Chapter 25 Heart Strings #3
This past summer, I would have said hands down that I did, but now I don’t know. West and his gang of girls have sealed up a bunch of holes in my sinking ship. I’m not sure how they did it, but I know I’m not drowning anymore. “What do you think he needs?” I ask.
Connor’s smile suddenly fades. His forehead draws in. He gasps as another tear slips down his cheek. God, I fucking envy him. The way he lets his emotions sit out there for everyone to see just like Tristan does, but with Connor it’s more raw. It hit hard. I wonder if he knows how brave that is.
After a long pause, he says quietly, “You. Because I didn’t even consider that.”
“Hey…” I reach out for his hand, and he gives it to me. He places his in mine. It’s cold, and it’s small, and this tenderness I feel for him is nothing I’ve ever experienced before. It has to do with the ache in my heart, and it has to do with the regret in his eyes.
Eyes just like mine.
“You think I’m strong?” I ask.
“I know you are.”
“There are times when I think of you in that bathroom, and I puke until I pass out. I’m medicated, too. I see a therapist twice a week. The song you were playing that night…”
“Don’t,” he whispers, shutting his eyes. “I’m so sorry. You have no idea how sorry.”
“Don’t apologize. I swear to God, I would have played the same song.
I understood you that night. Completely.
It might not seem like it after everything that’s happened, but we are connected, and what I’m starting to realize is that there isn’t anyone on earth who’ll ever understand me the way you do.
I need that, bud.” I squeeze his hand. “I need you.”
“I need you, too,” he says. He puts his other hand on his heart. “I feel what you mean. About the connection. Thank you for letting me have that. It feels like what I’ve been missing.”
“I love you,” I tell him, meaning it—getting it—for the first time in my life.
Three days later, Connor signs himself out of Rivershore. He wants me to pick him up. The sun is barely hovering above the horizon when I pull up to the rehab center.
Kate starts texting me the second I get out of the car.
I pull my phone out of my pocket as I’m crossing the parking lot and re-engage in our ongoing emoji battle. I’m digging deep into the screens to come up with the most random one—one that will make her giggle.
I hit her with an octopus. She returns fire with an angry chicken.
I reach the steps of the building, hitting send on the ultimate random emoji—the paperclip—and smack directly into an oncoming person.
The woman takes the hit hard. She stumbles back, can’t manage to catch herself, and lands on her back.
“Shit—I’m so sorry.” I squat next to her and offer a hand.
I recognize the nurse who tried to kick me out the other night when I was on the patio with Connor.
I can’t remember her name. Jamie? Jessie?
“It’s okay. I’m all right.” She takes my hand and lets me pull her up to sitting. I brush some leaves off her shoulders and back. She’s about my age with dark eyes that gleam like polished stone in the sunlight when she smiles. “Connor’s brother, right?”
“Yeah. Archer,” I say. We stand up together. I pick her bag up from the ground and hand it back to her.
“Jessica,” she says. “Thank you. Guess we won’t be seeing much of you anymore.”
“Hope not,” I say.
“Well, good luck. I like your brother. He’s a firecracker.”
I laugh. “He’s something, yeah. Thanks for the other night.”
“No problem. What fun are rules if you can’t break a few of them, right?”
I hear a short huff and then a much more familiar voice. “Isn’t she a little old for you?”
I look over Jessica’s shoulder and straight into Tristan’s eyes. I freeze as the whole world wobbles for a second. Every molecule of air in my body abandons ship, leaving me with none.
Jessica gives me an awkward nod. “Nice to see you again, Archer. Good luck.” Then she heads down to the parking lot.
I’m left staring at Tristan, running through the conversation I just had with the nurse.
Taken out of context, it sounds bad. Nice to see you again.
Goddamn it. Did she have to say that? “She was just talking about—”
Tristan holds up his hand to stop my words.
His gaze hardens, and he shakes his head.
He’s either letting it grow out, or he’s overdue for a haircut.
It’s clean, but unkempt. He’s dressed in sweats I guarantee he doesn’t think are flattering because they’re so big on him.
He doesn’t look the same. Not at all. “I don’t care,” he says. “Not my business.”
“I just came to get—Did Connor know you were gonna be here?”
“No. But now I understand why he kept trying to get me to leave. You look—” He gives me the worst smile ever, affects a brightness in his voice so false it makes my head hurt. “You look great. You’re like…happy.”
Words fail me again. I’ve seen Tristan sad before.
That morning he moved to Houston. The day he showed up in my class at UT.
The day I kicked him out of my house and broke up with him.
But this is different. This is palpable.
It takes enormous quantities of self-control to keep from grabbing him and holding him until I force all our collective sadness away.
It goes against my grain not to. I’m actually amazed he doesn’t see it on my face—my restraint.
It’s the only thing I’m thinking about. I know exactly what he needs right now, and everything in me wants to give it to him.
But I don’t.
His fingertips lift and touch the skin behind his ear. The gesture is mindless, like he isn’t aware he’s doing it. Like it’s something he does all the time. It roars at me—that tattoo—the part of me still under his skin.
He searches my eyes while he waits for me to say something. And I might be about to, but he loses his patience, letting his anger show. “Well, are you? Are you finally happy?”
A few minutes ago, I was happy—or at least something that bore a certain resemblance to happy. But I don’t respond, because I know him well enough to know it’s a trick question.
“This is us now then, huh? We’re this? You won’t even speak to me? You and Connor are best friends all of a sudden, and I’m just thrown out with the trash? You only have room for one of us at a time?”
“No—I—”
“What was I to you?” he asks, cutting me off.
“Tristan, please don’t do this—”
“Do what? Ask you a question? You never had a problem answering me before.” He squeezes his eyes shut, his defiant expression crumbling—falling to pieces.
He presses the heels of his hands to his forehead and makes a noise of frustration.
His hands are shaking. “I can’t do this,” he whispers. “I can’t stand it… I can’t…”
He looks up at me, his gaze lingering on my mouth as a pain I’ve never seen takes hold of him. It makes me wish I was fucking dead.
I have a thousand things to say to him, but all I can think is his name. Tristan Tristan Tristan Tristan...
I love him.
The thought is a fist around my heart. I open my mouth to say the words, but they won't come. They just stick in my head with his name…
Tristan I love you Tristan I love you Tristan
I reach for him, but in the instant before my hand makes contact with his arm, he moves away, rushing past me. “Tristan, wait—”
But he doesn’t stop. I don’t blame him, but I also can’t take a deep breath.
Jesus Christ, I need a deep breath.
I can’t imagine someone worse than me today. Not while I stand by and watch the love of my life break his own heart because I’m too stupid to string together a few words.
Connor and I are on my porch swing. He’s chain-smoking. I’m still reeling from seeing Tristan, and I admit, pretty quiet.
He’s talking about our mother. I’m building a kind of immunity to it. I listen, and I absorb, but I’m managing to keep it from infecting me. Maybe I’m getting better. Maybe it’s the Wellbutrin.
“I think the more time that passes, I forget what it was like—what she was like, but I have these letters she used to write me and they’re super shitty.
All her narcissism and nastiness just right there, and reading them sometimes reminds me I’m not crazy.
She really was that bad. If you ever want to read them—”
“I won’t.”
“I get it, but it’s been more than ten years since you had to deal with her. I can only imagine you would start to doubt what was real or not real. Maybe one day when you’re feeling up to it.”
“I know what was real. My feelings about her and dad have never been mixed. I haven’t missed them. Not even for a second. Not ever.”
“I’m jealous of that,” he says.
“Don’t be. It’s just another example of how shut down I am.”
He takes a deep breath of preparation. “Can I say something?”
Bracing myself, I ask “Am I gonna need a drink for this?”
“I don’t know. Maybe. It’s about Tristan.”
My shoulders drop as I slump farther down on the porch swing. “I think you should talk to Tristan about Tristan.”
“You don’t want to hear this?”
“Let me tell you what I want. I want you both to be happy. He’s not happy.”
“That’s because you broke his heart,” Connor says.
“I know.”
“You broke it, and you stomped on it, and you walked right on past it—”
“Jesus Christ, Connor, I get it, okay? He’ll be all right. He’s got you and his family, and there are so many guys out there…” I’m making myself sick. I shut up.
I can feel my brother’s rueful smirk burning a hole in my face. “My turn yet? Or do you wanna keep talking about all the other guys waiting for a chance at Tristan?”
“Go ahead.”
“I’ll be okay if you want to get back together.”
I shake my head.
“I really will. Think of it like my thank you for saving my life.”
“I didn’t save your life. He did.”
“Right. Well, he came through for me, and I want to come through for him. You’re good for him. You love him like he deserves to be loved.”
“How’s that exactly? By trampling on his heart? And anyway, how do you know? He said he never told you about it.”
“He has now.”
“Great.”
“I can tell how much you love him by the way you keep letting him go.”
That shuts me up for a minute, then I say, “I think he might disagree with you on that.”
Connor laughs. “Oh, he would. But listen—you said you don’t get love, right?”
“I feel like I’m making progress.”
“Well, why don’t you stop thinking of it like it’s a concept and start thinking of it like it’s a thing. I think of it like a string.”
“A string?”
“If you understand me so well, then maybe this’ll help you, too.
I think of love like a string that connects your heart to someone else’s.
A strong, indestructible string. You can’t cut it, you can’t disconnect it.
Once it’s there, it’s there. Always. And sometimes you don’t even notice it until it starts to pull at you.
But it can stretch. Over distance, over time.
Like it did with you and me. You know that tug you feel in your chest?
” He presses his fingertip into my pounding heart.
“The ache you feel when you miss someone? It’s the stretch of the string.
That’s how you and Tristan are connected. By a heart string.”
I’ve felt that tug so many times before, but I refuse to admit it. “That’s it? That’s all love is? Heart strings?”
He nods.
I laugh.
“Why is that funny?”
“Because it’s too simple—”
“It’s supposed to be. You make it way too complicated. Ask Helen. I bet she’ll tell you the same thing. Anyway, think about it for a while. Try it on for size.”
“I feel like there’s something missing in your theory.”
“What?”
“Well, you talked about how the string stretches, but what happens when you’re with the other person? Does it sag?”
He slaps the back of my head, playfully. “No, you moron. It pulls you together. At the heart.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah. Oh.”
“It just sounds more like a rubber band to me,” I say.
“Whatever. My point is—that’s Love. Loving someone is different, but you don’t suck at that nearly as bad as I used to think you did. Turns out I was the one doing it wrong. But I’m learning.”
“Let me know what you figure out.”
He plants a hand on my cheek, kisses the other one, and he looks me right in the eyes. “I’m learning from you.”
His words still me. Something deep inside me stops swirling, and the rough waves always tossing me around go calm. If Connor could see inside my body in this moment he’d get to see the ugliest of all the scars on my heart disappear before his beautiful, unblinking eyes.