Chapter 25 #2
“We’re going to have an amazing life together,” he tells me. “Yeah?”
“You’re feeling wicked sappy today, huh?” I can’t help but to tease him, just a little bit.
“I’m going to take that as an affirmative.”
“Yes, sir.”
The corner of his mouth twitches. “That’s a line with some practical applications.
” His palms skim my shoulders. He seems nervous, almost, in this moment.
It’s not very obvious, probably wouldn’t be to anyone else, but I know him too well at this point—there’s something twitchy and fleeting in his expression.
“Jesus,” I say. “Are you about to propose to me or something?” I’m still teasing. Mostly. I have no idea what I’d do if he actually got down on one fucking knee right now.
“No,” he says quickly. “Not right now, anyway. Waiting for that first divorce to go through.”
I blink at him. “Wait, does that mean—”
Just then a wave so large it might as well be rogue plows into us and dunks us both.
I go tumbling beneath the currents and for a harrowing few seconds I don’t have a clue which way is up and oh, great, I’m gonna fucking drown on my stupid beach day, and then I feel a hand close around my bicep and pull me to the surface.
I take big, cartoonish swallows of air as Luca holds me steady, smoothing my wet hair out of my face.
“Are you okay?” he asks me, worried. “You want to head back to the others?”
“Yes,” I croak.
And few days after that, I get my tattoo fixed.
Luca and one of the other senior artists at Inklab take a good, long look at the scar on my leg before unilaterally deciding it’s healed enough to tattoo over.
It’s never going to look quite the same again but at least it won’t be so terribly noticeable, and that’s sort of a relief, too.
Before I didn’t care how much I’d fucked it up—an awful catharsis, in the moment—but now that I’m moving into a better headspace it’s bothering me a lot.
With biting, bruises fade. Cutting yourself, not so much.
And I think it’ll help Luca, too, to not have that constant reminder, not see it every time I wear shorts or when we make love.
I have no interest in punishing him anymore than he already has been.
I wanna move on and look to the future, towards all the things we have on the horizon that are equal parts exciting and terrifying.
Look at me: I can actually foresee a future for myself. It’s not murky or bloody or awful anymore, there is vague no way out constantly lurking at the back of my mind, constantly being considered.
I do really fucking love being alive, I think. Even if it’s hard. Even if it sucks ass, sometimes. I want to be here. I want to experience everything.
“Good?” Luca asks me as he starts in with the tattoo gun.
It hurts more than it did the first time, but I was told that could be the case. It’s not like it bothers me anyway. It feels good like most pain does, scratches a particular secret itch like nothing else can and I close my eyes with a sigh. “Good.”
August is nearly half-over before I finally meet up with my friends again.
It’s not on purpose. I don’t make them wait around for me on purpose.
I’m not trying to punish them or anything like that.
And it’s not that I don’t want to see them either, necessarily; I needed the time.
To lay fallow, to dump it all on my world-weary therapist, and to wait until I started to feel more like myself again.
Like a person who can deal with conversations.
When I do hit them up Danika and Jamil seem understanding enough, though. They are, after all, patient people. They sort of have to be to be friends with me.
They come over to my place late one Saturday morning, gathering in the living room where my pathetic window unit valiantly attempts to fight the absolutely oppressive pea-soup humidity.
Amelia’s here and she’s thrilled with the visitors, of course, darting between us with one of her favorite half-dismembered stuffed animals in her mouth and her tail wagging furiously, soaking in the attention as my friends exclaim over her.
I feel like I’ve already sweat through my deodorant by the time we all sit down. “Sorry if I smell,” I say, mopping my hair from my face. Danika passes me a milk tea she picked up from work, and I jam a straw through the top. The ice has pretty much all melted but whatever.
“Nah, dude.” Jamil’s spinning his vape pen on the coffee table like it’s a fidget toy. “You always smell like, wicked good. Even when you’re disgusting.”
“Uh, thanks. For noticing. I guess.”
“So where’s your man?”
“At work,” I say, watching Amelia as she belly-crawls under the coffee table. “Tattooing people’s gooches and whatnot. The usual.”
“Gotta admit,” Danika says, almost begrudgingly, “he was pretty cool that night. Um, at the party. Where…uh, yeah.”
“I don’t remember,” Jamil remarks. “I mean, I remember Luca being there, but I don’t remember what he did. I was pretty fucked up.”
“We know,” she says dryly.
Silence ensues and well, this is awkward. We’re all just smiling vaguely at each other without a clue what to say until Danika clears her throat and turns to me. “Do you want to talk about it?” she asks me frankly. “We don’t have to. We can just hang out like we usually do. No pressure.”
I sip my tea and narrowly avoid choking on a tapioca pearl. “I don’t know,” I say after a moment. “I don’t know what to say, I guess.”
“Okay, well, I’ll start by apologizing. I’m sorry for giving you such a hard time about Luca.
Especially while you were going through all that.
And I guess…” She hesitates and bites her lip.
“I guess what I’m really sorry that you felt like you couldn’t say anything to us about that.
I mean, we’re supposed to be best friends, right? ”
“Yeah.” I lean forward and set my drink on the coffee table. I hear Amelia’s tail thump exactly twice against the table’s legs.
“But obviously we haven’t been, you know, a safe place for you. I don’t know.” She adjusts her glasses where they’ve slid down her nose. “I’d like to fix that. If that’s something we can fix.” Jamil nods.
“Um.” I fidget with the hem of my shirt, trying to think of what to say and how to say it as diplomatically as possible.
“You’re right, actually. I don’t feel like this is a safe space or whatever.
I mean, with you guys. I get why you’d be concerned about Luca after what happened before, and just in general—like, I know your heart’s in the right place.
But it actually fucking sucks to get shit on just by being honest when I’m not asking for anything. ”
“I went overboard,” she agrees, sheepishly.
“So yeah, I thought if I told you about Jordan, you wouldn’t believe me.
Or you’d think that it happened because I was trying to get close to him again, or rebound or something.
Or if you did believe me, you’d push me to do something about it.
There was never a moment where I thought you would react normally.
Even Jamil made a comment about seeing us together at the club. ”
“I really didn’t mean anything by it,” he says, hasty and guilty. “I just thought it was funny and pathetic. I mean, he was. Not you.”
Danika looks outright hurt by my admission, but she squares her shoulders. “That’s fair,” she says. “I would’ve believed you, of course. You saw how quick I believed you when you told me. But I can see why you’d think I’d act that way.”
“Look, I don’t want this to be a big thing.
You guys don’t have to grovel. I just want things to be a little different going forward is all.
I’m doing the work, I’m going to therapy, I’m taking my meds.
I’m making decisions in my life that I’m happy with.
You don’t have to like them or even support them, just… accept them.”
“Done,” Jamil says promptly.
“That’s easy,” Danika agrees.
“Is it?”
“Okay, so maybe I have to work on that thing I do where when I disagree with someone’s life choices it bothers me on a deeply personal level and I feel the need to aggressively correct it. But Noel, I promise that things will be different. I’m sticking around until you friend-dump me.”
I finally smile. “I don’t want to friend-dump you, Dani. I just want you to chill.”
She loops her arm through mine. “Then consider me stuck to you like a very irritating barnacle. And with regards to the whole Jordan thing…” Her soft brown eyes turn earnest. “I’m really, really sorry. He’s a fucking monster.”
“Yeah.” It’s all I can manage in the moment and it comes out only a little strangled, that one word. I don’t really know what else to say.
Jamil leans forward, catching my eye. “Noel. What you did, coming to the party and intervening, was amazing. It freaks me the fuck out to think how close—well, you know.”
He makes a face and his eyes flick downwards and I know the feeling, I think.
Trapped and heavy and panicky, those moments where your breath catches and you realize you’ve evaded some fate out of Final Destination or something similar.
Like missing your flight only to hear on the news that it crashed later, or seeing an accident happen in your rearview.
The what-ifs are a special kind of torturous anxiety.
“I didn’t really do anything,” I say. “I just caught him in the act. Luca’s the one who decked him.”
“He wouldn’t have been there if it weren’t for you,” Danika declares. “You made it happen. Don’t sell yourself short just because you didn’t kick his ass personally.”
“I guess.” But I don’t feel like a hero or anything even remotely close.
“Do you wanna know what’s going with Jordan?” Jamil asks me. He’s scrolling through his phone. “He’s getting his just desserts, if it makes you feel better.”
“Not really,” I say honestly. “I kind of just want to forget any of this ever happened. I want him to stop existing.”
“That’s fair. We don’t have to talk about it. I just thought that maybe you’d kinda sorta want to know he got arrested.”
Both me and Danika’s heads whip around. “He did?” she demands. “You never told me that. Did Mack call them at the party?”
“Nope, but apparently Kris did. No idea what they charged him with, but he spent the night in jail and he’s deleted all his socials since…I don’t think it’s looking good for him, whatever it is. I bet Mommy and Daddy are coming down on him hard.” His white teeth flash in a grin.
“Mommy and Daddy will probably get him out of it,” I say sourly. “Whatever shit he got into.”
“I’m choosing to believe in justice right now. C’mon dude, he got beat up, humiliated and arrested in one night. It’s like Christmas came early!”
I keep that my feelings to myself. Who knows? Maybe he will get punished adequately for what he did, and I don’t even have to humiliate and expose myself in the process. I wonder if I should reach out to Kris.
Jamil manages to read all that from my expression alone. “But we can talk about something else,” he says quickly. “Forget Jordan, anyway. He’s an idiot.”
“What I do wanna know is what’s going on with Dan.”
He laughs as Danika rolls her eyes. “Oh, god. I broke up with him weeks ago. Didn’t I tell you?”
“No,” I say. “We weren’t talking.”
“Right. I dumped him over the whole porn thing. He was devastated, of course. Told me he’d get therapy or whatever for it if I came back but I decided that I don’t have time to fix a man.”
“It is really time consuming,” I agree. “Fixing a man.”
“As it happens, I’ve met the new love of my life—”
“Yeah,” Jamil interjects. “And his name is Hum-ry Cavill.”
She rounds on him instantly. “Shut up.”
“Oh.” Jamil sits up straight, grabbing Danika’s hands. “I just realized. Noel’s going to be a dad soon.”
They both turn dinner plate eyes to me and I raise my eyebrows. “Yeah. A month and some change until the due date, I think.”
“That’s so crazy,” Danika says. “Don’t you think? Any of us having…kids. We’re kids. Anytime I see anyone my age with kids, it freaks me out. Your life is going to be so different.”
“Sheesh,” Jamil says. “See you at Anathema never.” And then he claps a hand to his mouth. “Shit, sorry. That was insensitive.”
“It’s okay,” I say, because he’s not wrong. I probably will not be going back to Anathema anytime soon, if ever at all. There are other clubs without the memories and I’m not sentimental enough to cling to it just because Luca and I met there. We can make new ones somewhere else.
“Don’t be a stranger,” Danika reminds me gently as they go to leave. “I know you’re busy and got a lot going on, but we still want to be part of whatever shenanigans you’re getting yourself into.”
“Are you sure about that?” I ask.
“Of course.” She smiles, dimples appearing in her round cheeks. “Noel, life is fucking boring without you around. And look at everything you’re accomplishing. Who else am I going to live through vicariously?”
A few days later, when I’m checking my email while procrastinating, I find a very stupid piece of correspondence:
Hi Noel,
I just wanted to tell you how sorry I am for everything that happened between us.
(I didn’t mean any of the things I said that other night btw.) I have been struggling a lot since we broke up and I think I’m just carrying all this trauma from our relationship.
Neither of us were perfect and we both hurt each other.
Anyway, I’m sending this email because I wanted you to know how sorry I am, and my counselor said that writing a letter might help with how guilty I feel. I wasn’t actually supposed to send it but maybe it will help with you getting closure or something like that.
If you never want to talk to me again, I get it. But know that I have a lot of love in my heart for you and maybe you do too. I never meant for things to go this far. I hope you’re doing okay.
-J
I delete it, of course, and I block him too.
And then I go to bed with my boyfriend.