Chapter 20
Gray
It’s a blur after that. The haze of rage at Sam, and John-Henry, but mostly at myself.
And it’s blurrier after the shots I line up at the bar and rip one after another.
The band is still playing, and the party’s still going, and people are dancing and laughing and having a good time like the world didn’t just implode.
I’m dancing with Robin, and he’s sucking on my neck.
I’m on one of the folding chairs, Robin grinding on me, hands up my shirt.
I’m lining up shots again.
I’m puking onto somebody’s shoes because I’m a fucking lightweight now.
Turns out, they’re Ben Fields’s shoes. He doesn’t say anything. Or maybe he does; it’s hard to hear him over the waves of nausea, through the sideways cloud of purple light.
I don’t know when the outreach ends, but I know that it’s a party now, and there are more drinks, and guys laughing at me, and girls watching me and talking behind their hands, and Robin gets me alone in a bathroom.
He tries to take off my jeans, and when I stop him, he slaps me hard enough to make my ears ring.
I end up in the bathtub, my legs sticking up over the edge because I can’t seem to make them work properly, and he’s screaming down at me.
And then he’s gone, and a girl wants to use the bathroom, and a couple of guys are nice enough to walk me out into the night, and for a while, I’m on the lawn.
It browns out after that.
Sudden, drenching cold, and I’m awake, sitting up. My head explodes. I’m sopping wet, and I breathe in some of the water and start to cough, and it’s too bright, and that makes my headache worse.
It’s probably fifteen seconds of skull-splitting agony and trying not to chuck before it starts to make sense. The porch. The familiar pair of running shoes. My oh-so-sorry ass.
And last night comes rushing back in.
And Sam.
I must make some kind of noise, because Emery checks the bucket hanging from his hand, like he might need more water, and says, “If you’re going to throw up, do it in the flower bed.”
But I don’t. I just feel like I’m going to die.
“Your car is parked halfway up the verge,” Emery says as he grabs the screen door. “You’re technically sober now. And I don’t like finding feral detectives on my porch.”
He goes inside, but he doesn’t shut the door behind him.
I sit there for a while, dripping. The headache levels out to a nice, steady agony, and it only flares when I move my head or open my eyes or try to think.
My body is stiff from sleeping—technically, passing out—on the porch.
But what really hurts is everything flooding in from the night before. Every moment. Every word.
When I crawl over to the screen door, Emery has left a towel inside.
I dry myself off, which means I use the towel until I stop dripping.
I take off my shoes. And then I head into the house.
It’s quiet, which must mean Colt and Evie are out.
I pass through the living room, where Emery must have been straightening up—no forgotten cups, no shoes left behind, no scattered socks or bags of potato chips.
None of the evidence of a teenage boy living here.
For fuck’s sake, Emery’s even lined up the remotes. It probably gave him a boner.
He’s in the kitchen, wiping down the counters. There’s a glass of water and ibuprofen. He’s a softy once you get to know him.
“I mopped these floors yesterday,” he says. “If you get them dirty, you can clean them.”
I sink onto a stool and raise my hands in surrender. Then I take the pills and drink the water. He fills the glass again without commentary, but I don’t pick it up again.
“Okay,” I say. Croak, really. My voice is shit. “Let’s hear it.”
“You’re a fucking piece of shit. Was some part of that unclear to you?”
“Not so much, no.” There’s a tiny ring of water around the bottom of the glass, and I trail my finger through it. “What, uh, happened?”
“You showed up at three in the morning, moaning and scrabbling at the windows like a fucking lab rat.”
“Uh, not actually what I—”
“You’re lucky I didn’t shoot you.”
“Yeah, thanks.”
“I’m surprised you didn’t piss yourself. You didn’t piss yourself, did you?”
“Kind of hard to tell after you dumped that bucket of water on me.”
“I’m going to choose to believe that you did.”
Okay, so he’s not that much of a softy.
“And John’s not here, so if you’re looking for some kind of pick-me-up or motivational speech or comforting shoulder to cry on, you can fuck right off.” But, in true Emery style, he’s still warming up. “Sit there. Don’t talk.”
So, I sit. He gets soda crackers and puts them on a plate for me.
Then he puts two slices of bread in the toaster, and we sit there while it toasts.
He’s glowering at me to make sure I know how much he doesn’t like me right now.
But he does give me the toast. And then, for some reason, he gets a can of Campbell’s chicken and stars and dumps it into a pot and sets it to warm.
I haven’t had that since I was eight or nine, down with the flu, and my mom told me her mom always made her chicken noodle soup when she was sick.
Not that my mom was much for mothering, but, you know.
He breaks off long enough to shout, “Eat your fucking crackers!”
So, I eat the crackers. They’re dry, which means I have to drink some of the water.
My stomach settles. My head starts to feel a little better.
When the soup is ready, he ladles some into a mug.
He’s very careful. Doesn’t spill a drop.
He’s a big guy, but everything about him is so contained, so controlled.
I honestly don’t think he knows how good he and John-Henry are for each other. He’s got to be one hell of a fuck.
And then I’ve got my soup, and he folds his arms, looming over me, and says, “What the fuck is wrong with you?”
“How much time do you have?”
“Knock it the fuck off, Gray. You’ve had your shit together for a long time now. What the fuck was that debacle last night? Things had gotten a little too quiet, so you decided to treat everyone to a public self-immolation?”
I sip some soup. It’s salty and has only the barest hint of chicken, but it’s surprisingly good, so I break off a crust of toast and dunk it. “What’d John-Henry tell you?”
“He told me you invited him and Peterson to that outreach event last night, and he got there, and the first thing he saw was you and Sam all over each other.”
“We weren’t all over each other.”
“Are you honestly telling me that you think John could stand in the same room as you and not know in five seconds if you’re fucking someone? And Sam? Jesus Christ, Gray, that kid practically vibrated every time you flirted with him.”
“Okay, right? Right?” I can’t help my voice from rising with a kind of grim satisfaction, even though it makes my head start pounding again. “It wasn’t just me. He was—” I break off, not sure how to say it.
Dryly, Emery says, “He was asking for it?”
“No, bro. But there was a vibe, right?”
“Of course there was a vibe. He’s intensely attracted to you.
And you can’t take your eyes off him. It’s a miracle you didn’t end up fucking sooner.
That’s not the point. The point is you’ve made a dog’s fucking dinner out of this whole situation.
Fake dating, Gray? Really? Like this is—what?
Some kind of fucking romance novel? Please explain to me how, in your extremely limited capacity, you thought this was not going to implode eventually. ”
“It was supposed to be to convince a donor that I was, you know, reliable.”
“And how’d that turn out?”
“Real fucking great. I puked on his shoes; I’m sure he’s writing a check right now.” I dip some more toast in the soup. “Look, it wasn’t supposed to be…complicated.”
Emery makes a disgusted noise, but he doesn’t say anything. He runs a cleaning cloth over the counter again, even though it doesn’t need it, and then he stands there.
“It’s all over,” I say. It’s easier, somehow, hearing it out loud. “WISP. It’s done. I mean, nobody’s going to help fund it now, not when the guy running it got blackout drunk at his own outreach event.”
“After a humiliating public fight with his boyfriend.”
I’m too tired for more than a dirty look, and I can’t even keep that up for long. “I thought I was doing something good, you know? I thought I was…better. And here I am, fucking up everything, just like the good old days.”
Emery swishes the cloth around a few more times. Finally, like he can’t help himself, he says, “You know this is what happens literally every time, don’t you?”
“Huh?”
“They always think it’s not going to get complicated.
And then they develop feelings for each other.
And the feelings turn out to be real. And that only makes their situation more complicated.
” He waits, like I’m supposed to say something, and when I don’t, frustration bleeds into his words.
“It’s literally the plot of every fake dating story ever.
She needs a fiancé to take to a family Christmas party.
He needs a girlfriend because his brother’s getting married.
He has to see his ex at a friend’s wedding, and he doesn’t want to go alone, so—”
“Yes, yeah, I get it, Emery. Not really the point.”
“You could have asked John. He has at least ten different books with that same tired old formula.”
“I said not the point!”
It’s hard to tell with him. Sometimes, it’s like he’s almost smiling.
I drink some more soup. I finish my toast. I’m looking out the window at the spring day, and I feel so tired. Although I guess a lot of that has to do with the fact I’m almost thirty, so go ahead and put me in the fucking ground.
“You know, Gray, people can change,” Emery says, and the sudden words startle me. “But we don’t change all that much. And we certainly don’t change fast. We try to be better versions of ourselves.”
“Yeah, well, I’d like a hard reset, because even the better version of myself is pretty fucked up.
” I want to hold the rest of the words back, but they boil up.
“I mean, I tried. I really fucking tried. I didn’t fuck around.
I kept my head on straight. I’m so sick of fucking up.
I’m tired of hurting people I care about.
And here I am, fucking everything up and hurting people I care about. ”
“Well, that’s probably because you didn’t actually change all that much,” Emery says.
For a moment, I honestly can’t say anything. And then “Jesus fucking Christ, thanks so much.”
“You didn’t.” He shrugs. “You traded one form of attention and validation for another. Instead of fucking your way through the entire male population, you got yourself a grant, and you got yourself this nonprofit, and you surrounded yourself with all these people who want things from you and need things from you. It’s not a bad thing.
I imagine the chlamydia rates are lower. ”
It takes a lot to make my jaw drop. Finally I manage, “Bro.”
He shrugs again.
“What the actual fuck?”
“And for the record, you’re not staying away from relationships because you’re afraid of hurting someone.
You’re staying away from them because you’re afraid of being hurt.
I understand that for a perennial fuckboy like you, it was a big emotional risk, entering into a serious relationship like the one you were in with Darnell.
And when that ended, it hurt. A lot, I imagine.
And you’re still hurting, and you’re convinced that you’ll never be able to be in a real relationship because you fucked up the first one so badly. ”
“What the fuck is actually happening right now?”
“But here’s the thing, Gray. You’re a good guy.
You’re a colossal fuck-up, but that’s a separate issue.
It’s okay to be hurt. And it’s okay to take time to heal.
But at some point, taking time to heal is only another way of hiding because you don’t want to get hurt again.
” A strange smile crosses his face. “Everybody screws up; ask me sometime about Billy or Alec. But you pick yourself up, and you try again, and you do better.”
I push the mug away like I’m going to stand, and the sound of the ceramic sliding across the countertop is small. But I stay there, sitting on the stool. My face is hot. I stare out the window, and the pollen is so thick it’s rippling in the air like a golden wave.
When I finally speak, my throat is so tight I’m not even sure he can understand me. “I didn’t want to hurt him.”
Emery nods. “I know. And believe it or not, John knows too. He was surprised and—and upset. The last year has been difficult for him, and I think seeing the two of you, I think it scared him. For what it’s worth, he knows he acted poorly.”
“The one thing I said I wouldn’t do was hurt him.
I kept telling myself I wouldn’t let it happen.
Because Sam’s such a good guy, you know?
” The tears sting my eyes, and I blink them away.
“And then John-Henry said I was ruining his life, and it was like—like it was true. Like as soon as he said it, I knew it was true, and I’d done that.
Me. I’d fucked up everything in Sam’s life.
I couldn’t think. I didn’t even know what I was saying.
It was like this—this fucking autopilot of being an absolute asshole. And everything I said made it worse.”
Emery nods.
I sit there for a while. The mug cools between my hands, and I forget about the rest of the saltines.
Emery doesn’t say anything. But that’s okay, because I’m not there.
I’m somewhere else. I’m with Sam when he’s doing that stupid workbook.
And Sam at the gym, that stupid golf pencil behind his ear.
And Sam reading reviews on a pair of joggers because he wants to be sure they’re good quality.
And Sam warming up his gran’s chicken enchilada casserole, but really, he’s throwing me a lifeline, and I start dragging myself out of that place inside myself. Sam. Sam, Sam, Sam.
My whole life, I never fucking hid. So why the fuck am I hiding now?
“I guess I need to talk to him,” I say.
“Great,” Emery says. “Then the two of you can bother each other and leave my husband the fuck alone.”