Chapter 23
I didn’t make the conscious decision to come here.
All I know is, I’m walking through campus, trying to get control of myself before I have a very public panic attack, and at some point, I find myself crossing the street I called home for the last five months.
My hand is throbbing, only getting worse when I bang on the door. I’m shaking so hard my teeth are chattering, and I don’t know if it’s because of what happened or because it’s the middle of winter and I’m only wearing a t-shirt.
“Coming, geez,” Mike shouts from inside, his eyes widening when he tugs the door open and sees that it’s me. “Alex?”
And I don’t know what happens.
I’m holding it together the best I can, and then Mike is there, and he’s wearing the pajama pants from the first time I saw him, and he’s beautiful, and I haven’t seen him in over a week.
I shatter, right there, on the spot.
“Mike-” I start, but I can’t finish because I can’t stop crying like a fucking baby.
“Hey,” his voice goes soft, and I don’t even hate it right now. “Hey, okay, come inside.”
“I need to—” I try, because I should explain, but the reality crashes over me again, and it comes out jumbled. “Ryan— I found my—”
He takes my hand and pulls me through the door. I let him move me as easy as breathing.
Easier, right now.
“He had my stuff.” I show him what I have, needing him to understand. “I thought it was my old roommate, but all along it was—”
“Okay,” he says, taking my stolen boxers from me, setting them down on the hall table, out of sight. “Let’s go sit down.”
Mike steers me to the couch when I don’t make a move to go anywhere myself. I sit down when he tells me to, listening to his footsteps up and down the stairs, and then he’s back with the grey blanket.
The one I put over him that last night.
He puts it around my shoulders, and I pull it tight around myself, trying to get the tears to stop, to get myself under control. He sits on the coffee table directly in front of me, close enough that our knees are touching.
“You’re freezing.”
I cross my arms under the blanket, nodding. “Left my stuff at Ryan’s.”
“Did you walk here?”
“Yeah,” I say, punctuating that with a sniffle.
He puts his hand against my cheek, more careful than he’s ever been with me, and I close my eyes for a second, leaning into the contact. I think I whimper when he pulls back. “Tell me what happened.”
I tell him everything.
It comes out messy and out of order, and I have to stop several times. But I tell him about the drawer and the notebook and the underwear. Ryan locking the door, and the way he called me baby. When he tried to kiss me.
I shake my head. “He’s been my friend for two years, and the whole time he was just waiting for what he really wanted.”
Mike can’t conceal his anger, but I can tell he’s trying. He’s keeping his face still, letting me talk, he doesn’t say a word. But I can see the fury in his eyes. “Did he hurt you?” he asks, as calm as he can.
“No.” I shake my head. “But I thought he might want to. So I hit him.”
“You hit him.”
“Yeah.”
He looks down at my hand and holds out his. I let him have it, mostly to feel his rings against my skin again. He presses along my knuckles, and I wince at the third one, but it’s not broken.
I know what broken feels like.
When he’s done, he doesn’t let go. And suddenly the room feels very quiet.
“Mike.” He looks up. “I’m sorry. I didn’t know where else to go. I can call Nate and—”
He shakes his head. “Don’t apologize for coming here. If it were up to me, you never would have left.”
He holds my gaze, steady and more serious than I’ve ever seen him, clear of any alcohol or drugs. Just those bright blue eyes and—
“What happened to your face?” I blurt out, finally noticing the bruise under his left eye. I don’t know how I missed it until now.
He was wearing sunglasses earlier.
Someone hit Mike.
Hard enough to give him a black eye.
“It’s fine,” he says, looking down at my hand, running his thumb over my red knuckles.
“It’s really not.” I reach out before I remember that I shouldn’t, turning his face toward me so I can get a better look.“Who did this?”
“Trent,” he says with a sigh, letting me move his face however I please.
“Trent hit you?”
“Well, to be fair, I hit Trent first.” He pulls back, looking around the room like the explanation lies somewhere in the furniture. “A few times, actually. He got one in before Damon pulled me off.”
“What? Why?”
“He said something while you were visiting your family,” Mike starts, not meeting my eyes, bouncing his leg up and down. “About you. Us. He was being a dick, and I let it get in my head. And then you left so—”
He shakes his head, looking up at me with a little smile and his shrug, but I can see that whatever happened, he’s still shaken by it. I’m not gonna add to that by making him talk about it.
“Look at us.” I turn his hand over, and sure enough, his knuckles are fucked too. As upsetting as it is to see, I smile. “Getting into fights.”
“Yeah,” he says, a matching smirk growing on his own lips. “Never again. Punching people hurts.” He winces at the memory.
And god help me, I laugh. Loud, uncontrollable, damn near delirious, because how is this real life? I had to punch my best friend because he tried to kiss me. Mike beat up Trent over me.
I laugh for the emo teenage version of me that wouldn’t have believed a single word of this.
Mike’s eyes go to my face when it happens, and he smiles. The one that means I think he loves me, too, and my heart doesn’t know what to do with that. He shifts forward to sit beside me, and I open my arms. He finds his spot against my chest, relaxing into me, and I wrap the blanket around him.
My chin lands on top of his head while I rub his back, and he makes a sound that would be the human equivalent of a purr. And fuck. I’ve had a terrible day.
A terrible month, really.
But I missed him.
I missed him so bad that right now, with him warm against my chest, I know that leaving him was the biggest mistake of my life.
“Alex?” Mike says after a long silence, twisting our fingers together.
“Hm?”
“I’m sorry. I can’t—” He stops with a frustrated noise, closing his hand around mine. “I can’t sit here and pretend I don’t know.”
I frown in confusion. “Pretend you don’t know what?” That there’s something wrong with me? That I’m not the person you thought I was? That I can’t give you what you need? My brain throws out every possible answer to that except the one he gives me.
“I found out what happened to you,” he says, slowly. “In high school.”
I drop his hand. My arm loosens around him. It’s involuntary. A reaction to hearing the thing I feared the most.
But he doesn’t pull away.
He chases my hand until it’s back in his, keeping his head right where it’s been this whole time. He looks up at me, and I look down at him, and his eyes are doing the careful thing, and I knew this would happen—
“I’m not angry that you didn’t tell me.”
I nod, but I can’t get any words out.
“I just.” He searches my face. “Why didn’t you? I— I wouldn’t have—” He stops, his voice cracking and his eyes fill with tears, and this is my fault. “If I had known, I never would have pressured you into—”
“I didn’t want you to know.”
His mouth snaps shut.
I didn’t want Mike to know, but now he does. And the only thing I can do is tell him the truth. It’s what he deserves after everything I’ve put him through.
“I didn’t want you to look at me differently,” I start, brushing the tears from his cheeks. “You looked at me like I was a person. Someone you wanted to be with. Everyone who knows looks at me like I’m broken.”
“If I told you,” I continue, “you would have looked at me the way they do. The careful look. The sad eyes. The way you are now. And I couldn’t lose that. For the first time in my entire life, someone actually wanted me, and I didn’t want to let him ruin that for me.”
Mike hasn’t said a single word, but he hasn’t let go of me either.
“But jokes on me. I went and ruined us because I couldn’t hold it together for five fucking minutes. So, I guess you were always gonna find out eventually.”
He keeps his eyes on his tears landing on the blanket, sniffling, and I’m sure I’ve lost him. Why would he want to put up with this? It’s too much. I know it is. I knew from the beginning, that’s why I never told him.
“I don’t see you any differently,” he speaks up, finally. “I want you to know that. Whatever you think is going to change about how I look at you.” He shakes his head. “That’s not true.”
I close my eyes, accepting my fate one way or another.
“What happened to you doesn’t change who you are,” he says, reaching for my cheek and tilting my face down to look at his tear-stained face.
“You’re still Alex to me. That asshole doesn’t have any power here.
He doesn’t change a thing about how much I—” He stops himself from finishing the sentence, clearing his throat and looking down.
“He was my boyfriend,” I tell him. If there’s a chance that we can move past this, I’m moving on with the whole truth out there. “Everyone thinks it was one time,” I say, feeling him freeze against me. “But it went on for almost a year. And it wasn’t always—”
I stop. Deep breathe. Try again.
“He wanted things all the time. And I did them because I wanted to. I thought he loved me. But he never wanted to touch me.”
Mike hugs me tighter, scoffing. “Who wouldn’t want to touch you?” He mumbles into my chest, breaking some of the tension I feel building in my body.
“Jason, apparently. He said it was too gay. I did everything he wanted because I thought we would be real someday. When he felt like he could come out.”
I look at the wall across the room, burying my face in Mike’s hair for the next part. But I have to tell him everything. Even if he doesn’t want me anymore after.