Chapter 5
NOEL
It’s not fair.
It’s not fair.
It’s not.
Fucking.
Fair.
That mantra runs through my head all damn day as I sequester myself in my bedroom and ignore my phone and anyone who would try to get in contact with me.
All night, too. And especially when I see Luca’s stupid forgotten Bruins hat in the bathroom when I do finally get up to piss—although I guess it’s not like I really gave him a chance to grab it before he left.
Whatever. He shouldn’t have even been here in the first place.
I hate him.
I think about how much I hate him as I lie in bed that night while I also think about the way he held me as I cried, his lips pressed to my forehead.
Or how he touched me after he’d just finished telling me about how he’s been looking for me all these months, wanting me back, when he was the one who ruined everything.
Just rendering all this pain a pointless exercise in seeing just how far I could bend without breaking entirely.
Meanwhile I’ve just been rotting here. Alone.
Grieving him until I went numb with how much I missed him.
Hurting myself until even hurting myself couldn’t distract me.
Thinking about how tragic it was, both of us hurting so acutely, until I finally got myself to a place where it didn’t hurt so much and I could even forget that I cared all that much, sometimes. Could go days at a time forgetting.
Now I’m right back in it again. It’s like Luca took a knife to that healing wound and just tore it back open so he could leave me bleeding all over again. Showed up just long enough to do me another mortal fucking wound.
And he had the nerve to say he loved me.
I wish it didn’t hurt so much.
And I wish that I could just accept this.
Accept Luca, however he was, whatever fucked up version of his love he was offering me.
Share him with the wife or whatever it is that he was even trying to imply and just have him back.
Because being without him is painful enough, but being without him after being so close to having him again is a special kind of agony.
One I am not certain, in these especially black moments, I can bear on top of everything else.
Wish I could’ve just accepted being a secret and never having gone without him at all.
Or could’ve just said yes, I forgive you, that morning and he could be here with me now, maybe, and—I don’t know.
No. That’s not right either. Don’t I deserve better? Don’t I deserve all of someone? Or do I? Maybe that’s the best I’ll ever get, being someone’s secret, being half-loved in the shadows.
Rubbing my face against my shoulder and along the inside of my arm without realizing it, an old habit that still dies hard, self-soothing.
That temptation to hurt myself and get the all-too-brief flare of endorphins that will make me feel better, if only for a little while. Before I feel so much worse.
I don’t, though. I resist. This much I can do at least.
I’m trapped in my head again the way I was before, with the old memories of him all carved on the surface of my brain and on the inside of my skull. And now there are fresh ones joining in of this morning and of last night, and they’re not even good ones—but they’re all I’ve got.
And I cling to them like a blanket that’s been drenched in his scent and I drape it all around myself, full immersion.
Like he’s here with me. I hold the feel of him close to me, however brief, however fucked up it all is, and while away the sleepless hours with thoughts and memories of him that I wish I could delete from my head, but I can’t, and I won’t.
I can justify it to myself in that at least it serves the purpose of distracting myself from everything else.
From Anathema, from what happened in the alley, or didn’t happen, or almost happened.
The truth is that no one has ever loved me the way he did.
And I’ve never loved anyone the way I love him.
Sunday morning breaks at last and I haul myself out of bed, get dressed and clean up because Danika and Jamil are supposed to come over for “brunch”—that is, they’ll bring something over from Dunkin’ or whatever, because none of us are particularly skilled cooks.
I haven’t seen Danika in a few weeks between work and her new boyfriend, and I guess I’m looking forward to that.
It’ll be good for me. That’s something I’m always having to tell myself, at the behest of my therapist. Whether something’s gonna be good for me or not, regardless of whether I feel like actually doing it. Hanging out with people I love is supposed to be self-care. Caring about myself is just hard.
They show up together around eleven, bagels and coffee in hand.
They both live in Brookline with their parents; they were friends long before they met me at MassArt.
Danika, being annoyingly intuitive, picks up something’s wrong the minute she walks in the door, eyeing me with some consternation and a furrowed brow.
“What happened to your face?” she asks.
“Fell over on the dance floor on Friday,” I answer smoothly. “I’m fine. Just drank too much.”
“Hmm.” She tilts her head. “You’re doing okay otherwise? Taking your meds? I thought you weren’t supposed to drink too much on them.”
“Yes and yes. I just overdid it a little.” I have already resolved not to tell either of them about Luca’s unwelcome intrusion in my life because I don’t need a lecture on all the reasons why I shouldn’t take him back.
I’m not going to, anyway. I give her a smile that I hope doesn’t look too forced.
“What about you? And uh, what’s his name… ”
She rolls her eyes. “Come on. It’s Dan.”
My smile is legitimate now. I smack my forehead with my palm. “Right. Dani and Dan. Don’t know how I keep forgetting.”
“You’re insufferable. It’s not that funny.”
Jamil shoves my iced chai latte into my hands and we all pile onto the couch. “Dude,” he says. “Friday night. Fucking awesome. You were so right about going out. I’m glad I listened to you. I feel like a new man. Like, who the hell is Brady?”
“He keeps alluding to Friday,” Danika says in annoyance. She’s slathering her everything bagel with enough cream cheese to stop her heart dead in its tracks. “He won’t say what happened.”
“I was waiting until everyone was in the room so I didn’t have to keep telling the same story,” he says. “But basically, y’know, me and Noel went to Anathema—”
“You guys need to pick clubs I can go to,” she sniffs. “Not just gay ones.”
“Since when has a straight girl let that stop her?” I say.
“Yeah, but I don’t want to be that bitch.”
“Who cares? Be that bitch. I’m cosigning it.”
“Anyway,” Jamil breaks back in. He’s pulled his vape pen out of his pocket and now he’s toying with it, turning it over in his hands.
“So we go to Anathema, right, and it’s crazy there.
Looks like a Satanic church or something and people are walking around in basically nothing.
Might as well have their dicks out and shit.
And it’s all fetishy, which isn’t really my thing—no offense, Noel—but this couple latches onto me the minute we hit the bar.
And, I dunno, I guess it was lust at first sight… ”
“And then you abandoned me for a double dicking,” I say, nonplussed.
“How romantic. Is this the part where we hear the riveting play-by-play of your threesome?” Danika asks.
Jamil’s cheeks darken, but he’s smug. “Well, no. I just wanted it to be known. That you know. I did it. Had a threesome.”
I golf clap. “Well done.”
He takes a pull from his vape while Danika laughs. “What about you?” he asks me, a puffy white cloud issuing forth from his nose and mouth as he does.
“What about me?”
“You and a certain someone.” He wiggles his eyebrows, and Danika’s going, who, oh my god, who?
Interesting how I’ve been able to sort of compartmentalize the events of Friday already, dump them in priority of my anguish over Luca. To the point where it takes me a moment to remember what he’s talking about, but the moment that box springs open I freeze up.
Jordan.
“Hello? Earth to Noel.” Jamil’s leaning across Danika, trying to get my attention. “Did you or didn’t you? Or are you gonna play coy now?”
I snap myself out of it. “What are you talking about?”
“Are you serious? Jordan!” he says. “Literally had to scoop my jaw off the floor when I realized.”
And you didn’t say anything?
Danika’s crowing. “Omigod. No fucking way. What a loser! He went up to Noel?”
“Yes!”
“No thanks to you,” I say, and I hope I’m masking sufficiently because I suddenly feel like grabbing my coffee and hurling it at Jamil’s head. “He got the brilliant idea to come down because of your stupid posts.”
“Oops?” He has enough grace to look slightly sheepish. “I mean, I guess I forgot he follows me.”
“Whatever,” I say, picking my coffee up off the table.
Most of the ice has long melted by now. I gulp it down anyway.
“Yeah, no. He was basically groveling to me because he’s so hard up.
I let him buy me a drink and—” He spiked it with his mom’s medication to get me to sleep with him.
He dragged me out of the club and dumped me in a city alley blocks away.
My mouth is open. I close it, seal my lips very carefully around my teeth.
I prod at the marks inside my mouth with my tongue where I’ve bitten and worried at it until I’ve bled, and I realize I can’t tell them what happened because what if they don’t believe me?
What if they do? What if they tell someone?
“That was that,” I finish after a brief pause. “I told him to fuck off and then went home after I realized Jamil ditched me.”
They’re both looking at me strangely and I don’t know why, because I haven’t said or done anything terribly out of character.
Danika’s drawing her eyebrows together in a skeptical way and Jamil’s just got this kind of disbelieving look, and before I can ask what the problem is, he says, “Are you mad at me for that?”