Chapter 18 Seth
EIGHTEEN
Seth
I sat in the empty room, lit by the desk lamp, leaning back in my chair and staring out the window. The streetlamps cast an orange haze through the frost on the window glass, sparse snowflakes forcing their way down from the sky.
When my roommate quietly turned the key and pushed the door open, he paused, seeing that I was awake.
I watched the reflection of his slouching figure as he shut the door behind himself.
He felt bad, but it was too late for that.
He was ready to confess, but I already knew.
Some paranoid part of me discovered the truth deep within all my doubts, then held on to it until I was certain.
“You’re awake,” Silas said.
I didn’t reply. I didn’t turn the chair around. Why should I? I owed him nothing. Not a reply and definitely not a warning about trusting the wrong person. He would discover that on his own, just like I did.
“Seth?” Silas said, voice thin and wrecked with guilt. “Seth, I didn’t…I didn’t mean to fuck things up for you.”
At least he wasn’t pretending anymore.
“What happened?” he asked.
Finally, I turned the chair around, watching the guilt shatter across his face when his gaze landed on my red, stinging eyes and the hard line of my mouth. “You tell me what happened first. What happened with you and your mystery crush, Silas?”
Silas swallowed. “I’ll tell you everything.”
I shrugged, waiting, and observed him as he crossed the room and sat down on the edge of his bed.
He looked at his hands, both resting in his lap, palms up, fingers trembling just enough to make me feel bad for him.
But no. I wasn’t going to let pity cloud my judgment.
Not when he so carelessly stabbed me and twisted the knife, smiling all along.
“I swore I wouldn’t tell you,” Silas said. “He has these…stupid ideas that coming out would fuck with his career. I didn’t want to out him. Not to anyone. Not even to you.”
“But that wasn’t true the other way around,” I said. “You told him about me and Damon.”
Silas sank a little lower, exhaling and lifting his gaze to meet mine. “I didn’t know why it was such a secret. You never said.”
“And you never thought that telling my brother who I was fucking could complicate things in my life?” I asked, barking a bitter laugh. “He’s a hypocrite, Silas. And so are you.”
“Seth, please,” Silas whispered, leaning in. “I wouldn’t have told him if I knew he hated Damon so much. I just thought it was funny, you know? Yeah, I get it. I’m stupid. Never was that smart. Not like you.”
“Right,” I said. “It can’t be your fault. You just weren’t thinking.”
He nodded and turned away from my gaze. He was silent for the longest time, turning over the words and deciding not to say them. There were no excuses I would accept tonight. Not after I had thrown away the best goddamn thing I’d ever had because of his stupid yapping.
We’d been so busy joking about who Silas was dating from Damon’s team that it had never crossed our minds to look elsewhere. The only games he went to were those when the Titans played against the Breakers. He was there for Nick, knowing all along that I was there for Damon.
“So when we went to games and Nick thought I was there to watch him play, you told him the truth?” I asked.
Silas shook his head. “Only last week. It was a joke, Seth. I let it slip when I was teasing him.”
He went quiet again, silence stretching endlessly, as I let the pieces fall into place.
Nick. He’d never brought a girl home, yet I’d always assumed that he was straight because why the fuck wouldn’t he tell me?
Why the fuck would he have left me to struggle with accepting my own sexuality when he was well aware I wasn’t alone?
“I think I love him,” Silas said. “Fuck, Seth, I think I do.”
“Great. Hope he treats you better than his own brother.”
Silas bit back a whimper that almost escaped him.
He looked at me with tears in his eyes, and I couldn’t be cruel anymore.
I just couldn’t, no matter how much I wanted him to feel a bit of the pain that I felt.
“I’m really sorry, Seth. There’s nothing I can say to make it right, but I can try hard to change his mind about you and Damon. ”
Then, I laughed. It was a desperate laugh, terrifying for the absence of humor. “You didn’t think that I had a reason to keep Damon a secret, Silas. Nick will never understand. He broke Damon’s collarbone on purpose. Did you know that? He rammed into him so hard because he wanted to break him.”
“They were kids,” Silas said as if that excused my brother.
I sucked my teeth and began to turn away from Silas.
“Seth?” he said, voice timid.
“Yeah?”
“I was a shit friend to you. I regret it. I hope, even though I don’t deserve it, that you’ll be better than me and forgive me.”
Yet I knew, deep in my heart, that knowledge existed, that he hadn’t done anything out of malice or spite. He was just who he was, chaotic, a little careless, but entirely good-natured. And hating him for it was impossible.
“I forgive you, Silas. It’ll just take some time before I forget,” I said honestly.
“Thank you,” he said, relief so strong in his voice that it scared me. “Thank you, Seth. And I’ll try my best, I promise. I’ll make him change his mind. We can fix this.”
I shook my head. “He broke it, Silas, but I was the one who threw the pieces away. There’s nothing there to fix.”
And with that, I got up and went into the bathroom, pretending I was brushing my teeth. I stared at the mirror and let all the regrets and mistakes settle inside of me, like freshly poured concrete.
The look on Damon’s face after Nick had clashed with him tonight and told him something, some words that made him freeze completely.
The way they both searched for me in the crowd.
The satisfaction on Nick’s face after he’d skated away.
And the total absence of hope on Damon’s face.
All these things etched themselves inside my brain, forming synapses that would never go away, immortalizing the night I lost him.
Because I had lost him then. I could see it on his face. I could see him dying a little after Nick had spoken to him. All my hope that we could maybe sail through this inevitable storm had drowned when Damon’s gaze found me.
Nick sat by the window in the café when I stepped inside, coffee already in front of him. I ordered mine and carried it to the table, sitting down without a greeting. “What do you want?” I asked.
“To talk,” Nick said bluntly.
I’d spent the whole day yesterday pretending the world wasn’t spinning around me.
I’d gone to the library, kept myself busy, kept the walls up against the grief and regrets battering against my shields.
Reading and taking notes had helped just enough to get me through the morning, but I’d spent the rest of the day in my bed, doomscrolling to dull whatever it was that I felt.
There was so much resentment in me that I felt like I poisoned every room I entered. I poisoned myself with every breath.
“Yeah, your sweetheart said so,” I spat. “He said I should hear you out.”
Nick shifted uncomfortably. This was the first time in our lives that we faced one another without secrets standing between us. I didn’t like it. It wasn’t even a little liberating to know that Nick was gay or to have nothing to hide from him because he knew everything.
“Very happy for you,” I said. “Love is love is love and all that.”
Nick swallowed, not looking at me, and leaned back in his chair. “I know what you think about me, Seth. You think I’m a smart-ass. You think I’m controlling. But what you don’t realize is that I’m just trying to protect you.”
I dusted my hands theatrically. “Job well done. Nothing to protect me from, Nick. Is that it, then?” I leaned to the side as if to get up.
He shot me a judgmental look that should have always been a dead giveaway. No straight guy could pull off that side-eye. “Sit down, Seth. You’re acting like a child.”
I laughed bitterly and crossed my arms. “I honestly thought you had something nice to say to me, Nick. Silas was so confident in this. Oh, he’s gonna love this.”
Nick looked into my eyes, searching my face for whatever he thought he could read there. There was nothing left in this old husk. I just wanted to sleep.
“If you think I’ll tell you that I was wrong and that you should totally be with Damon, you misunderstood,” Nick said flatly.
“Great. Well, I didn’t. And even if you said it, the world doesn’t revolve around your opinions quite as much as you think.”
Nick graced me with one of his legendary deadpans.
“Seriously,” I said. “Just because you’d be so kind and sweet to bless this union, we’re not just gonna fix the shit you made.”
“Good,” Nick said, leaning in. “Because Damon is not a good guy.”
I rolled my eyes. “Give me a break.”
“He isn’t,” Nick said. “I know him, Seth. I know him better than you do, and I can tell you that he’s as bad as they come. Hell, you have no idea what he was up to since he moved here. There’s nobody he hasn’t slept with. Is that really someone to look up to?”
“Look up to?” I asked, outraged. “Are you fucking serious? He’s not my daddy, Nick. I didn’t ‘look up to’ him. I loved him.” The words tumbled over my lips with the same carelessness that I judged Silas for.
Tears welled in my eyes before I could blink them away.
I’d told these words to Nick before I’d had the chance to tell them to Damon. It was so fucking unfair.
My cheeks burned when the tears spilled from the corners of my eyes. I shook my head furiously and pushed my coffee away.
Nick stared at me in stunned silence. “Love him? Really?”
I swallowed the tightening knot in my throat and shook my head, but halfway through it, it became a nod. “I did. More than I thought I could. Not that you would know what that’s like.”
“I’m sorry, Seth,” Nick said. “I’m sorry that you fell in love with him. And that I had to stop it. But Damon isn’t someone who loves people. He uses them, then tosses them aside.”
“What do you know about anything, Nick?” I whispered. The words that had escaped me still burned before my eyes. I loved Damon, and I’d pushed him away, and he had accepted it just like that.
“What do you think I told him, Seth?” Nick asked. “Do you think I threatened him? Do you think I have power over him? Just the fact that I knew about you made him walk away. Damon Pierce doesn’t do relationships. He doesn’t do complications. He’s always been broken, and he’ll stay broken forever.”
I didn’t look at him anymore. I stared at the heart shape in the milk foam in my cup.
“That’s not true,” I said. “I broke up with him, not the other way around. I broke up with him because I didn’t want complications.
And you are the complication, Nick. You think you know what’s best for everyone.
Well, let’s see how that works out for you.
But I don’t think I have any reason to ever listen to a thing you say again. ”
Nick stiffened. “You don’t mean that.”
Tears still came, damn them. “It’s so stupid, Nick. I broke up with him because I didn’t want to be in this café someday, cutting you off. But I see now that you’re not good for me. You’re just not. You’re my brother, and that can’t change, but I don’t think I like you very much.”
“Seth, you’re being dramatic,” Nick said, but his voice wasn’t so sure anymore. He was scared of something.
I blinked through the tears and looked at the horrified expression on his face.
“I’m really not,” I said quietly. “I’m doing the one thing I should have done from the start, Nick.
You need to change. Whatever’s broken inside of you needs fixing, or you’ll never be happy.
And I’m not the person who can fix it. We’re too close.
We know each other too well. We’ve lied to each other too many times.
” I nodded, wiped my sweaty palms against my pants, and straightened my back.
“I think it’s better if we don’t see each other for some time.
” I stood up and took a step back. “I mean this in the best way possible, Nick. You need to do better, or you’ll lose the people who love you. ”
The fear was real on his face as I turned away from him and walked out.
A burden had lifted off my chest, though what remained was only an open wound where my heart used to beat. I’d lost a lover and a brother in forty-eight hours. And I didn’t think I was getting either one of them back.