Tess
Ilooked up at the sound of the knock on my bedroom door. In typical we’re-too-close-for-formalities fashion, Teyana walked in before I invited her and found me sitting on my bed, my back against the headboard.
“Came to check on you. Feeling better after your shower?”
I waffled with my response, trying to find a happy medium between not too morose and honest. Eventually, I settled on, “I don’t know.”
The fact that I’d finished my shower almost half an hour ago and was still wrapped in my towel probably told her as much as she needed to know.
She chuckled. “Sounds about right. Can I get you anything? Tea? Vodka? The ice cream carton?”
“Nah, I’m good.” It suddenly occurred to me that I was on the wrong side of the support system. I was the one who was supposed to be inquiring about her. I hadn’t even asked when I’d arrived home earlier in the evening after my week away, excusing myself to my bedroom as soon as I’d walked in.
“Do you need anything?” I asked, an attempt to step into my usual role. “How are you feeling?”
“I feel fine. The new meds the specialist has me on are already helping, I think.”
“Really? So no nausea? No pain? Any fainting spells?”
“Tess, stop. I’m fine. Let me take care of you for once.”
Normally, I would have protested, but I didn’t have the strength. Funny how exhausting heartbreak was. “Okay. Take care of me.”
“What do you need, baby? Can I get you something to wear?”
“That would be a nice start.” I watched while she got my white terrycloth robe out of my closet, then after she handed it to me, I awkwardly maneuvered from wearing the towel to wearing the robe without showing too many lady bits.
Like a saint, she took my towel from the floor where I’d dropped it and put it in my hamper across the room. “What else do you need?”
That was a loaded question because what I needed, I couldn’t have.
And not having him was physically painful.
I imagined this was what it felt like to be a recovering addict, jonesing for another hit of Scott.
I’d made it six days sober, ignoring his phone calls and texts, and it didn’t feel like he was any more out of my system now than he’d been when I’d walked out his door Monday night.
“Will you come cuddle with me?” Even to my own ears, I sounded pathetic.
But Teyana didn’t flinch in the slightest. “You bet.”
Less than a handful of seconds later, she was sitting on the bed at my side, her arms wrapped around me, and while I’d gone home to my mother seeking this sort of comfort, this was the first time since breaking up with Scott that I’d felt closer to fine.
She held me like that for a while, letting me weep without trying to make things better with hollow platitudes, which I very much appreciated.
In fact, she didn’t talk at all. She just rocked me, and despite my state of despair, I made myself file away the moment for future reference when I wanted to find the perfect way to be a good friend.
I could have stayed like that all night. Definitely could have fallen asleep in that position. But after a while, I really needed a tissue, and particularly after this act of kindness, it didn’t seem polite to drip snot all over her shoulder, so I forced myself to sit up.
Tey reached over and grabbed a Kleenex from the box on my nightstand before I could even ask and handed it to me.
“Thank you.” I dabbed at my eyes and then my nose, then took a deep breath, trying to gain some semblance of humanity.
“Feel better now?”
I did. A little. But it felt like a betrayal to my heartache to admit. So instead, I asked, “Does it ever get better?”
It occurred to me after I’d asked that she legitimately might not have a good frame of reference to be able to give a satisfying answer.
I’d known Teyana since college, and in all that time, she’d never had a serious relationship.
Flings, yes. Many, many flings. But never anything that she had to recover from when it ended.
“I suppose that wasn’t a fair question,” I said when several silent seconds had passed.
“No, it’s fair. I hope it does. I hope it gets better. But I can’t say that I know for sure.” She sounded as sad as I felt.
God, she was a good friend. Completely on my side. Feeling my feelings with me.
“There’s something to look forward to, though,” she said in afterthought.
“Scott’s not going to be engaged to Kendra forever.
If you are still feeling this way about him when they finally break up—and believe me, I know it feels like it’s an eternity away, but time will pass.
I do know that for certain—that means there is an ending.
Eventually. You’ll have him back, and that’s something to look forward to. Isn’t it?”
“I guess.” It really did feel an eternity away. And while part of me knew I’d never stop loving Scott, another part of me hoped I would because I couldn’t imagine surviving like this for more than a few weeks, let alone a year or more.
But even if I did survive that long, I wasn’t sure that everything would be better.
“It’s more than the engagement, Tey. I wish it were just that, because like you said, there’s an end in sight. Well, not necessarily in sight, but there’s an end. Just, that’s not really the problem, not really.”
She gave me her I-have-no-idea-what-you’re-talking-about-please-explain look.
“I mean, yes, him being engaged is a major problem. It doesn’t help that he’s engaged to Kendra, of all people, but it’s the reason why he’s engaged to her.”
“Because of the DRF.”
“Because of his father.” I’d been thinking about this a lot over the last week, trying to figure out whether this was a real problem or one I’d made up, and while I didn’t know if I could fully articulate it, I was pretty sure I’d come to an answer.
“Think about it. What it would be like being with him, when his father—who has made it clear he doesn’t like me—has that much power over him?
What kind of a life could we ever have together?
And okay, I’m not saying we’re going to be together forever, but if that’s not at least a possibility, then there’s no reason to be waiting for him at all, so I have to consider what that would be like.
Because Scott’s proven who will win whenever an altercation comes up.
He’s proven whose opinion matters most, and it’s not mine.
It’s not even his own. So who would I be dating?
Scott or the person Scott’s father wants him to be?
Is that something I could live with? It probably doesn’t make any sense. ”
“Oh, no. It makes perfect sense. And while I can’t say whether or not it’s something you can live with, I can tell you that I couldn’t. I...can’t.”
It was my turn to be confused. “You can’t live with me in that kind of relationship?”
“I can’t live in that kind of relationship. I know that from experience.”
I shifted so I could better stare at her profile without craning my neck. “Teyana, are you holding out on me? Do you have some similar past relationship story that you haven’t shared?”
“Not past. But yeah. Real similar.” She bit her lip and looked up at me, her eyes filled with guilt.
“Hold up. What? You’re currently dating someone that I don’t know about? For how long?” Unless it was someone she’d started dating in the last six days, I was going to be pretty hurt about her withholding.
“Off and on about…” She paused, and I couldn’t decide if she was counting or getting the nerve to say. “Three years.”
Definitely getting the nerve to say.
“Oh my God, what? You’ve had an off-and-on relationship for, uh, basically the whole time you’ve had POTS—”
“A little after my diagnosis, actually.”
“And you’re only just now telling me?” She certainly knew how to distract me from my misery. “Do I know him?”
“You do. Know her.”
I sat stunned for a beat. Then another. “Okay, uh, what? You’re into women too?
Not that there’s anything wrong with that.
You know I’ve always been supportive of whomever Kendra was dating, and she’s always gone back and forth, and oh my fucking God.
” I knew it without her confirmation. A woman that we both knew, a woman she’d known for at least three years, a woman she would have had a hard time admitting to being with.
“You’re in an on-again, off-again relationship with Kendra? !”
“I know, I know. I should have told you.” She repositioned herself so she was facing me.
“Why the fuck didn’t you?”
“We were afraid of how you’d react. Or that it would complicate your working relationship. Or I don’t know. Our reasons changed all the time, and every time I was about to tell you, we’d end up breaking up, and then there was nothing to tell.”
I was speechless. Not because I didn’t have anything to say, but because I had so much to say and had no idea where to start, and on top of that I had no idea what to feel, and I had a shitload of feelings going on, not the least of which was feeling utterly betrayed.
As always, Teyana seemed to sense my primary emotion. “Tess, I swear, keeping it secret wasn’t about you. Not really.”
“You literally just said it was.” But my mind was racing too fast to stay focused on that detail. “She abandoned you when you got sick, Tey.”
“No, she didn’t. It just seemed like it to you.”
“But you hate her!”
“I don’t.”
“You act like you hate her! You encourage me all the time to hate on her.”
“Because I love her!”
That didn’t make any kind of sense.
Except.
When I gave myself a beat, it did. It made perfect sense. Especially when I remembered that she’d just hinted to being in a relationship where a parent’s opinion mattered too much and what Kendra had said when she’d disappeared the last time, that she was trying to decide between two lovers.
Oh fuck.
And now my heart hurt for Teyana as much as it hurt for Scott because I understood the situation perfectly. “She chose Scott. Over you. Because of her parents?” Her religiously active parents who’d never known about her affairs with women. “Because they’d freak out if she came out with a woman.”