at him for having the supposed indecency to date me before I’ve been sober for a year, so I don’t say anything.
A new song starts up on the iPhone, a horrendous pop song I haven’t been able to escape on the radio lately. Ben groans, “Oh fuck, I hate this song so much. You people have terrible taste in music.”
Christine gives him a once-over and says, “I’m honestly surprised you even know this song.”
Grimacing, Ben admits, “I have four sisters under the age of twelve. I have Justin Bieber’s entire oeuvre memorized.”
“Taylor Swift’s, too,” I add, dodging the kick he aims at me for disclosing that particular embarrassment. I grin and get just close enough to dig two fingers into the side of his ribs. “Are you sure, though? Are you sure you don’t secretly love this song? Are you sure you don’t want to chill by the fire while we’re eating fondue? I can serenade you with it, if you’d like. If it’ll get me laid later, I’ll totally sing this whole song.”
“You’ll get laid later if you don’t sing,” Ben swears. “I’m serious. I will literally punch you if you start singing.”
“See, now you’ve threatened me—”
“Garen, don’t you fucking dare—”
“—and it’s like you’ve goaded me into it, you really only have yourself to blame—”
“—this is not a fucking episode of Glee, you can’t just serenade people to get them to touch your balls—”
“—I guess you’d just better prepare to say hello to falsetto in three, two—”
“—going to fucking punch you, I swear to—”
“I’d like to be everything you want! Hey, Ben, let me talk to you,” I sing as loudly as I can possibly manage. He does take a swing at me, but I’ve had enough warning that it’s not at all difficult to catch him by the wrist and spin him into my arms so that I can grind enthusiastically against his ass as I continue, “If I was your boyfriend, I’d never let you go. Keep you on my arm, girl—or, boy, I guess.”
“This friendship is over forever,” Ben says flatly.
He catches me with an elbow to the ribs that makes me miss a line because I’m too busy scowling to sing, but then I just pull him tighter to my chest and nuzzle his jaw with my nose. “And I could be a gentleman, anything you want—”
“For fuck’s sake,” Travis mutters from the back of the room, storming over to the box of paints and beginning to furiously repack it.
As though he’s been waiting for some sort of comment, Ben wriggles out of my embrace and takes a few steps towards Travis, voice sharp as he says, “Travis, if you’ve got something to say to me, then man up and say it to my face.”
Travis stops packing and turns around so abruptly that, for half a second, I think he’s going to knock over the box. He snaps, “The idea of you telling anyone to ‘man up’ is fucking ridiculous to me right now, Ben.”
“What does that mean?” Ben demands.
“It means you don’t want to hear what I have to say, okay? I promise you that,” Travis says. Ben flings both his arms out in a clear hit me with your best shot sort of gesture. Never one to back down when pushed in a moment of anger, our ex-boyfriend aims a finger at him and says, pronouncing each word clearly and carefully, “Seeing the two of you together makes me sick. He is going to relapse, and it is going to be your fault, and I will never, ever forgive you.”
I look around at Ben, but I’m not actually seeing him. My mind is too focused on Travis’ words to pay attention to what my eyes are doing. There’s a horrible certainty in the way he says, he is going to relapse; it’s like he’s just stating a fact, something everyone else has been aware of except for me. Except for Ben, too, if the look of barely repressed shock and fury on his face is any real indication of how he feels. His voice is nothing short of deadly when he replies, “Garen’s sobriety is going perfectly well, and I have been completely supportive of him. So, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the fact that you’ve been too supportive,” Travis says. “You’re letting him rely on you too much, and you’re dating him, and you shouldn’t be, and it’s fucked up.”
“Can we clear the room?” I ask, turning pleading eyes on Annabelle. “Can we—please, I think this is going to be a shitty conversation. Can we clear everyone out of the room for a few minutes?”
“Of course,” Annabelle says. She stuffs the still-playing iPhone into her pocket and declares, “Everybody, we’re moving to the other classroom. Seriously, get up, now.”
Only once the room is empty, save the three of us, does Travis continue, “Look, if you say he wants this, that’s fine, I believe you. Except I don’t give a fuck what Garen wants. I only care about what he needs, and what he needs right now, more than anything else in the world—more than sex, more than friendship, more than anything you’re capable of giving him—is a chance to figure out who he is. Because he’s not the same person he was last fall, when you met him, and he’s not the same person he was last winter, when I dated him, and he’s sure as hell not the same person he was last spring, when he was using. Everything about his life is different, and he’s clinging to this relationship with you because you’re familiar, because you’re—”
“If you call me ‘easy,’ I will punch you in the mouth,” Ben warns, and I slip my hand into his once more to keep him in place, just in case.
Travis lets out a frustrated noise. “I was going to say that you’re safe. You’ve always been like that, for all of us. You’re the one who takes care of the rest of us, you’re the one who brought Garen back from Cleveland, and who puts Alex to bed after parties where he drinks too much, and who first brought me into this group because you could tell that I was hurting and needed people to connect to. That’s what you do, Ben. You fix the rest of us, and now you want to fix Garen. You think you understand how bad it can get, but you have no fucking clue. Last spring, you weren’t the one he was clinging to. I was. And it nearly wrecked all of us.”
There is a long moment of silence, during which they just stare at each other, and a panicked, furious, jealous part of me wonders if this is going to end with them kissing. That would be such a fucking Travis thing to do—to say he’s still in love with me, to scream at my not-boyfriend, to say how toxic my not-relationship is, and then to suddenly end up with his hands in Ben’s hair and his tongue in his mouth, all anger and passion, just like everyone tells me they started with. But then Ben says, almost too quietly for me to hear even though I’m standing right next to him, “I’m so sick of this from you. I’m sick of you giving up on him and expecting everyone else to do the same. He’s one of my best friends, Travis, and I care about him. I’m not going to treat him the way you do, because you are always the first person to let him drown.”
“No, I’m the only person who realizes he can fucking swim,” Travis says flatly. “He can do this without us, Ben. As a matter of fact, that’s the only way he can do this, and you’re fucking it up with your stupid, selfish need to be needed. You’re trying to—”
“For fuck’s sake, Travis, can you just admit that you’re saying this because you’re jealous?” Ben snaps.
Oh, Christ. That’s the worst thing he could say. Travis’ jaw is almost too tight for him to grit out the words, “Excuse me?”
“You’re pretending that this is all about his sobriety, but that’s bullshit,” Ben says, yanking his hand out of mine and crossing the room. I scramble after him, still trying to put myself in between them, because they’re getting closer, and they’re getting louder, and the last thing I want is to see two people I care about getting into a fistfight about whether or not it’s okay for one—or both—of them to want my dick. Ben continues, “I know you still want him, okay? We all know that. I’d bet your fucking girlfriend knows it, too. Garen told me she doesn’t want you two talking anymore—didn’t tell me why, but I’m betting it’s because she hates that look in your eye.”
“What look—”
“The same one you’ve had every time you’ve looked at him since the day you met!” Ben bursts out. “That look like he’s the only person in the fucking world, like you’re in literal, physical pain for want of having your hands on him. The same look you gave him the entire time you were dating me.”
I now have a hand pressed flat to each boy’s chest, making sure they stay on my sides and not coming after each other. Travis lets out a harsh laugh and crowds closer still. “Are we really going to go there, Ben? Are we really going to make this all about you and me, and not the fact that you’re a complete dick who doesn’t even trust him to stay clean without you babysitting him? If you knew half as much about what’s good for his sobriety as you think you do, you’d realize that he’s not at a point in his life where it’s okay for him to be dating anyone—”
“You’re just pissed that he’s not dating you!”
“That’s not what this is about!” Travis shouts. In what I can only assume is an attempt to move around me so that he and Ben can be right in each other’s faces as they argue, he tries to brush me aside with a hand curved harshly over my hip, and fuck--
Dave is shouting, yelling, giving me a rough shove with his hands on my hips. I stagger back against the edge of my desk, and the corner of it digs into my thigh, probably going to bruise me. But he comes at me again, gives me another shove, then a punch that leaves my jaw stinging and his voice still screaming, “How the fuck could you not tell me that you live with your ex?”
“It doesn’t make a difference,” I sneer, because my bleeding mouth is still working even though deep down, I know I should just shut the fuck up and try to wait out his rage. “Nothing’s happening between us anymore. I’d know—I keep trying to get him to give up his boyfriend for me, but he won’t do it.”
He grabs me by the throat, and I can’t breathe, I’m gasping for air, he’s giving me a rough shake. “What if he did, huh? Are you telling me that if he just left his boy and beckoned, you’d leave me? You’d just dump me and go right back to being his?”
“I’ve never been anyone else’s,” I say, and he pulls back his free hand, punches me again, again, again. My head is spinning, and I curl involuntarily in on myself, hunching over. I almost fall over, but he pulls me upright again, steadies me with his hands on my hips again--
“Garen,” an urgent voice says from behind me. Ben. “Garen, it’s okay, you’re okay.”
“What’s going on? I don’t understand, Ben, tell me what’s going on,” Travis orders.
One of them places a hand on my back and I cringe away from it. I become slowly aware of the fact that I’m doubled over, leaning my elbows on a desk and facing away from both of them. I straighten up quickly and turn to face them again, try to force myself to smile and shake it off, but I can tell by the looks they’re giving me that neither of them would be convinced. Besides, I’m not sure I could make a sound—I’ve freaked out before, but not like that. Not in shreds of memories that make me feel sick. Ben rounds on Travis, gives him a hard shove. “You can’t just fucking grab him like that.”
“What are you talking about?” Travis asks, seeming terrified, wrecked. “I didn’t mean to do any—I don’t understand. What did I do?”
“This,” Ben says, roughly palming Travis’ hip in the same way Travis himself had touched me. “You can’t just touch him like that, he can’t handle it.”
Travis looks like he’s close to snapping. It is with extreme effort that he makes himself slowly say, “You’re sleeping with someone who reacts like that to physical contact? I put my hand on hip, and he reacted like I hit him with a baseball bat. And you think it’s okay to have sex with him?”
“He doesn’t react like that with me,” Ben protests. “He feels safe with me, he’s comfortable with me. I know how to touch him, alright? And maybe you can’t understand that, but that doesn’t mean—”
“I want to go,” I say. Thankfully, my voice manages to be even, normal, not nearly as destroyed as I feel. Ben is at my side in a second, and I slip my hand into his, lace our fingers together so tightly it almost hurts. “Ben, I want to go. Can we please just fucking go?”
He doesn’t say anything, just nods and lets me pull him out of the classroom. I can’t make myself look back at Travis. I already know the unbearable look of pity and confusion that will be painted on his face, and I can’t deal with that right now. I can’t bring myself to acknowledge the fact that I’ve just managed to humiliate myself completely in front of the guy I’m in love with. He must think I’m so weak, or weird, or insane.
Only once we’ve left the building and are making our way across the parking lot to Ben’s car does he say, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I just—I mean, you know what happens when something goes wrong. And I, um—” I break off, frowning down at his face. Though his tone is even, he looks stricken. “Ben, are—wait, are you okay?”
“We should go,” he says, unlocking the car and sliding in behind the wheel.
“Not until you tell me why you look so fucked right now,” I say.
He turns the car on and yanks up the hood of his sweatshirt, and I can feel him shutting down on me. “Travis was right. I’m such a piece of shit for touching you when you’re so uncomfortable with contact. I’m such an asshole, I’m taking advant—”
“No, you’re not, to any of that,” I say. He opens his mouth to protest, and I don’t know how to make him believe me, so I settle for proving him wrong with some of that contact I’m supposedly so opposed to. I hook an arm around his waist and pull him back out of the car, taking his place behind the wheel and pushing the seat all the way back. He makes no move to stop me when I drag him back into the seat with me, onto my lap with his knees straddling my hips. There’s just enough room for me to close the door and close everything else out. I run both my hands down the length of his torso, then back up to tug him forward by the shoulders. He lets me kiss him, first chastely, then deeply. When he does pull back, I say, “You were right, not Travis, okay? When it’s you touching me, I’m fine. I trust you, you know how to do it without freaking me out. It’s fine. It’s good, it helps. Being with you like this, it helps, Ben.”
He says nothing, and I take the silence as a cue to kiss him, which he reciprocates somewhat reluctantly. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see the front door of the building swinging open. Travis steps out, searches the parking lot for a moment before his eyes land on Ben’s car. On us. Sensing the sudden tension in my body, Ben pulls away again and follows my line of sight out to the front of the building. He lets out a frustrated sigh and mutters, “I should… not.”
He shifts off of my lap into the passenger’s seat, but Travis is still watching us, and I’ve made up my mind. I bring my mouth crashing against Ben’s once more, murmuring against his lips, “No, I want—show him.”
“What do you mean?” Ben asks.
“I want to show him, I want him to see that he’s wrong,” I say, somewhat desperately. I want him to know that I’m not broken, that I’m still capable of doing this. When Ben doesn’t react, I wind my fingers around his wrist and guide his hand to the front of my jeans. “Please, Ben, I need—”
Grimacing, Ben admits, “I have four sisters under the age of twelve. I have Justin Bieber’s entire oeuvre memorized.”
“Taylor Swift’s, too,” I add, dodging the kick he aims at me for disclosing that particular embarrassment. I grin and get just close enough to dig two fingers into the side of his ribs. “Are you sure, though? Are you sure you don’t secretly love this song? Are you sure you don’t want to chill by the fire while we’re eating fondue? I can serenade you with it, if you’d like. If it’ll get me laid later, I’ll totally sing this whole song.”
“You’ll get laid later if you don’t sing,” Ben swears. “I’m serious. I will literally punch you if you start singing.”
“See, now you’ve threatened me—”
“Garen, don’t you fucking dare—”
“—and it’s like you’ve goaded me into it, you really only have yourself to blame—”
“—this is not a fucking episode of Glee, you can’t just serenade people to get them to touch your balls—”
“—I guess you’d just better prepare to say hello to falsetto in three, two—”
“—going to fucking punch you, I swear to—”
“I’d like to be everything you want! Hey, Ben, let me talk to you,” I sing as loudly as I can possibly manage. He does take a swing at me, but I’ve had enough warning that it’s not at all difficult to catch him by the wrist and spin him into my arms so that I can grind enthusiastically against his ass as I continue, “If I was your boyfriend, I’d never let you go. Keep you on my arm, girl—or, boy, I guess.”
“This friendship is over forever,” Ben says flatly.
He catches me with an elbow to the ribs that makes me miss a line because I’m too busy scowling to sing, but then I just pull him tighter to my chest and nuzzle his jaw with my nose. “And I could be a gentleman, anything you want—”
“For fuck’s sake,” Travis mutters from the back of the room, storming over to the box of paints and beginning to furiously repack it.
As though he’s been waiting for some sort of comment, Ben wriggles out of my embrace and takes a few steps towards Travis, voice sharp as he says, “Travis, if you’ve got something to say to me, then man up and say it to my face.”
Travis stops packing and turns around so abruptly that, for half a second, I think he’s going to knock over the box. He snaps, “The idea of you telling anyone to ‘man up’ is fucking ridiculous to me right now, Ben.”
“What does that mean?” Ben demands.
“It means you don’t want to hear what I have to say, okay? I promise you that,” Travis says. Ben flings both his arms out in a clear hit me with your best shot sort of gesture. Never one to back down when pushed in a moment of anger, our ex-boyfriend aims a finger at him and says, pronouncing each word clearly and carefully, “Seeing the two of you together makes me sick. He is going to relapse, and it is going to be your fault, and I will never, ever forgive you.”
I look around at Ben, but I’m not actually seeing him. My mind is too focused on Travis’ words to pay attention to what my eyes are doing. There’s a horrible certainty in the way he says, he is going to relapse; it’s like he’s just stating a fact, something everyone else has been aware of except for me. Except for Ben, too, if the look of barely repressed shock and fury on his face is any real indication of how he feels. His voice is nothing short of deadly when he replies, “Garen’s sobriety is going perfectly well, and I have been completely supportive of him. So, what the fuck are you talking about?”
“I’m talking about the fact that you’ve been too supportive,” Travis says. “You’re letting him rely on you too much, and you’re dating him, and you shouldn’t be, and it’s fucked up.”
“Can we clear the room?” I ask, turning pleading eyes on Annabelle. “Can we—please, I think this is going to be a shitty conversation. Can we clear everyone out of the room for a few minutes?”
“Of course,” Annabelle says. She stuffs the still-playing iPhone into her pocket and declares, “Everybody, we’re moving to the other classroom. Seriously, get up, now.”
Only once the room is empty, save the three of us, does Travis continue, “Look, if you say he wants this, that’s fine, I believe you. Except I don’t give a fuck what Garen wants. I only care about what he needs, and what he needs right now, more than anything else in the world—more than sex, more than friendship, more than anything you’re capable of giving him—is a chance to figure out who he is. Because he’s not the same person he was last fall, when you met him, and he’s not the same person he was last winter, when I dated him, and he’s sure as hell not the same person he was last spring, when he was using. Everything about his life is different, and he’s clinging to this relationship with you because you’re familiar, because you’re—”
“If you call me ‘easy,’ I will punch you in the mouth,” Ben warns, and I slip my hand into his once more to keep him in place, just in case.
Travis lets out a frustrated noise. “I was going to say that you’re safe. You’ve always been like that, for all of us. You’re the one who takes care of the rest of us, you’re the one who brought Garen back from Cleveland, and who puts Alex to bed after parties where he drinks too much, and who first brought me into this group because you could tell that I was hurting and needed people to connect to. That’s what you do, Ben. You fix the rest of us, and now you want to fix Garen. You think you understand how bad it can get, but you have no fucking clue. Last spring, you weren’t the one he was clinging to. I was. And it nearly wrecked all of us.”
There is a long moment of silence, during which they just stare at each other, and a panicked, furious, jealous part of me wonders if this is going to end with them kissing. That would be such a fucking Travis thing to do—to say he’s still in love with me, to scream at my not-boyfriend, to say how toxic my not-relationship is, and then to suddenly end up with his hands in Ben’s hair and his tongue in his mouth, all anger and passion, just like everyone tells me they started with. But then Ben says, almost too quietly for me to hear even though I’m standing right next to him, “I’m so sick of this from you. I’m sick of you giving up on him and expecting everyone else to do the same. He’s one of my best friends, Travis, and I care about him. I’m not going to treat him the way you do, because you are always the first person to let him drown.”
“No, I’m the only person who realizes he can fucking swim,” Travis says flatly. “He can do this without us, Ben. As a matter of fact, that’s the only way he can do this, and you’re fucking it up with your stupid, selfish need to be needed. You’re trying to—”
“For fuck’s sake, Travis, can you just admit that you’re saying this because you’re jealous?” Ben snaps.
Oh, Christ. That’s the worst thing he could say. Travis’ jaw is almost too tight for him to grit out the words, “Excuse me?”
“You’re pretending that this is all about his sobriety, but that’s bullshit,” Ben says, yanking his hand out of mine and crossing the room. I scramble after him, still trying to put myself in between them, because they’re getting closer, and they’re getting louder, and the last thing I want is to see two people I care about getting into a fistfight about whether or not it’s okay for one—or both—of them to want my dick. Ben continues, “I know you still want him, okay? We all know that. I’d bet your fucking girlfriend knows it, too. Garen told me she doesn’t want you two talking anymore—didn’t tell me why, but I’m betting it’s because she hates that look in your eye.”
“What look—”
“The same one you’ve had every time you’ve looked at him since the day you met!” Ben bursts out. “That look like he’s the only person in the fucking world, like you’re in literal, physical pain for want of having your hands on him. The same look you gave him the entire time you were dating me.”
I now have a hand pressed flat to each boy’s chest, making sure they stay on my sides and not coming after each other. Travis lets out a harsh laugh and crowds closer still. “Are we really going to go there, Ben? Are we really going to make this all about you and me, and not the fact that you’re a complete dick who doesn’t even trust him to stay clean without you babysitting him? If you knew half as much about what’s good for his sobriety as you think you do, you’d realize that he’s not at a point in his life where it’s okay for him to be dating anyone—”
“You’re just pissed that he’s not dating you!”
“That’s not what this is about!” Travis shouts. In what I can only assume is an attempt to move around me so that he and Ben can be right in each other’s faces as they argue, he tries to brush me aside with a hand curved harshly over my hip, and fuck--
Dave is shouting, yelling, giving me a rough shove with his hands on my hips. I stagger back against the edge of my desk, and the corner of it digs into my thigh, probably going to bruise me. But he comes at me again, gives me another shove, then a punch that leaves my jaw stinging and his voice still screaming, “How the fuck could you not tell me that you live with your ex?”
“It doesn’t make a difference,” I sneer, because my bleeding mouth is still working even though deep down, I know I should just shut the fuck up and try to wait out his rage. “Nothing’s happening between us anymore. I’d know—I keep trying to get him to give up his boyfriend for me, but he won’t do it.”
He grabs me by the throat, and I can’t breathe, I’m gasping for air, he’s giving me a rough shake. “What if he did, huh? Are you telling me that if he just left his boy and beckoned, you’d leave me? You’d just dump me and go right back to being his?”
“I’ve never been anyone else’s,” I say, and he pulls back his free hand, punches me again, again, again. My head is spinning, and I curl involuntarily in on myself, hunching over. I almost fall over, but he pulls me upright again, steadies me with his hands on my hips again--
“Garen,” an urgent voice says from behind me. Ben. “Garen, it’s okay, you’re okay.”
“What’s going on? I don’t understand, Ben, tell me what’s going on,” Travis orders.
One of them places a hand on my back and I cringe away from it. I become slowly aware of the fact that I’m doubled over, leaning my elbows on a desk and facing away from both of them. I straighten up quickly and turn to face them again, try to force myself to smile and shake it off, but I can tell by the looks they’re giving me that neither of them would be convinced. Besides, I’m not sure I could make a sound—I’ve freaked out before, but not like that. Not in shreds of memories that make me feel sick. Ben rounds on Travis, gives him a hard shove. “You can’t just fucking grab him like that.”
“What are you talking about?” Travis asks, seeming terrified, wrecked. “I didn’t mean to do any—I don’t understand. What did I do?”
“This,” Ben says, roughly palming Travis’ hip in the same way Travis himself had touched me. “You can’t just touch him like that, he can’t handle it.”
Travis looks like he’s close to snapping. It is with extreme effort that he makes himself slowly say, “You’re sleeping with someone who reacts like that to physical contact? I put my hand on hip, and he reacted like I hit him with a baseball bat. And you think it’s okay to have sex with him?”
“He doesn’t react like that with me,” Ben protests. “He feels safe with me, he’s comfortable with me. I know how to touch him, alright? And maybe you can’t understand that, but that doesn’t mean—”
“I want to go,” I say. Thankfully, my voice manages to be even, normal, not nearly as destroyed as I feel. Ben is at my side in a second, and I slip my hand into his, lace our fingers together so tightly it almost hurts. “Ben, I want to go. Can we please just fucking go?”
He doesn’t say anything, just nods and lets me pull him out of the classroom. I can’t make myself look back at Travis. I already know the unbearable look of pity and confusion that will be painted on his face, and I can’t deal with that right now. I can’t bring myself to acknowledge the fact that I’ve just managed to humiliate myself completely in front of the guy I’m in love with. He must think I’m so weak, or weird, or insane.
Only once we’ve left the building and are making our way across the parking lot to Ben’s car does he say, “Are you okay?”
“I’m fine. I just—I mean, you know what happens when something goes wrong. And I, um—” I break off, frowning down at his face. Though his tone is even, he looks stricken. “Ben, are—wait, are you okay?”
“We should go,” he says, unlocking the car and sliding in behind the wheel.
“Not until you tell me why you look so fucked right now,” I say.
He turns the car on and yanks up the hood of his sweatshirt, and I can feel him shutting down on me. “Travis was right. I’m such a piece of shit for touching you when you’re so uncomfortable with contact. I’m such an asshole, I’m taking advant—”
“No, you’re not, to any of that,” I say. He opens his mouth to protest, and I don’t know how to make him believe me, so I settle for proving him wrong with some of that contact I’m supposedly so opposed to. I hook an arm around his waist and pull him back out of the car, taking his place behind the wheel and pushing the seat all the way back. He makes no move to stop me when I drag him back into the seat with me, onto my lap with his knees straddling my hips. There’s just enough room for me to close the door and close everything else out. I run both my hands down the length of his torso, then back up to tug him forward by the shoulders. He lets me kiss him, first chastely, then deeply. When he does pull back, I say, “You were right, not Travis, okay? When it’s you touching me, I’m fine. I trust you, you know how to do it without freaking me out. It’s fine. It’s good, it helps. Being with you like this, it helps, Ben.”
He says nothing, and I take the silence as a cue to kiss him, which he reciprocates somewhat reluctantly. Then, out of the corner of my eye, I see the front door of the building swinging open. Travis steps out, searches the parking lot for a moment before his eyes land on Ben’s car. On us. Sensing the sudden tension in my body, Ben pulls away again and follows my line of sight out to the front of the building. He lets out a frustrated sigh and mutters, “I should… not.”
He shifts off of my lap into the passenger’s seat, but Travis is still watching us, and I’ve made up my mind. I bring my mouth crashing against Ben’s once more, murmuring against his lips, “No, I want—show him.”
“What do you mean?” Ben asks.
“I want to show him, I want him to see that he’s wrong,” I say, somewhat desperately. I want him to know that I’m not broken, that I’m still capable of doing this. When Ben doesn’t react, I wind my fingers around his wrist and guide his hand to the front of my jeans. “Please, Ben, I need—”
“Okay,” he says quietly, cranking up the stereo and fumbling for my belt, my zipper. I’m not turned on yet, but Ben is patient; he twines his fingers in my hair and kisses me while I slip a hand into my jeans and stroke myself to full hardness. He waits, traces my lips with the tip of his tongue, ducks down to nibble at the curve of my throat. When I’m gripping the front of his sweatshirt with my free hand and sighing, he whispers, “You ready?”
I look past him to where Travis is still standing on the sidewalk, watching us. His jaw is set, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jeans. I nod, push my jeans down over my hips, and say, “Yeah. I’m ready.”
In one movement, Ben leans over and swallows me down. My own mouth drops open a little, my head falls back against the headrest—it feels good, but I might be overselling it a little, because I know Travis is still watching. Truth be told, I’m pretty sure Ben’s putting in more effort than usual, because he knows Travis is watching, too. And at the end of the day, in our group, no one is ever just fucking the person they’re actually fucking.
I open my eyes again just in time to see Travis step off the curb towards us. “Fuck.” Ben can’t exactly ask me what’s up, but he does make a slightly questioning hum around the head of my cock. I allow myself a second to appreciate the sensation before I say hoarsely, “H-He just moved closer.”
“Still moving?” Ben pulls off to ask. His tongue is tracing me from base to top, making it sort of impossible for me to focus enough to actually give a shit where Travis is standing right now.
I push Ben’s hood off his head so that I can tangle my fingers in his hair as he returns to bobbing on my dick. When he eventually makes another, slightly more impatient hum of curiosity, I force my attention back outside the car. It takes me a minute to even find Travis, but then I say, “He’s in his car now. Twenty feet away, maybe, just watching through the windshield. Shit, Ben, your mouth—”
He surges up to kiss me, sweeping his tongue into my mouth so that I’m left with the taste of my own precum. He pulls back just enough to urge, “Don’t look away, okay?”
“Please—”
“I’m going to, I promise, you’re going to get off, but I want you to look him in the eyes the entire time. I want him to see your face when I make you come.”
It’s twisted, and hot, and wrong. I nod, and he kisses me again before sinking back down onto me. True to my word, I do my best to focus my eyes on Travis, who has barely blinked once. I’d always hoped I’d get another chance to see his face while getting off, but I never, ever wanted it to be like this. I never thought that the closest I’d get to sleeping with him again would be getting sucked off by his ex-boyfriend while he watched from his own car. This is so fucked up, but Ben has a goddamn talented tongue, and after a while, it’s hard to remember that this is wrong. I’m fucking up into his mouth, and I chance the briefest glance down to see that he’s palming himself through his jeans. When my eyes flick back up, Travis looks so, so sad, but then he licks his lips, and I’m coming.
I’m still twitching a little as Ben throws open his car door and stalks across the lot. My vision is a bit whited out, but I blink a few times, just in time to see Ben climb right up onto the hood of Travis’ car, kneeling over it and bracing his hands against the windshield.
And then he spits.
It takes a fucking lot to shock me when it comes to sex these days, but even I can’t help but be stunned by the sight of my cum and Ben’s saliva splattered across Travis’ windshield, of Travis’ slack jaw on the other side of that glass, of Ben leaning back onto his heels and snapping, “Fuck you, Travis. You have no idea what he needs.”
No idea what… what? I’m too dazed to fully appreciate the conversation, or what it might have to do with everything that was said in the classroom, but I do have the presence of mind to tuck myself back into my jeans and zip up before I get out of the car. I’m intending to go over and try to diffuse the tension—which will be incredibly hard to do, if I’m looking at Travis through semen-coated glass—but then Ben turns around, jumps off the hood of the car, and stomps back over to me. “Are you ready to go?”
“You need to drive,” I say, my voice still barely more than a groan. “You—fuck, I’m not sure I can work the pedals yet.”
“That’s fine. Get in,” he orders, sliding into the driver’s seat and yanking it forward again so he can reach the pedals. I sink into the passenger’s seat and cast one last look at Travis’ car as we peel out of the parking lot. He’s staring at the cum on the windshield, the muscles in his jaw working furiously, like he’s trying to stop himself from screaming, or crying, or something.
I slouch down in my seat and kick my feet up onto the dashboard. Ben swats at my knees, and I catch his hand and lace our fingers together again, giving them a hard squeeze. “Feel better?”
“No,” he says quietly, voice barely audible over the stereo. “Do you?”
I shake my head and turn to stare out the window. “No, I don’t.”
I look past him to where Travis is still standing on the sidewalk, watching us. His jaw is set, his hands stuffed in the pockets of his jeans. I nod, push my jeans down over my hips, and say, “Yeah. I’m ready.”
In one movement, Ben leans over and swallows me down. My own mouth drops open a little, my head falls back against the headrest—it feels good, but I might be overselling it a little, because I know Travis is still watching. Truth be told, I’m pretty sure Ben’s putting in more effort than usual, because he knows Travis is watching, too. And at the end of the day, in our group, no one is ever just fucking the person they’re actually fucking.
I open my eyes again just in time to see Travis step off the curb towards us. “Fuck.” Ben can’t exactly ask me what’s up, but he does make a slightly questioning hum around the head of my cock. I allow myself a second to appreciate the sensation before I say hoarsely, “H-He just moved closer.”
“Still moving?” Ben pulls off to ask. His tongue is tracing me from base to top, making it sort of impossible for me to focus enough to actually give a shit where Travis is standing right now.
I push Ben’s hood off his head so that I can tangle my fingers in his hair as he returns to bobbing on my dick. When he eventually makes another, slightly more impatient hum of curiosity, I force my attention back outside the car. It takes me a minute to even find Travis, but then I say, “He’s in his car now. Twenty feet away, maybe, just watching through the windshield. Shit, Ben, your mouth—”
He surges up to kiss me, sweeping his tongue into my mouth so that I’m left with the taste of my own precum. He pulls back just enough to urge, “Don’t look away, okay?”
“Please—”
“I’m going to, I promise, you’re going to get off, but I want you to look him in the eyes the entire time. I want him to see your face when I make you come.”
It’s twisted, and hot, and wrong. I nod, and he kisses me again before sinking back down onto me. True to my word, I do my best to focus my eyes on Travis, who has barely blinked once. I’d always hoped I’d get another chance to see his face while getting off, but I never, ever wanted it to be like this. I never thought that the closest I’d get to sleeping with him again would be getting sucked off by his ex-boyfriend while he watched from his own car. This is so fucked up, but Ben has a goddamn talented tongue, and after a while, it’s hard to remember that this is wrong. I’m fucking up into his mouth, and I chance the briefest glance down to see that he’s palming himself through his jeans. When my eyes flick back up, Travis looks so, so sad, but then he licks his lips, and I’m coming.
I’m still twitching a little as Ben throws open his car door and stalks across the lot. My vision is a bit whited out, but I blink a few times, just in time to see Ben climb right up onto the hood of Travis’ car, kneeling over it and bracing his hands against the windshield.
And then he spits.
It takes a fucking lot to shock me when it comes to sex these days, but even I can’t help but be stunned by the sight of my cum and Ben’s saliva splattered across Travis’ windshield, of Travis’ slack jaw on the other side of that glass, of Ben leaning back onto his heels and snapping, “Fuck you, Travis. You have no idea what he needs.”
No idea what… what? I’m too dazed to fully appreciate the conversation, or what it might have to do with everything that was said in the classroom, but I do have the presence of mind to tuck myself back into my jeans and zip up before I get out of the car. I’m intending to go over and try to diffuse the tension—which will be incredibly hard to do, if I’m looking at Travis through semen-coated glass—but then Ben turns around, jumps off the hood of the car, and stomps back over to me. “Are you ready to go?”
“You need to drive,” I say, my voice still barely more than a groan. “You—fuck, I’m not sure I can work the pedals yet.”
“That’s fine. Get in,” he orders, sliding into the driver’s seat and yanking it forward again so he can reach the pedals. I sink into the passenger’s seat and cast one last look at Travis’ car as we peel out of the parking lot. He’s staring at the cum on the windshield, the muscles in his jaw working furiously, like he’s trying to stop himself from screaming, or crying, or something.
I slouch down in my seat and kick my feet up onto the dashboard. Ben swats at my knees, and I catch his hand and lace our fingers together again, giving them a hard squeeze. “Feel better?”
“No,” he says quietly, voice barely audible over the stereo. “Do you?”
I shake my head and turn to stare out the window. “No, I don’t.”