One for your conscience #2
The warmth in my voice leaves me at once, so I don’t say anything.
Leila turns her cup around. “And then I thought, I actually thought there was something real happening. Nobody had ever paid attention to me like that. Not once. Not in that house, not at that school, not with you next to me.”
“Mm. He's very good at that. It's basically his one skill.” My voice stays calm.
“And I told him to stop.” She swallows. “I did. And then he said he was going to break up with you and be with me instead, and I believed that. I believed it for four weeks while it kept happening.”
Ah. So it was four. I’ve been clocking three.
“At my house.”
Leila looks at me, hesitating. “Yes…”
“While I was at the party.”
She looks away. “Yes…”
“Why did it keep going?” I take a drink.
Leila looks down at the table. “The longer it went the more impossible it got to say it out loud to you. Every day it got heavier and every day I said tomorrow.”
“Say the other part,” both my hands are flat on the table.
Leila looks up.
“You said nobody paid attention to you with me next to you.” I keep my voice flat. “Say that part.”
“I wanted what you had. But not like that.” Leila closes her eyes. “You've never once walked into a room and had to wait. You always seemed so confident in front of everyone, and everyone loved you, wanted to be around you. And then he made me feel really special.”
I give her a shrug. “Okay. That one I believe.”
Nine months and I hadn’t given Leila a sentence. This afternoon has been more than enough.
I lift myself off the chair, and then she tells me the thing I did not come here for.
“He used to say you didn't need him.”
I sit back down.
“That you were always fine, and you had your own everything and your own money and your own friends and you never once asked him for anything. He couldn't work out what he was for.” She isn't looking at me. “I think he liked me because I needed him. That's the whole thing.”
“That's not my fault.”
“No. God, no. That's not what I—” She shakes her head fast. “I know it isn't. I'm telling you because you asked why.”
I didn't ask why. But fine.
She turns the cup a quarter turn, which is a thing I do, which she probably got from me. “He said you guys were not happy. That you were gonna break up with him anyways and he was gonna do it first.”
Interesting fact. So my ex had sex, and heartfelt conversations probably after sex with my ex best friend too.
I don’t recall being that unhappy. Now I have to ask why. “Based on what?”
“He told me you didn’t have that much sex. He said he'd ask what you liked and you'd say it was fine. And then afterwards you'd go quiet and he never knew what he'd done wrong. And I—” Leila trails off.
Friday. Once a week, sometimes twice, and I cleared my schedule for it.
It takes me a second to hear my own thoughts in it. I scheduled it. I turned up and I made sure he had a good time and I never once told him I didn’t.
Not that it’s an excuse. I simply didn’t know how to say it without hurting his ego. So I stayed quiet and tried to single-handedly manage dual pleasures in a relationship.
Clearly that worked out beautifully for everyone involved.
“That’s not a very good reason to sleep with my best friend.” I let out a low chuckle.
“No. No. It’s not.” She looks straight at me. “I don’t think you didn’t care, Maddy. You guys looked so happy whenever you were together, I didn’t know what to believe.”
Her hand comes halfway across the table, palm up, an old reflex from a hundred other tables. I look at it. She takes it back.
“It really didn’t matter what you believed.”
I study her for a moment then take another long sip of my matcha.
“Here's the thing, though. You still did it for four weeks. Every day you woke up and did it again. And every day you decided not to tell me, with all the reasons why you did what you did. I don’t work on reasons.”
Leila's face changes.
“I want to say something and then I want you to let me say it,” I tell her.
Leila nods.
“I trusted you like a sister. I have an actual sister, so I know exactly what I'm saying. You didn't take a boyfriend off me. Boyfriends are replaceable, he's a story I tell at parties now.” I look at her properly. “You went behind my back and let me talk to you about him. And worse, you listened.”
“Yes.” Her eyes are wet and she does not attempt to hide it. “I'm so sorry, Maddy. I've been sorry for nine months.”
“I’m sorry, too.” My voice comes softer.
She wanted to be somebody's only person. Somebody offered. She took it and it cost her another person.
I am not going to sit here and pretend she is a monster. She's just a girl who was flattered.
And I didn't miss anything. I went back through it all summer, looked for the thing I should have seen. Now I know, there was nothing to see.
Once someone decides to conceal a thing from you and they have the unfair advantage of your trust, you were always going to miss every sign.
“So can we—” Leila stops. Starts again. “I'm not asking for it to be like it was. I know that's gone. But we were best friends and you're here, and I'm here, and I thought maybe—”
“No.”
“Maddy—”
“I believe you're sorry.” I put money on the table for both cups, because I suggested the place and I am not a barbarian. “I'm not going to spend the next three years being weird when I see you, and if you're at a party I'll say hello, and I mean that.”
I stand up. “But I don't want you in my life.”
Leila's face does something I am going to think about later, in bed, at two in the morning, with my phone in my hand.
“Bye, Leila.”
I walk out.
Here is the thing about trust, which I have thought about more than I would like anybody to know.
I don't hand it out in increments. I don't have a setting for mostly. Everyone I let in gets all of it at once, immediately, on no evidence, and I would rather be catastrophically wrong once than cautious a hundred times.
So when it goes, it goes the same way it arrived. All of it. In one movement.
I have done this to four people. It has never once been reversed.
So.
If you want Maddy in your life, this is the Maddy you get.