Chapter Thirteen
Skylar Parish
“You barely spent any time with us for your birthday! You were here for maybe two hours at breakfast, and that’s it!” Mom complains into the receiver, ever so dramatic.
I hold the phone between my shoulder and my ear, fiddling with the Nintendo Switch in my hands; my character runs around aimlessly.
Distracted, I reply, “I know. I’m sorry, I’m just really busy right now.”
She sighs just as I’m sniped from some mountains off to the east. “We just miss you, baby. I know you feel like we’ve been overbearing ever since… that accident, but we just love you so much.”
I throw the console onto the mattress next to me, closing my eyes to ward off the memories as I take in a large inhale.
“I don’t think that, Mom. And I miss you guys, too. I’ve just been swamped. And starting tomorrow, we start studying for midterms.”
None of this is a lie—between work, beach volley, and finishing my bachelor’s to become a nurse, finding time to drive back home is hard. It has nothing to do with their concerned faces or any resentment toward the lengths to which they went to… fix me.
I hear the front door unlock, the sound of someone kicking off their shoes, and a bag hitting the floor.
My pulse speeds up.
“Well, maybe we can come up there for dinner sometime,” Mom offers.
“That sounds great. Text me a date, okay? Evie just got here.”
“Oh! You guys made up?”
I sigh. “We weren’t fighting, Mom.”
Everett comes into my room in a pair of sweatpants and a Sinclair baseball t-shirt. He looks disheveled, exhausted. I can feel my skin flushing at the sight of him, at the memories that now resurface when I see his face.
“Sure you weren’t. You guys—”
“I love you, Mom. I gotta go,” I interrupt.
She chuckles. “I love you too, baby.”
Ending the call, I toss my phone next to the Switch. Everett is staring at me, his shoulders slumped as if some great burden he has been carrying the whole drive here has just fallen straight to the hardwood.
After a moment, he flops down onto the bed, sitting on the edge.
“Hey,” I greet him, slowly inching closer.
We’re like two magnets, Evie and I. Always searching for one another.
“Hey.” He sounds so tired, so defeated.
“You okay?”
“Just a… long dinner.”
I make a sound of acknowledgement, settling in to sit next to him. “Want to talk about it?” He shakes his head, so I say, “Okay. Want to order a pizza and watch Family Guy?”
Slowly, his gaze lifts, giving me a soft smile that makes my heart squeeze uncomfortably. “Yeah, that’d be cool.”
I try not to let my mind wander; I pray he doesn’t hear the pounding of my heart as we move around the apartment, placing our pizza order and turning on the TV in the living room.
As we sit on the couch, I try to navigate this tension that wasn’t here this morning—I can’t seem to find the source of it. Is it coming from what we did last night? The dinner he just came back from? School?
But Evie doesn’t want to talk about it, and I won’t force him.
So, we sit in this tension instead.
“Ready for midterm studying?” It’s a very lame question, one we’ve probably asked each other a billion times by now, but I have no idea what else to say to him now that we’ve touched; now that I know how obscene he looks as he’s coming.
And fuck, I want to see it again. Preferably in my mouth, or maybe even in me. Would he be into that? Am I allowed to ask?
What is this new thing between us? I mean, how can we just be Evie and Sky after what has transpired? He admitted to wanting me sexually, and I showed him by returning the favor.
We are in a limbo, stuck in an in-between I am not familiar with.
“Yeah, are you?” Everett finally responds.
And yeah, okay, now probably isn’t the right time to ask him to fuck me.
“Yeah,” I murmur.
Silence. Once again.
The pizza arrives, so I grab it and put it on the coffee table. We eat to the sound of Family Guy reruns, and once we’re done, I try again.
“Everett,” I prompt sternly, watching as he turns his head to look at me. “What’s up?”
I don’t want to push, but this silence is suffocating.
“I just need to get out of my head.”
Oh. Does that mean… surely not. If it did, he would have jumped me by now, right? My palms are getting sweaty; my heart rate is rising once more, despite how casual I’m trying to appear.
“Okay. What do you want to do?” I ask.
He sighs, long and defeated, and says, “I don’t know.”
Should I suggest it? Should I tell him that fucking me would distract him and relieve tension? I’ve always been forward; I’m pretty sure I’ve been the driving force every time we’ve done something intimate at this point.
“We could—”
The sound of Everett’s phone cuts me off; it buzzes once, then twice. He makes no move to check it, so I grab it for him, and he doesn’t even register the movement.
He’s perpetually lost in whatever thoughts are plaguing him.
Ashley
I’d love to! What time?
Ashley
I’ll wear that dress you like (;
If I was worried about my ridiculously fast heartbeat moments ago, I have nothing to fear now—it does a full fucking stop. Sure, only for a moment or two, but even that is enough to kill a man.
Ashley—that’s that blonde from the bar, isn’t it? The one who was making out with Everett, her hand squeezing his dick through his jeans?
I stare at Everett out of the corner of my eye, taking in his vacant expression. “You have two texts from Ashley.”
He nods absentmindedly and says nothing.
“Everett?” I push.
“Hm?”
I have no right to be jealous; I know this. And even if I am, which I am—although I’m not one hundred percent sure if it’s for completely lustful reasons or not—we’re not exclusive. He can see her all he wants.
But personally, I don’t want to sleep with someone who is sleeping around. It’s not safe; it’s not right. Not to me.
I kind of feel like throwing up right now. I kind of feel like crying.
I’d turn Jacob down if Everett would stop seeing Ashley—even if we aren’t necessarily together. Would he want that? He might.
Everett cares for me.
“I don’t want to keep doing this together if we’re seeing other people,” I tell him, my voice confident even as the inside of me is a jumbled mess of butterflies.
Slowly, resembling a cute baby fawn caught in a deadly car crash, Everett’s head lifts, and his eyes find mine.
“Together?” he mutters.
“Yeah. Like… what we did yesterday. I know we both liked it, but if we want to keep doing it—to keep this thing going—I think we should stop seeing other people.”
It’s not an unreasonable request, yet I can see it as his breathing deepens, as it picks up. He’s panicking, eyes darting around the room before finding mine again, drawing his knees to his chest as if he can disappear just by making himself small enough.
He winces as his arms wrap around his knees.
For the first time in so long, Everett looks like a child. And he’s terrified.
“You…” he starts. “You think we have a thing?”
My brow furrows, stray curls falling into my eyes as I tilt my head at him. Someone on the TV is laughing.
“Yes? I mean, what we’re doing isn’t exactly normal for us. I’d say it’s a thing.”
He takes an unsteady breath. “Skylar, there is nothing between us.”
I feel his words like they’re a knife personified; I can feel them gut me, skin me alive, ready me for sacrifice.
“Sorry?” I sound so genuinely confused, like I misheard him.
I did, right? Because it was absolutely a thing, even if it wasn’t an exclusive one.
“What we did… it was wrong. It was a mistake.”
“It was wrong? What the fuck is that supposed to mean?”
Everett backtracks, stumbling over his words as he says, “T-that’s not what I meant. For me it’s wrong. For me. For you it’s okay—because it’s you.”
I can feel him. I can feel that little part of me that I worked so hard at shutting away—and he’s banging on the door to get free, ready to pounce.
And Everett? He’s in striking range.
“Only for me it’s okay? That sounds just as bad.”
He groans, rubbing a hand down his face. “It was a mistake, okay? Can we drop it?”
I turn to face him fully. “No, Everett, we can not drop it. What’s your problem? You liked it. You said you’d thought about it before, that you wanted it. I saw it on your face. You came all over me—”
“Enough!” Everett jumps to his feet, manic and angry. “I did something stupid; I let my hormones get the best of me! I’m straight, Skylar. I like women. Stop pushing me.”
“Pushing you?!” I shout, standing to meet him where he is, rigid and startled. “I didn’t push you into shit! You were just as into it as I was. What’s changed? Why are you acting like this? All I’m saying is that sleeping with several people at once isn’t safe.”
I need to count backward from one hundred; I need to take a timeout. Dr. Damen would tell me to start using “I” statements. But none of these techniques are being put to good use, not as I stare at Everett with so much rage and hurt building inside of me.
Calm down, Skylar, my mind says. Remember who this is.
“I’m not sleeping with several people at once. We didn’t have sex.” He says it so straightforwardly that I can’t help but roll my eyes at him.
“Jesus.”
He ignores me, adding, “I’m going on a date with Ashley, because she’s a woman and that’s what I like. What’s expected of me.”
My eyes narrow on him, on his heaving chest and his frantic expression. “Expected of you? Evie, what—”
“Drop it!” he screeches. “Stop trying to make me gay!”
That silence, the one from earlier? It returns to crowd the space between us, and it’s fucking deafening. I don’t know who Everett is right now. I don’t know what’s happening to him or what he wants, but I do know that he’s hurting me.
It fucking hurts.
Making him gay? Bullshit. He was desperate for it, for me. I didn’t make him, push him, or coerce him. I won’t let him pin this on me.
That part of me that I hate so much settles back down, once again falling into a deep sleep. And in its wake, all that is left for me is sorrow.