Chapter 2
CODEPENDENT SOULMATES
On Sundays, Tristan and I would meet in the field between our two houses. Actually, there was an abandoned parking lot, railroad tracks, and a field that separated our houses. But it was walkable, and Tristan used to do it almost every night up until two weeks ago.
Tonight, we didn’t walk it hand in hand like we normally did.
Tristan walked next to me, picking the seeds from the long grass.
He didn’t tell me about gym class, and I didn’t tell him about the stupid things Anna said.
And that was hard because he was my best friend, and I missed him so much.
I missed seeing him every day, falling asleep to the sound of his heartbeat.
I even missed the bad nights, the ones filled with tears and bruises.
“Here?” he asked, dropping the blanket in the tall grass.
“Sure.” I wanted to press fast forward and get past this part. The part where we either fixed us or we didn’t. I wasn’t sure what to do if we didn’t. I’ve never thought about my life without him. Never thought about making a future with someone else. We had to fix us.
Tristan spread the blanket out amongst the tall grass. “Let’s get this over with,” he said, lying down.
“Fine.” I flopped down next to him.
“Well?” He looked over at me. His lip and left eye were still bruised.
“You’re the one who wanted to talk.” I flipped through the pages of the magazine that was part of my lit homework. I hated how weird it was between us. I loved him. We had been through so much together and yet it felt like we were a million miles apart. In two different worlds.
“Me? I thought this is where you’d yell at me, we’d fight, and then we’d make up.” He rolled over and stared up at the evening sky. “So, yell at me. Tell me what a fuckup I am. How I can’t do anything right. I’ll say I’m sorry and we’ll move on.”
Those weren’t my words. Those were his mother’s and I hated that he believed that about himself. “I’ve never said that. Don’t say I said that,” I said, pulling my knees up to my chin. “And I don’t believe you’re a fuckup.”
I looked down at him lying on the stupid cartoon blanket my grandmother had given me a few years ago.
His dark clothing and sharp edges clashed with the bright yellows and blues of the blanket.
There was no doubt Tristan was the best-looking boy in our school, and if he had been born to a better family, he would have been the homecoming king and popular.
Now, he was just the bad boy the good girls liked to whisper about.
“I know. I’m sorry. Again.” He sat up and rested his chin on my shoulder. “Tell me what to say to make this all better.”
That was the problem; I didn’t know how to fix this. This seemed like such a trivial thing compared to everything we had been through, and yet it still felt like a big moment. One I should want closure on.
I flipped through the magazine, stopping on a page with the words: “Are They Your Soulmate?” written in bold block letters. “I’ll make you a deal.” I pulled away a bit. “If you pass this soulmate quiz, I’ll forgive you.”
“And if I fail?” Tristan looked over at me.
If he failed, then the stars were wrong. “Please don’t.”
He settled back on the blanket. His dark hair covered the bruise by his left eye.
Three weeks into Tristan’s and my relationship I learned how bad James could get.
Tristan had called; something had happened, and he wondered if he could bring Noah over.
He showed up at my house with a busted mouth and bloody nose.
I didn’t know what else to do, so I brought them up to my room.
I tucked a then six-year-old Noah into my bed, and then I cleaned Tristan up in my bathroom.
He was fourteen. Before that night, he had brushed off the bruises and black eyes from fights at school or from work.
I was naive to what was happening in that house. Some days, I wished I still was.
“What’s the first question?” he asked.
I lay down next to him. “If I lost my memory, what memory would you tell me about?”
Tristan twisted to face me. “Are we alone?”
It was hard to be this close to him and not touch him. Not kiss that stupid mouth of his. “I don’t know. Why does that matter?”
“Because.” His eyes moved down my face, landing on my mouth.
“Fine, we are.” I rolled over on my back, holding the magazine over my head.
“Then I’d show you, not tell you.” He pulled me closer and slid his hand up my shirt, nuzzling my neck. “Our first night together.”
I was only seventeen, closer to eighteen, and I knew people would say that I had no idea what I was doing. That young love was dumb love. But those people also said mothers and fathers loved their sons and daughters. They didn’t hit them or die of cancer. So, what the hell did they know?
“In the back seat of your car?” Our first time wasn’t some magical moment where everything was perfect.
The act was a mess of arms, legs, and elbows.
I had no idea what I was doing. But it wasn’t the act I remembered the most. It was how close I felt to him at that moment.
Nothing else mattered but him and me. Sex was how we reconnected, and I missed that connection.
“Do we have to go back to your car, or can you show me right here?”
Tristan moved closer, sliding his hand up to my breast, his mouth inches from mine. I moved to kiss him, but he pulled away. “Forgive me first, and I’ll show you right here.”
It would’ve been so easy to just forgive him. Put all this behind us. “Would you think less of me?”
“What? No. Evan. Why would you think that?” He sat up.
I shrugged, looking at the magazine. Because that’s what Anna had said. That if I forgave Tristan so quickly, he’d think he could do it again. I think she called me a “doormat.” She knew more about this type of stuff than I did. Boys were shitting on her all the time.
“Blu.” He took the magazine. “Talk to me.”
“If I forgive you this easily, what’s stopping you from doing it again?” I didn’t want to cry. Tears never fixed anything. They hadn’t fixed Tristan the night his dad tried to kill him, and they hadn’t brought my dad back.
He ran his hand over his face, cussing when he hit the cut on his lip. “You did nothing wrong that night. I did.” I watched him struggle with the words. “It won’t happen again because I won’t let it. I hate myself for what I did to you. I promise it will never happen again.”
I sat up and ran my thumb over his bottom lip. It had started to bleed again. In time I hoped the memories of that night would fade. But right now, they were still so raw. It was Anna’s birthday, and I had wanted one night of being a stupid teenager. Tristan said he had to work, so I went out.
I walked into the party and saw him, his cheeks flushed, his eyes glassy from whatever he was high on.
The girl laughed at me. Tristan didn’t move his smile sharp enough to cut me.
He didn’t care he was hurting me. I thought I could play the same game.
So, I found Austin, homecoming king and star of the football team.
The opposite of Tristan. And I let him kiss me.
Tristan pressed his forehead to mine. “I’m sorry, Ev. If I could go back and change that night, I would. I would take it all back. Please.”
“I forgive you.” I breathed out. I couldn’t take the hurt anymore. His. Mine. Any of it. I couldn’t take the worrying about him every night. I couldn't take being away from him.
He let out the breath he was holding and kissed me. It was soft, and like so many of his kisses, it carried with it the sharp taste of blood. I leaned into him, feeling the tension in his muscles loosen. My world finally felt like it should.
My mother said I was codependent. If I was, I learned it from her.
She had been codependent on my father and now Harold.
But that didn’t make sense to me. Weren’t couples supposed to be dependent on each other?
I don’t think that was a bad thing. Whatever Tristan and I were, adult Evan could deal with it. Right now, I didn’t care.
Tristan pulled away, cupping my cheek. “Are we okay? I mean, there are still a couple of questions on the quiz.” He glanced down at the magazine.
“Yeah.” I let him pull me down onto the blanket. My hand slipped up his shirt and rested on the flat plane on his stomach. Dusk was just starting to creep into the field, and the setting sun cast the field in a warm glow. I inhaled the sweet smell of the grass and Tristan.
Tristan picked up the magazine. “Let’s see if I would’ve answered the next question correctly. What is your happiest memory?” He thought for a moment. “I still have to go with our first time together.”
I looked up at him. “Are all your answers going to be the first time we had sex?”
“Probably. That was a huge moment in my life.”
“Mine too,” I whispered. I wasn’t his first which was probably for the best since one of us should have known what the hell we were doing. What little I knew about sex I had learned watching movies or from sex ed, and both of them were very wrong.
“How about you?” His voice rumbled in his chest.
That was easy. “The first time you kissed me.” It happened after a football game.
Tristan and his friends walked behind me and Anna, daring us to go through the woods.
There was a rumor that was the place high schoolers went to do drugs and get blow jobs.
We were in eighth grade, and those things seemed scary.
Tristan said he’d go if I went. So, I did.
“That night after the football game? In the woods?” He seemed surprised. “Why?”
“I didn’t think you liked me. You were Tristan.
” The summer of our eighth grade year, Tristan and a couple of other boys had left their round bodies of boyhood in the summer heat and stepped into the sharp edges of puberty.
Tristan walked into eighth grade taller, and the hints of the lean muscle that he would hone over the years had started to show.
His jaw was sharper; his eyes seemed almost greener.
And I wasn’t the only one who noticed. That year The List started.
A list of the hottest guys and girls in our class.
Tristan and Anna were at the top of those lists; I was not.
“Why would you think that?”
I shrugged. I didn’t look like Anna or Chelsea.
They had shiny blonde hair, bright blue eyes, and clear skin.
My hair was dark auburn, my eyes somewhere between hazel and green.
I had a splattering of freckles across my nose that in the summer spawned more.
And in eighth grade, I had the body of a twelve-year-old boy. “I didn’t look like the other girls.”
Tristan rolled his eyes. “That’s why I wanted to kiss you. I wish you’d stop listening to Anna. I had a raging hard-on after I kissed you that night.”
I clicked my tongue and shoved him. “I’m talking about a moment that shaped my life, and you turned it about your boner.”
“You think that didn’t change my life? Fuck, Ev, you pressed up against me that night was all I could think about. Your mouth. Your hands on my chest. Your mouth. I thought a lot about your mouth.”
I had thought a lot about his, too. If I closed my eyes, I could see that night.
Tristan was taller than me, so I had to look up at him.
He stepped closer, and in that low voice that still gave me goose bumps, he asked if he could kiss me.
He was the first boy I had kissed like that.
Tongue and teeth. That was the moment I fell in love with him.
I rolled over and watched the stars wink into existence.
Tristan believed that our love was written in the stars.
He said that meant we were destined to be together.
I wondered if it had also been written that my father would die and Tristan would kiss another girl.
That we would be lying here trying to put us back together.
I wondered how much the stars really knew, and how much was yet to be decided?