37. Mount Up
MOUNT UP
CHELSEA
Aknock on the door wakes me up, but I'm groggy and blurry-eyed and I can't bring myself to answer it. After Brett left—Ha. Is that what I’m calling the most traumatic breakup of my life?
—I spent a long night on the couch drifting fitfully between sleep and tears and now my head hurts as much as my heart.
I think we should break up. Or stop fucking. Or whatever this is to you.
The knock sounds again and I nestle deeper into the fuzzy blanket I'm cocooned in, hoping that if I ignore it, whoever's at the door will just go away and leave me to wallow. Unfortunately, nothing's going to plan lately.
The metallic snick of the lock disengaging intrudes on my misery. Shanna’s the only one with a spare key, so I’m not surprised when I hear her tentative call right before the door closes behind her.
“Chelsea? Are you here?”
Since she only needs to take about three more steps before she'll see me herself, I don't answer.
“Oh my God. I just saw it. Are you okay? Is he okay? What do we do?” She rushes over, throwing her arms around me and the tears start welling as she gives me a squeeze before taking a seat next to me on the couch.
“Is Brett here?” she asks, looking around the living room like he might suddenly appear from behind the lamp or beneath the coffee table.
“Why would he be here?” My voice cracks, my throat raw from crying.
I think we should break up.
Shanna frowns at me. “Because of that video. I can't believe he'd want to be by himself after getting betrayed like that. Maybe you should call him.”
Nothing Shanna is saying is making sense. I don’t know if it’s because the betrayal is too close to the surface or already tainting the marrow of my bones, but I can’t figure out why she thinks I’d want him here. We’re over.
I make myself say it aloud. “He came by last night. We broke up.”
“What do you mean you broke up? Didn't you watch the video?”
“I saw enough.”
At the mere thought of him in that pool room with her, the bile in the back of my throat burns.
The things he said to me last night are still so raw that it hurts to breathe.
You want me to be your dirty stairwell blowjob, and there was a time when I would have settled for that. But I’m not that guy anymore. And I can’t be that again. Not even for you.
“Wait a minute,” Shanna says, cutting through my melancholy reverie. “Are you telling me you didn't watch the whole thing?”
The tears are unstoppable now, spilling down my cheeks. “No!” The word bursts from me. “I couldn't. I can’t.”
Shanna reaches past me, snagging a tissue off the end table, and hands it to me before she wraps me in a hug. I let myself cry, accepting the comfort I didn’t let her give me when Dustin and I broke up.
But the truth is, losing Dustin didn’t hurt like this.
I have no idea how it happened so fast, but Brett matters. More than anyone else ever has.
When the tears finally slow, Shanna pulls back, handing me another tissue. “Better?”
I sniff, mumbling my assent, because it was cathartic to cry on her shoulder. Not because I’m any less devastated. I can only imagine the mess I look as I dab at my eyes and blow my nose.
“Okay, good. Because we’re about to move on to the tough love portion of today’s program.”
I frown at Shanna.
“So I don't know what this self-pity burrito situation is,” she says, circling a finger at me and the blanket I have wrapped around myself, “but if you care about your big, beautiful hockey boy at all, you need to man up and watch the rest of that video.”
“I—”
She holds up a hand to cut me off. “Before you answer, bear in mind that you went to bat for him with your dad.”
“But I—”
“Additionally, you and I had our longest fight since the Barbie incident of second grade over him.”
I close my mouth.
“Also, I have eyes. So if you think I don’t know how you feel about him, you’re dead wrong. And if someone I cared about was taken advantage of like that, I would fight tooth and nail for them.”
“He broke up with me,” I confess, heart breaking, voice small.
Shanna pulls out her phone. “I don't care.”
With just a couple of clicks, the video that shook up my life last night is playing.
The slosh of the water.
The gray chevron tiles.
It takes everything in me not to look away, but as soon as the video plays past the part where I stopped, everything changes. Now I can't look away. And my heart breaks all over, but this time, it’s not for me. It’s for him.
He asked her to stop.
He told her not to film.
He cared about his reputation, not on his own behalf, but on behalf of kids who look up to him
“Oh, God.”
A sob bursts from my chest, and my hands fly to my mouth as I watch what happened to him at the hands of a woman who vowed to love and cherish him. She took advantage of him and posted it for the world to see just to hurt him.
And while I'm immensely relieved when Shanna pauses the video before they get to the actual sex, I'm overwhelmed with guilt for having made such heinous assumptions about the kind of man Brett is when I should have known better.
His ex-wife might have hurt him, but so did I. Right where he was already wounded.
“So what are we going to do?” Shanna asks. “We need your clipboard. We need a plan.”
She’s right.
Because no matter what happened between Brett and I, I can’t let this stand.
And I might not be able to fix everything, but I can fix this.