Chapter 19
Kai
Aaron and I stood behind a line of benches watching our gym partners. Thalia spotted Briggs, who sat on a red bench and held a dumbbell in each hand, pressing them up in shaky movements. She followed beneath his elbows with her palms. If Briggs was the second strongest of the group, Thalia was a very close third. Her beautiful muscles shined under the harsh gym lighting, and I envied how sure and solid she looked. She was cool, and I wanted to be cool like her too.
After a handful of reps, the weights finally dropped to the floor. While Briggs took a breath, Thalia picked them up and brought them back to the rack, returning with the next set, five pounds heavier.
“She likes him,” I said, turning my head to Aaron who stood just behind my right shoulder.
“No way.” I watched in the mirror in front of us as he put his hands on his hips, shaking his head and catching my eye. “There’s no way. It’s been a year. If they both liked each other, something would’ve happened by now.”
I grinned. “You really are terrible at reading women, aren’t you?”
“Excuse me?” His eyebrows lifted, the movement accompanied by a popped hip.
I hardly knew Thalia, but I could tell. While I was only just getting to know this muscly bunch, I was truly rooting for her and Briggs. Something about their dynamic just worked. She was so strong-willed and focused, and he was so sweet and kind, and their personalities mixed in such a perfect way. The only issue is, Thalia clearly held all the power, and she didn’t seem like one to get all caught up with romance and such. She wore a shell made of ambition, and she was the type to scoff at mushy feelings. Add that to the fact that Briggs was as nervous as a first-time skydiver around her, and you had yourself two people who would just never cross the finish line.
“Look at them,” I said quietly, holding Aaron’s gaze in the mirror. “She’s replacing his weights so he can rest. Not in a bro way, in a caring way. Look at how she looks down at him over his shoulder. She’s thinking about it. It’s crossed her mind. But she needs a little push. She needs him to make the first move. As confident as she is, I don’t think romance is her strong suit.”
“She is surprisingly soft on the inside.” Aaron placed his wrist on my shoulder and lifted his fingers to scratch his chin. I flinched as his hot skin rolled too close to my sweaty neck. Ugh, that was not a spot I wanted just anyone touching. He looked down at me and scrunched his eyebrows, lifting his wrist and thumping it back down on the bone of my shoulder, closer to the edge. He shook his head as if he were shaking off my reaction and continued to speak. “You’d think she’d make a move. She’s bigger than him. More aggressive, too. She obviously wears the pants.”
“Sometimes the more outgoing ones have a harder time getting close.” It was a thought I pondered often. “Sometimes all the glamor is covering something else. Don’t you think?”
He scoffed. “I’m outgoing and I don’t have issues with getting close. Chicks love me.”
“I’m talking about Thalia, asshole. Besides, you do.”
I’d only known Aaron for two weeks, and I already felt like I knew him. I felt like I knew him because he was me. I knew what it was like to party, to talk to multiple people at once, to fuck and spit and lick in place of having an actual conversation. To only offer people the shallowest version of myself to avoid greater pain than that which I already suffered. I burned out fast, hiding away in my apartment for two years before I felt ready to make a change in my life. Aaron, it seemed, had lasted surprisingly long. Or so he claimed.
He sighed. “Blame my ex.”
I folded my arms over my chest and watched Briggs tremble with the final rep of his current set. “What’s Briggs’ deal?”
“Are you asking if B is totally traumatized like us?”
I nodded.
“No. Nothing. He had a nice girlfriend in high school. It fizzled out and they wished each other the best. She moved to South Carolina, and he’s been mostly single since, working at his dad’s surf shop by the beach.”
“So, he’s been going to the gym this whole time because he actually likes it?” I looked back at Aaron in the mirror to see if he would understand what I meant by that, but I knew he would. Aaron and I worked out because we were angry. Briggs worked out because he was happy. It was a dynamic I wasn’t sure I’d ever understand. Aaron just smiled. “Do you think Thalia ever feels like she’s not good enough for him since he’s so sweet and she’s kind of a hot head? Like she might hurt him?”
“I think we’re allowed to talk about ourselves now,” Aaron said, “without covering it up like we’re talking about them.” He gestured to me to sit back down on our respective bench. I picked up the two dumbbells from the floor and began pressing as Briggs was. “So, who is it? The skinny kid who picks you up sometimes?”
“Aaron!” I paused my motion at the top and gave him a reprimanding look in the mirror.
“All right, so it is.”
“It’s not,” I said truthfully, pushing up a few more reps before continuing my thought. I dropped the weights to the ground and swapped places with Aaron. “It’s not him, but he does set a standard. He’s my best friend. Very loyal, very thoughtful.”
“Are you not those things?” he said with a grunt, lifting a heavier set.
“He thinks I am. I try to be. But I did a lot of stupid things in the past. Sometimes I look at my friends and I just wish I could be like them. It’s hard to feel…worthy of such nice people. Don’t you think?”
“You’re asking the wrong person, KK.” Aaron finished his set and dropped the weights. “I’ve fucked up so many times, I’ve damned myself to be like this forever. No nice person would ever want to be around this.” He held his hands out to the side and gestured to himself as he often did.
I rested my forearms on the head of his seat and leaned into my hip. “Are you calling me mean?”
“Are you saying you want to be around me?”
I scoffed, denying him an answer to that as each of us took a moment before the next rotation. “Don’t you ever feel guilty for being the one who always fucks up?” I picked at my lip with my thumb and pointer, thinking back on all the times my poor life decisions caused Jonah pain.
He stared at the ground for a while, his thick lashes shielding his blinking eyes. “I feel muscular fatigue” was his delayed answer.
I puffed a non-laugh through my nose. Guilt was a feeling that coursed through me often, though I hardly gave it any attention. Generally, I felt rage, disappointment, and utter confusion. But as I worked through those sensations, they began to turn on me. I let a lot of things happen to me. I handled situations incorrectly. I let myself be someone I wasn’t proud of. Someone I wouldn’t have liked if I met her. I constantly admired the people around me, wishing I could be more like them instead of simply being more like them. How could I have failed myself as such?
“I don’t think Thalia ever feels like she’s not good enough,” Aaron continued. “She’s not the type to create problems, she just has a low tolerance for stupidity. Nothing is haunting either of them.”
“Lucky them.”
Aaron shook his head. “No. Because people like that take over a year to get what they want.”
“But maybe waiting is a good thing. Maybe both of them need to be ready so they don’t fuck up like we have. People like us, who are never ready or settled, cause pain for the people who love us. Don’t we?”
We caught eyes once again in the mirror, and it was the first time I’d ever seen a hint of softness in his dark gaze. He thought for a moment before standing from his seat. “All right, Professor K. It’s just a lame crush. We don’t need to get all philosophical.”
I slumped back down on the bench, staring at our two friends happily rotating. Perhaps waiting was a good thing. Perhaps time was precisely what allowed me to be someone other than who I’d been. Perhaps it would let me become a worthy person.
◆◆◆
Jonah picked me up from the gym, and I asked him if he wouldn’t mind walking home in silence so I could think. Of course, he didn’t mind, and he let me loop my arm through his so I could zone out as we traveled. Mere seconds in, I had completely spaced. He kept me going in the right direction and tugged at me so I wouldn’t hit any obstructions.
I liked Aaron. We had a lot in common already, and that wasn’t something I could often say. Sure, I often met nice people. That wasn’t so mind-blowing to me. What really surprised me, what really made me wonder, was when I met people and got the sensation that they just knew. They just got it. For some reason or another, this stranger was already on my team and always had been.
But he reminded me of things I didn’t really want to remember, too. Had I met him five years before, we probably would’ve been the Bonnie and Clyde of Madrid, running around and stealing pussy from every person we met, drowning our united consciousness in alcohol and tongue strokes. Perhaps it would’ve saved me from hiding behind Javi, but it would’ve destroyed me just the same.
Aaron’s attitude about relationships bothered me. Not in the sense that he was personally offending me, though I was offended. He wasn’t taking home someone new every night or anything like that, but he did tell stories from his past from time to time, and he often made jokes about “chicks loving him.” It kind of made me feel like I was left out of some larger culture because I wasn’t dating around.
I enjoyed talking to Aaron. I enjoyed looking in the mirror. It’s just that casual sex and chatting with strangers didn’t soothe me as it allegedly did him. Touch didn’t make me forget; it made everything worse. It made me jump. Not because I was afraid of it, but because my body locked up to prepare to endure whatever was coming. I hadn’t been able to find a safe place for closeness in a long, long time. But I wanted to. Now, after years, I found myself wanting to.
“Careful,” Jonah said quietly, wrapping his far arm around my torso. He tugged me toward him lightly, helping me avoid a chipped piece of sidewalk.
My attention dragged to him. He smiled at me once before looking ahead of us without another word. Jonah had never made me feel guilty, nor had he made me feel like my mistakes defined me. And he definitely didn’t make me feel left out of the dating scene. If anything, I felt like a freaking guru compared to him. He was simply there, to allow me to fuck up, to act as a sounding board, to act as comfort.
“Do you think I’m bad?” I asked.
His eyebrows ticked inwards. “Bad?”
“Do you think I mess things up?”
“No.” He looked at me. “I think you’re passive, and that’s not a secret to you. I think you’re very good at processing your feelings when things go wrong, but you don’t always put up boundaries so...things go wrong.”
I cocked my head to one side. I’d never really thought about it like that. “And in being that way, I hurt you.”
He looked back down at the sidewalk as he stepped. “Why are you asking about this?”
I explained my conversation with Aaron, and how my past sometimes felt like a block to my future. He rolled his eyes when I told him that Aaron had fully adopted his torment and simply lived in it instead of breaking out of it. I even told him some things I’d done during my relationship with Javi, which I’d kept as a secret with myself for years. The time I got blackout drunk and kissed someone else at the club, sparking a pang of guilt that chewed on my insides. How I would tell him I was going to sleep and put my phone on airplane mode so I could hang out with the girls with no distractions. All the iniquitous little lies that had devoured me and made me wonder if I’d ever be good or healthy enough to maintain a real relationship, or if I’d fuck it all up because I never let myself learn how to face up to things and let go of that which was hurting me.
“Is that why you’ve been alone for so long?” he asked.
“Yes.” The pressure around me caused me to act in false ways in the past, and eventually, I lost myself. So, I remained alone though not really processing any of it, not needing to process it because I hid so well.
“I see it in your eyes sometimes.” I whipped my head to face him. What ever could that mean? He shrugged. “Sometimes you look like you’re not even in there. Like it’s just...emptiness. Almost like you believe your sole purpose is to stay quiet and react to the people around you, but never to speak up.”
I scrunched my nose. “Thanks, Jonah. That made me feel better.” Not.
He snorted. “I’m just saying... You can blame yourself, or you can blame the situations you’ve been in. It doesn’t matter. No one can be the best version of themselves if they’re having a hard time, and no one can be the best version of themselves without any hard times, so we’re all bound to fuck up at some point. It doesn’t make you any less deserving, Kai. I just hope you know that.”
“I’m pretty sure I fuck up more than the normal amount.”
“That’s double the lessons learned, double the perfect.”
That pretty curve just above his chin melted away some of my guilt, a weight immediately lifting from my shoulders. Jonah’s calm thoughtfulness always made me feel at home in my own labyrinth of uncertainty. “So, I don’t need to be like Aaron and paint myself in black tattoos?”
“Why would you, when you’re so beautifully golden?” he said softly.
I shoved at his shoulder with an eye roll and a grin.
He chuckled and cocked his head backward, drawing my attention to the bag on his back. “Noah is sick today, so we’re taking the day off. Oli and June are at the beach. I brought your things in case. Do you want to go to the beach with them, or do you want to go home and be alone?”
I thought for a few moments, unsure of what I wanted, of how I felt. Nothing. Nothing and everything all at once. “I feel a little off today, Jojo, and I’m not sure why.”
“Here’s what we’ll do,” he said, stopping us in our path and turning to face me. “Why don’t we call a car and head that way? It’s hard to see now, but the sun will make you feel better.”
“I’ve always told you that.”
“You have always told me that. You can change and rinse off there…”
“I don’t need to rinse off. I smell wonderful.”
“You smell like metal bars and burnout. You can change and rinse off there, hang around for a bit, and when you’re feeling a little better, we’ll take a walk and continue this conversation. What do you think?”
I smiled and took his hands in mine, thumbing his knuckles. “I think the student has become the master.”
He smirked. “Those who cannot do, teach.”
“What a vicious cycle we’re in,” I said as he pulled his hand from my fingers, grabbed his phone from his pocket, and called a car.
Perhaps being fucked up wasn’t so bad, as long as I had someone fucked up in complementary ways to lead me away from chipped pieces of sidewalk when I went into zombie mode.