Chapter 3
NOEL
I have to wonder if I was just born under a dark fucking star or something because my life is just ridiculously sad at this point.
Like, nothing fucking good happening ever, or when it does it’s swiftly punctuated by something really, really bad, just to drive home the fact that good things should not happen to me and I should be punished for whatever that good thing was. Just very generally bad.
For instance, just when I start feeling kind of okay again, I get drugged by one ex-boyfriend only to wake up to the other ex-boyfriend.
In my face, in my apartment that he shouldn’t even know about, because I certainly did not tell him, and maybe it would be sort of funny if it wasn’t so goddamn sad.
And for a second I think maybe I’m hallucinating Luca and maybe this is some side effect of whatever the hell I was given.
My head is pounding and the side of my face is throbbing and I feel like I have the world’s worst hangover, or at least what I think a hangover would feel like if I’d ever been hungover before, which I haven’t.
But no, Luca’s real. Or at least the most real hallucination ever, even though everything’s still sort of fuzzy and aberrated around the edges.
He’s actually holding my face and stroking my hair and I can’t even understand what he’s saying, something about being so glad that I’m okay, I think, which of course I’m not.
Doubly not okay because he’s here, blubbering and making everything worse.
Except—except it’s kind of nice, actually.
Him being here. Touching me. He’s so solid, and he smells so good and familiar, and it feels so right being in his arms again like no time has passed, that the last few months have just been some nightmare I’m only now waking up from.
That I could push my face into his neck if I wanted, where I know it fits just right, and reclaim this all again and belong to him the way I’m supposed to.
But I can’t. Because I don’t. Because the reality is him leaving me, because I refused to be his secret lover while he played house with the pregnant wife.
I have no idea why he’s here now and I can’t scrape together any gratitude or gladness for it.
Can’t pump love through a dead heart, after all. He killed it.
With effort I raise my hands and get them between us.
I don’t have the strength, really, to shove him off, but he gets the picture and gives me some breathing room.
Not much, but it’s better than being cradled and smothered like he gives a fuck, which I know he does not.
I manage to lift the blankets off myself and sit up—I’m wearing different clothes, great, I know that must be Luca’s doing—and that’s a little better.
It’s a little less stifling in here than it was earlier this evening.
“What the fuck,” I croak again.
“Oh, Noel.” Wishy-washy son of a bitch with his fucking Bruins hat. “I was going out of my head. Are you—”
Not this. “Shut up.” I cover my face with my hands. “Jesus, just—shut up for a minute.”
To his credit he does. I think only a full sixty seconds passes with me trying to not puke and put my fragmented brain back together before he says, “Do you want water or something?”
I don’t want anything from him, but water sounds just too good to turn down. “Okay, yeah.”
Footsteps recede and then return. I hold out my hand and receive a cold glass. There must be windows open because I can hear the traffic outside, feel a faint breeze stirring on my sticky skin. I raise my head, gulping down the entire glass and immediately feel many degrees more alive.
Luca takes the empty glass from me and sets it on the nightstand. “What can I do?” he asks me.
I wipe my mouth on my shirt. “You can tell me what the fuck you’re doing in my apartment,” I say. I sound a little more like myself now.
“I—” He pauses and I want to bite him. “Do you remember what happened, Noel?”
Jordan. “Sort of.”
He opens his mouth, then shuts it, apparently deciding not to ask whatever question it is that he’s about to pose, and instead says, “I was there. I saw it go down.”
“You were there,” I repeat.
“Yeah. When he dragged you off, I followed, and—”
“You were at Anathema,” I interrupt because I’m stuck on this fascinating and nauseating little tidbit, absolutely fixated on it.
“Why? Why on fucking earth were you at a gay night club? Don’t you have better shit to do on a Friday night?
I seem to remember a wife and a kid—you were super fucking worried about them a few months ago. ”
“It’s a long story,” he says.
All that water I drank begins sloshing and churning in my stomach like a riptide. I clap a hand to my mouth. “I’m gonna throw up,” I mumble behind my fingers, and I stagger to my feet.
And, well, thank god Luca’s there, I guess, despite my anger and confusion and devastation, because he gets me to the bathroom much faster than I would on my own.
The room is spinning and wobbling like a shitty carnival ride and he hustles me in front of the toilet just in time for me to violently empty the contents of my stomach.
It isn’t much, just water and whatever’s left of the alcohol, but I keep going and going until I’m dry-heaving strings of bile.
Then I sit back on the cool tile floor. The pressure behind my eyes is incredible.
I know my face must look like a balloon.
He closes the toilet lid and flushes it for me—a kindness—and he wipes my face with a damp, cool towel—another kindness—and I just sit there and try to process anything that’s happened or happening.
Cannot quite make any of it fit. It’s one of those shitty old puzzles in the waiting room at the doctor’s office as a kid, most of the pieces missing or replaced with pieces from entirely different puzzles.
The picture isn’t coming together at all.
He is at gay clubs. He was at one tonight. Why? Why?
“Better?” he asks gently, as if anything could ever get better. As if better is a concept that exists for me.
“You still haven’t told me how you found my apartment,” I say dully.
“I went through your phone.”
Of course he did. I can’t quite summon the energy to be mad about it, though. “What happened to—” Jordan. But I cannot admit this, I find. His name stops in my throat.
“The guy who hurt you? I punched him in the face and he ran off.”
I lean back against the tub. He punched Jordan? I had to be unconscious for that? “You did not.”
“I did.” He exits the bathroom, but his words waft back to me. “He seemed to know you, though. Or he knew your old address, anyway. Maybe he got it off your license?”
And I can see, as he returns with another glass of water, that his knuckles are skinned and red.
I look at them for a long moment before I take the glass and then back at his face.
He isn’t smiling. He’s about as serious as I’ve ever seen him as he sits on the toilet lid, watching me with those beautiful green eyes that are made all the more exotic-looking by the fact that he’s lined them subtly in black shadow.
My heart suddenly clenches like a fist and I have to close my eyes and breathe very slowly for a moment, so I don’t make myself sick again.
He is hanging out at gay night clubs.
Which means he must be fucking other men? Or trying to.
That’s not a surprise, not at all. I called this.
I knew he would go right back to it for all his grandstanding and pontificating the night we broke up that he had to do the right thing and move back in with the wife for the sake of the baby.
Despite all the excuses he made, I knew.
He’s gay, he likes men, and as badly as he wants to stuff himself back in the closet and pretend he can live his normal straight life, it isn’t going to happen. I fucking knew it.
It still hurts, though. It hurts so damn bad. Because I wouldn’t go back in the closet with him, did he replace me with someone who would?
“I called the club,” he says, breaking into my thoughts. “Told them someone had their drink spiked at their bar. I don’t know if they’ll do anything, but—”
“I don’t want anything to do with it,” I say.
“Well, I gave them my number.”
“Any of it, I mean. I’m not talking to cops and pressing charges and I’m not going to the hospital so they can scrape me for evidence, or whatever.”
His eyebrows draw together. “Noel.”
“No,” I snap at him. “I’m not doing it.”
Not putting my pain on display for anyone.
Not letting any more people gawk at me. Not listening to strangers debate my gender and identity, or whether that played a role in my attack or permitted me to be a true victim.
Whether I was asking for it or not, hanging out at a gay kink bar dressed the way that I was, readily accepting drinks from those who would offer.
Rifling through my history that was, up until a year ago, promiscuous indeed, and my proclivity for sex that wasn’t altogether gentle.
My diagnosed mental illness—borderline personality disorder, the terrible weight of its stigma—which surely disqualified me from perfect victimhood. Or any kind of victimhood at all.
Nothing happened anyway, I don’t think. I’m pretty certain I would be feeling it if it had, penetration with fingers or dick or otherwise.
(Did he touch me anywhere else? In any other kind of way?
I don’t know. I don’t know if I’d know.) But mostly I just feel this bone-deep fatigue, dragging me down beneath the surface of wakefulness like I’ve got rocks in my pockets, and my head is foggy and throbbing.
And the side of my face feels like it’s been scraped clean off.