Chapter 21
There’s a crack on the ceiling that I never noticed before. A faint line in the left corner, probably cracked paint, where the sunlight comes in through the blinds, this time of day.
The light dims, and the dark comes, and the light comes back, and I watch it move across the ceiling, staring at the crack, wondering how it got there.
Mike knocked on my door an hour ago. The quiet knock he’s started to use.
Alex, can we talk?
I didn’t answer this time, the same as all his other attempts over the last few days. It’s better this way. I’ve decided that. It’s better for him. He doesn’t deserve this. Mike is the best person I know, so full of light even after everything he’s been through.
And I dimmed that light.
I took the gift he gave me, him, and I made him hide, and I told him I would never come out. I got angry at him when people found out about us. I never once asked him what he needed from me.
He deserves someone who can always put him first.
He deserves someone whole.
I used to think I could get there. I spent the last few months thinking I was actually getting better. Mike helped me forget, with his warmth and his hands and his laugh that made my heart feel like it was about to burst with happiness.
I started to think maybe I would be okay. That what Jason did doesn’t have to define me.
But I know better now.
I turned off my phone on day two, when Mike wouldn’t stop texting me, and I couldn’t look at them anymore. I haven’t touched it since. I can feel it over there. I know there are more texts. Maybe some phone calls. Maybe Nate, who tried to reach out the day after I left, and I never got back to.
I want to be home with Nate so bad I can barely breathe, but he can’t help me right now.
He doesn’t even know.
Mike knocks every night, and the guilt has started to consume me. I told him he could always sleep here, and I can’t even give him that anymore.
“Alex? Are you awake?” I don’t say anything. I don’t move. “Please let me in. We don’t have to talk. But I need to know you’re alright.”
I’m not alright. I don’t think that’s something I’m capable of, not in the way he means it, not in the way that means opening the door and everything going back to the way it was.
I stare at the locked door, but I never get up to open it.
“Okay,” he says, eventually. “Goodnight.”
His footsteps go back down the hall to his own room, and I’m forced to spend another night without him.
On the third night, he cries.
He says his usual, asks if I want to talk, and goodnight when I don’t answer. But instead of walking back to his own room, I hear a thud against the door, followed by a whimper.
I’ve seen Mike cry. Mostly when he talks about his parents. And after the fight that almost ended us. He was quiet those times, hiding.
Nothing like this.
“I don’t know what I did,” he sobs against the door. “I would never force you to do anything, Alex. I’m so sorry if I made you feel that way. We don’t have to do that. I’m not mad at you, if that’s what you think. Please.”
I’m tired of crying. It feels like that’s all I’ve been doing for the last two years. But hearing Mike like that, knowing it’s my fault, has me muffling my sobs with my pillow, wishing I could let him in.
I wait until a good time, when I’ve heard Mike up and moving around the house and the front door closing behind him, to pick up my phone. The screen is filled with endless notifications that I scroll past without looking,
Nate, Iris, Liz, Ben, Mike at least a hundred times.
“Alex?” She answers on the first ring, her voice filled with concern before I’ve even spoken. “Are you okay?”
“Can you come over?” My voice cracks. “I need you.”
“I’m grabbing my keys,” Iris says. “I’ll be there in twenty minutes.”
Twenty minutes later on the dot, I hear the sound of the front door opening and her coming straight up the stairs.
I’m on my side, facing the door, my comforter pulled up to my face. She stops in the doorway, and I don’t know what I look like from her point of view.
But I can guess.
The door closes softly behind her before she crosses the room without a single word and climbs into the bed beside me. Wrapping her arms around me, she runs her hand through my hair, and it’s the first time anyone has touched me since that night with Mike and—
That’s all it takes.
She doesn’t shush me or tell me I’m okay. I’m not. I cry until I can’t anymore, until I’m empty and wrung out, and her shirt beneath my cheek is wet and my head is pounding. And the entire time, she moves her hand up and down my back, patient in a way I don’t deserve.
“I’m so sorry,” I finally tell her. “Iris, I’m so sorry for what I said.”
“Hey.” Her arms tighten around me. “It’s okay. None of that matters, now.”
“No, I mean it.” I look up at her because I’m not sweeping this under the rug. I was a fucking asshole. “I knew it was wrong the second I said it and—”
“Alex.” Her voice is always gentle with me, but it still brokers no argument. “I forgive you. I forgave you that night. Got it?” I lie back down and nod while she hugs me tighter.
“We’ve been trying to reach you for weeks,” she says, softer now. “Everyone’s been so worried.”
“I know.”
“What’s going on?” She says it like there’s no wrong answer, and I know with Iris, there’s not. That’s why I called her. She knows what happened to me more than anyone. She sat there with me in the police station and listened to me tell them what happened that night, and never brought it up again.
She’s the one person in my family that I trust to accept me completely.
And I can’t lie anymore.
“I’ve been seeing Mike,” I force myself to admit. “We’ve been sleeping together for months.”
“Do you love him?” She asks, her hand never pausing on my back.
“Yeah,” I tell her, even saying it out loud feels like pressing on the bruise that is my heart. “I really do.”
“Okay,” she says, nodding. “That sounds like a good thing. What’s the problem?”
“I ruined it,” I tell her, fresh tears spilling down my cheeks. “I ruined everything, and I don’t know if he’s going to forgive me.” I pause to meet her eyes. “I’m not okay. I know I’m supposed to be by now, but I’m not.”
Iris sniffles, hugging me tighter. “There isn’t a timeline for this kind of thing, Alex. What happened to you was terrible. No one expects you to be better overnight.”
“I’ve been trying to— I thought I was getting better.” I sit up, feeling better now that I’ve gotten that part out. Iris nods, and I have to look down at my lap for the next part. “But then Mike started wanting more.”
“What does more mean?”
“He doesn’t want us to be a secret,” I say to my fingers. “He told me he’s not going to do it. So.” I let out a breath. “That’s it.”
Iris is quiet, long enough that I look up to find her frowning. “Why is that it?”
“I’m not someone he can tell people about. Who can hold his hand in public and go on dates. I couldn’t even let him fuck me—” I shake my head, my cheeks heating up when I realize I said that out loud. “He deserves someone who can do that.”
She shakes her head. “Hey, no. That’s not true.”
I shrug, picking at my thumb. “Yes, it is.”
“No one deserves your body, Alex. What you’re willing to do is for you to decide, and if he isn’t okay with that, he’s not the person for you. You know that.”
“Yeah, maybe in theory, but—”
“No buts.” I nod because I know she’s right, but it still doesn’t make it suck any less.
“As for the other stuff—” She takes my hand, holding it in hers, so I look up. “I don’t see what the problem is.”
That actually makes me laugh. “Come on. Can you imagine what Nate would say?”
“What do you think he would say?”
“He would hate me.”
“Alex,” she says, almost chiding. “Nate wouldn’t hate you.”
“You don’t know that.”
“I do know that. He loves you.”
“He loves the version of me he thinks I am.”
“And what about me?” She asks, tilting her head, and I feel like she thinks she’s making some kind of point, but it’s not the same at all.
“He loves you,” I say, even though there’s no need.
“He does,” she says simply. “I’m his wife, and I’m trans. If he could accept me as easily as he did, what makes you think he wouldn’t accept you? He loves you more than anything.”
“It’s different.”
“How?”
“We grew up in Rosehill, Iris,” I say, because that’s enough of an explanation. “People here don’t, I mean, you should hear the way my dad talks about gay people. And like it or not, that’s the dude who raised Nate.”
She gives me a sad smile. “I think you might not be giving him enough credit.”
“I think you’re giving him too much,” I challenge, but she doesn’t argue with me. She waits, wearing an expression that tells me she knows that’s a weak reason, and she’s right. It’s not the only one.
“He would wonder,” I whisper. “If me being gay means—”
I stop because fuck.
I can’t even say it.
“Alex,” she says gently. “Nate knows you didn’t consent to what happened to you.” She shifts, her hand coming up to the side of my face as her eyes fill with tears at the mention of that. “I’ve never seen Nate the way he was after.”
“He didn’t sleep. He didn’t eat. He wouldn’t leave you for a second.” Her thumb moves along my cheekbone. “He would never think that.”
I“It would change things,” I mumble, looking away.
Iris doesn’t tell me it wouldn’t. She can’t. We both know it would.
“Maybe,” she says. “But Nate surprised me when I was so sure he wouldn’t.” She pats my cheek. “He might surprise you, too.”
I roll my eyes, and she smiles, and I smile back, and everything is okay for about three seconds until I remember that nothing is okay.
“I miss Mike,” I groan, flopping back onto the bed, burying my face in my hands. “I miss him so much it’s making me feel sick. Is this what love is supposed to feel like? It’s shitty.”
“I think sometimes it is,” she says, and that helps a lot.
“I can’t flip a switch and be the person he needs me to be. Trust me, I wish I could. But I tried, and look what happened. I haven’t left my room in days.”
“Okay,” she says, standing up from my bed, her hands on her hips, her determined face on. “Here’s what we’re going to do right now.”
I wait, giving her the floor.
“You’re going to come downstairs and let me make you something to eat,” she says. “And then we’re going to clean up this room because—” She looks around the room that I’ll admit, is getting disgusting. “It really needs it.”
I breathe out, hesitant to do anything other than stay in bed, but I nod. “Okay.”
That night, I wait to go to the bathroom. I was never sure if Mike left this time. I never heard his footsteps.
So I wait.
And wait.
Until I fall asleep.
When I wake up again at three in the morning, it’s an emergency.
I open the door slowly, in case he’s still awake. I know he doesn’t sleep well alone. But when I start out into the hallway—
I almost walk right into him.
Mike is curled up in a ball with his head against the door, an inch away from my door. He’s wearing my shirt, and his face is blotchy, like he cried himself to sleep.
I look down at him, and I don’t know what I expected to feel. Dread? The panic that’s been living inside of me since that night. I was sure that when I saw him, it wouldn’t feel the same, and part of me was terrified of that.
The feelings from before never come.
I just love him.
I still can’t give him what he needs. I’m still broken. Nothing about our situation has changed.
But the love is still there.
My bladder sends me down the hall, into the bathroom. The entire time I’m gone, I’m convinced I’ll come back and he’ll be awake, standing in the hallway with questions, and I’ll have to explain because I won’t be able to lie to him.
But when I come back, he’s exactly where I left him.
His arms have come up around himself, wrapped tight across his chest, and even in the dark of the hallway, I can see goosebumps along his forearm where his sleeves stop at his elbows.
He’s cold.
I go back into my room as quietly as I can, and grab the blanket from the foot of my bed that I’ve had since I was a kid. The softest one I own. Mike likes it even more than I do.
I carry it back out into the hall and crouch down in front of him. He stays perfectly still as I settle it over his shoulders and tuck it around his arms so he’s completely covered.
He pulls the blanket tighter around himself without waking, his body settling under the warmth. His head turns to bury his face in it. The closest thing he has to comfort right now.
He’s asleep on the floor outside my door because I locked it, and this is the best thing he can get. He’d rather be cold out here than alone.
I hate myself right now.
I did this to him. He can’t even find comfort in someone else while I’m around. As much as it kills me to acknowledge, I can’t keep doing this to him.
I have to let him go.
This isn’t the first time that thought has arrived these last few days, but this time, I let it sink in fully, and I accept it for what it is.
I have to move out.