Chapter 24
Five years later
“Were you leaving?!” he whispers aggressively, his eyes jerking toward the closed bedroom door before he continues whispering. “Are you kidding me?”
We stare at each other, and I see something in his eyes that makes me deflate, and he must see something in mine, too, because we take simultaneous inhales and exhales, our shoulders dropping.
“You okay?” I tentatively whisper.
“I’m an asshole,” he murmurs.
“You’re not an asshole.”
“No, I definitely am.”
I drop my weekender onto the floor, and it lands with a soft thud. “No, you’re definitely not.”
He stares at my weekender, jaw tense. “You seem to think I am.”
“Well, we all get angry with the people we love sometimes. But you know you love them when you can’t stay angry with them for long.”
“I’ve been angry with you for years.” His eyes slide up from the weekender to meet my gaze. “And, besides. You don’t love me.”
“Yes, I—”
“No,” he says, full volume this time. “You looked me in the eyes and told me you didn’t.” He doesn’t give me time to respond, which is probably telling, but of what, I’m not sure. “Outside?” he asks, nodding to the front door.
He walks past me before I can acknowledge him, and I grab my bag and drag it outside. By the time I close the front door behind me, he’s already ten feet away, facing the street with his hands in his pockets. The tension is written in his posture, his shoulders reaching up toward his ears.
“I just wanted everyone to be happy,” he says toward a passing car. “I didn’t want to be the one ruining everything. I’m always the one ruining everything.”
“That’s not true,” I offer. He turns around with such expediency, I let out a small gasp.
“Isn’t it?” he asks, taking a step forward and staring at me with a crazed, flustered look.
“Because I ruined things with my mom. I ruined things with Stephanie and with everyone else I’ve tried to convince myself I was interested in since college.
” He pauses, and I swallow, a lump forming in my throat.
“I sure as hell ruined things with you.”
“No,” I say, inching closer. We stand face-to-face, neither daring to reach out. “You didn’t ruin things with me.”
“I did. I really, really did.” He hesitates, then, with renewed strength, asks, “Am I an asshole?”
“No. No, of course not.”
He takes a stuttered breath. “Then why didn’t you love me?”
Past tense. Not present tense. Past tense, as in why did I claim not to love him back then.
It feels silly, really—asking it straight out like that, when there’s no easy answer. I did love you. But you didn’t know everything. I did love you. But things were complicated. I did love you. But I had to pull back for my good and yours.
I take a deep breath.
Inhale.
Exhale.
Let’s start slow, he’d said. Tell me one thing—just one. One truth about Emma.
One thing.
Inhale.
Exha—
“I have a condition,” I say, choking on the words.
He stares at me, then squints. “What?”
“Remember the night we met?”
He tilts his head, nodding. “You were having boy problems.”
“There was this guy. I didn’t really know him, but we started making out in the bathroom.
” Harrison cringes, and I roll my eyes. “Yeah, yeah. But, anyway—we were making out, and I was feeling a little full of myself. Newfound freedom, and all that. So, things started to get a little, uh, hot and heavy? And he tried to finger me.”
“Tried?”
“Yeah, tried. It hurt like hell, and I accidentally kneed him in the balls.”
I expect Harrison to laugh, because—I mean, come on—it’s hilarious in retrospect. Instead, he furrows his brows and stays silent.
“So, later that year I went to the gynecologist for the first time. And, well, do you know what vaginismus is?”
“Yes,” Harrison says simply. His expression doesn’t change.
I raise an eyebrow. “I have it.”
The change in Harrison’s expression is barely perceptible, so small it’s impossible to read. It’s the slightest tightening of the lips, the tiniest widening of the eyes, the smallest tilt of the head. I wait for him to say something, but instead, he just nods at me to go on.
I don’t know what I was expecting his reaction to be, but it wasn’t this.
“So,” I continue, “I didn’t do anything about it for a long time. Because it sucked, and because I didn’t understand it and didn’t want to understand it, and because I was afraid. But I started going to pelvic floor therapy recently.”
He blinks slowly. “And that’s helping?”
“Some,” I say. Harrison’s face is still emotionless. “Slowly. It’s still uncomfortable, but it’s getting easier.”
“And…” Harrison starts to say. I nod for him to go on. “You’re saying this has affected your dating life.”
I give him my best no, duh look. “Yes, that’s kind of the whole point of telling you this.”
Finally, he frowns. I would feel relieved about finally being able to read his reaction if it didn’t make me afraid of what he was going to say next. “We were best friends for four years,” he says. I try to ignore the past tense. “You could’ve told me about it outside the context of dating me.”
“Yes, I definitely could have. And probably should have.” Harrison’s expression still doesn’t change, but I forge ahead. “I’ve gotten rejected by quite a few men since we graduated from college. Turns out, men care a lot about sex.”
“Penetrative sex.”
“Yes, that’s what I’m saying. Men reject me because I won’t have sex with them.”
Harrison closes his eyes and shakes his head. “No, I mean—you can’t have penetrative sex. Or, you can’t right now.”
“Correct.”
“But that doesn’t keep you from being intimate with…people…in other ways. Obviously,” he says, ears turning slightly pink.[*2]
“I mean…no. Obviously not,” I say, blushing.
“But what straight man wants to seriously date someone who can’t have penetrative sex?
I just figured I would wait to date until I’d finished physical therapy.
Makes it easier for everyone,” I say casually, as if this hasn’t been the bane of my existence for the better part of a decade.
Our staring contest lasts so long that my cheeks probably turn the same color as his ears. Finally, he closes his eyes and runs a hand down his face, defeated. “Holy shit.”
“I know. I know, I’m so—”
“I really am an asshole,” he murmurs.
I freeze. “Wait, what?”
“Am I actually such an irredeemable piece of shit that you thought I wouldn’t want to be with you because of this?”
I take a step forward, and his body tenses, as if he’s forcing himself not to walk away.
I power on, trying to hold it together. “What are you talking about? That’s not even remotely what I said.
And besides, me not telling you about my vaginismus is all because of my own screwed-up self-perception.
And believe me, I’m working through that in therapy. ”
“Did you tell other people?” he says without missing a beat.
“Jo,” I quietly admit. “I told Jo.”
“Great,” he says. “So the problem is me.”
I take another step forward, and this time he actually does step away.
“Holy shit, you actually didn’t love me,” he says, his eyes widening as if he’s piecing everything together.
“That’s not what I—”
“Nope,” he says, cutting me off. “That is exactly what you said, actually.”
I gape at him for a second, then continue. “Well, I didn’t mean it. I was a kid. I was dumb.”
“Great!” His voice is oddly shrill. “So you thought it would be better to break my heart than to be honest with me. That’s fantastic.”
I don’t respond.
“So let me lay this out for you.” He holds up a finger.
“One—you had a common medical condition that you didn’t tell me about.
Which is your prerogative, and I’m sorry you went through it, but—two”—he holds up a second finger—“when it became clear that things were not strictly platonic between us, you decided to keep that to yourself instead of telling me, even though other people already knew.” A third finger.
“And if that was truly what was holding you back from dating me, then you must’ve thought I would react negatively to the information. ”
I swallow.
“Do you want to deny that?” When I don’t answer, he continues.
“You made me think something was wrong with me. I spent years trying to understand why you were friend-zoning me even though we clearly had feelings for each other. I thought you didn’t love me enough to make it worth breaking your no-relationships rule, but it turns out that rule didn’t even exist.” Devastation paints his face, his breathing heavy.
“Do you know what I would have said if you had told me about your vaginismus back then?”
I don’t answer, because I fear I already know what he’s going to say.
“I would have thanked you for telling me, and then absolutely nothing would’ve changed between us. Not a single thing,” he says, and my eyes start burning, heavy pressure building in my temples.
“I made a mistake back then, but it’s different now,” I say, sniffling. He stares at me, his chest rising and falling in short bursts. “I trust you completely.”
Harrison lets out a maniacal laugh. I’ve never heard this noise come from his mouth before, and it lands in a pit in my stomach, burying itself into my gut. When he speaks, his voice is raspy. “I don’t know if I believe that.”
“What about last night?” I take another step forward, and I am vaguely aware of tears now running down my face. “I trust you. You see that. You have to see that.”
He takes a step forward, and we’re mere inches away now. I can see every ounce of hurt in his eyes.