Sullivan
Chapter Thirty-Nine
Iwake up in skin too tight for my body. I ate too much yesterday, that was one thing.
After finishing my mother’s meal, I’d trekked over to see my dad and Davy who’d fried a turkey and made mashed potatoes, which my mother historically does not include on her Thanksgiving menu.
Even her boyfriend wondered where they were, and she pointed at the sweet potatoes.
How many starches are required to fill you, sir?
she’d asked teasingly, and my sister had giggled.
From the moment Knight walked out of our apartment, I’ve had a weight on my shoulders that reads something like “I’m making a huge mistake.”
Everyone keeps asking me what’s wrong, and I haven’t been able to bring myself to tell them. I broke up with the best human alive because I’m an incomplete person and a freak, and I don’t see that changing any time soon. I’m helping him cut his losses.
His resilience has only shone a light on my complete lack of it.
But also, yeah—could he have just held me down and fucked me the one goddamn time?
I didn’t think that was asking too much.
He asked if that night would have ended any differently if he had, and I wanted to shout of course it would have.
I might have broken down and gone to cry in the shower, but I also might have finally had the breakthrough similar to the one he had during that first game.
But he is a knight, and I am forever sullied. Do I think I don’t deserve him?
Of course I don’t deserve him. Who the fuck could? But that’s not why I asked him to leave. I did that because I could no longer bear being the person who wanted to deserve him and couldn’t manage to do it. It’s complicated. And it sucks.
And yeah, I still fucking hate myself.
In my too tight skin, I take my mom’s car over to the run down lake house after the sun goes down. It’s the day after Thanksgiving. It’s cold, so I bring a space heater along with a propane lamp, my violin, and sheet music.
Some part of me must have been hoping for Knight to be here, because when I walk through all the rooms and find them dark and empty, I’m crushed to find myself alone wondering whether we even happened.
Was there ever a Christmas tree right there?
Were there ever hot dogs boiling on the stove?
Was there ever music and love in this crumbling down place by the water?
Or had I imagined it all? Was our whole relationship some trauma product I made up in my head to keep myself sane?
Am I sane? I couldn’t possibly be if I thought dumping Knight would solve all my problems and not just break me down more.
When I came here today, I was planning to write some lines for Shannon’s latest monster thriller, but what I wind up doing instead is composing more of a funeral march.
I play it before I transcribe it, and it comes out sounding very sad, especially with the way the acoustics in the living room work.
Even though the windows aren’t boarded up anymore, the sound still bounces around in the eeriest way.
I take a minute to hit record on my phone.
I’ll send it to Shannon at some point. He might not notice, but he usually does pick up on subtleties like acoustics.
He might even think this place sounds as haunted as I do.
As much as Shannon’s work inspires me, mine can sometimes do the same for him.
Two lines of my music as played on the cello, gave him the idea for the short film he released last week, and the movie is creepy as fuck.
It’s getting a lot of attention, and his dorky ass has started calling us the dream team.
“An elegy.”
I almost come out of my skin at the sound of his voice, turning quickly with my bow out in case it’s not who it’s supposed to be, but there he is.
Knight Winters, looking like he’s lost another parent.
His eyes are bleary and puffy. His lips are red, and his clothes don’t make any sense together.
Pajama pants, a sweater, and some warm looking slippers I’ve never seen that cover his feet.
It’s the sweater that looks like the afterthought.
I’m so caught off guard my first question is, “How could you tell?”
“I know an elegy when I hear it. Slow, sad, sounds like it should have a horn section.”
“Were you looking for me?” I ask.
“Sort of. I didn’t know you’d be here, but I kind of hoped.”
Me too. “Why?”
“If we’re breaking up, we should go over the details, right?”
I think I said we should take a break. It hasn’t even been a week, but whatever. I’m scowling at him, and he holds up a finger. “Just a sec.”
He leaves through the front door, and when he comes back, he’s got an air mattress—the air mattress—a sleeping bag and a pillow. Just the one of everything. The air mattress is already blown up, so it looks like he prepared his campout in advance. “I’m gonna bring the cooler in, too.”
“House sitting?”
“It’s my thing,” he says. His voice sounds a little flat but hearing it at all has never been a bad thing. Not even now. I still sort of feel like I’m dreaming until I see the cooler.
The Yeti covered in stickers he and I have collected over the last few years arrives, gets put on the kitchen table, and then he kicks the air mattress closer to where I’m sitting on the dusty old couch. He lays out his sleeping bag and pillow, then goes to the cooler. “Beer?”
“No thanks.”
“I’m gonna have one.”
“Do we really have to do this now?” I ask.
“Why? Is there a better time to have a depressing conversation? In your opinion? I didn’t get a choice about the other night, so I’ll answer that. Yes, we really have to do this now. You suck for what you did.”
I sigh, putting my violin—the one he gave me—back in its case.
“How long had you been thinking about dumping me?” he asks.
I swallow hard. “I feel like it was inevitable.”
“Since when?”
“Around the time of your first game this season, I guess.”
Knight takes this in with raised brows then gives a thoughtful nod before sitting down on the mattress.
He kicks off his slippers to reveal gray wool socks and draws his knees as close to his chest as he can get them.
“So that was also around the time my agent started blowing up my phone with all the draft stuff.”
I press my lips together. Yep. Yes, it was.
I hated myself for being a terrible boyfriend, but what I don’t hate myself for—at least not tonight, is being bad at taking a break.
I’m glad he’s making himself a little pallet on the floor to go over the details.
I’m glad he’s proving to be as good of a guy as I’ve always claimed he was.
That he meant it when he told me he loved me.
I meant what I told him about wanting him to take me back—with some force if necessary, but if I implied in any way that I never wanted to see him again, or that I was done with him, that would have been a lie, and so in that case, it’s good that we’re doing this.
Knight’s been my best friend for almost two years now.
He knows things about me my own mother doesn’t know and never will.
But yeah—this idea of him leaving, moving away to pursue bigger and better things, things he wants even more now with his dad gone than he ever wanted when his father was alive, and me—not quite done figuring my shit out yet, only just now beginning to chart a possible career path?
Going our separate ways has become a given.
The constant contact with his agent all season really impressed upon me that he’s moving forward, and I’m still stuck.
When I decided I’d be staying in Missouri for grad school with Shannon, and Knight was going to be on some coast playing football and making millions, everything about us that once made sense here at the lake, or in the back of his truck, or in our apartment stopped making any kind of sense at all.
Maybe I lack the imagination, but I’ve never been able to picture us together long term.
Once he gets drafted, we’ll lose each other all the way.
For good. Even though life has chipped and chipped away at what we could have been since the day we met, his starting his career with the NFL was always meant to be the final blow of the axe.
“It makes sense that you’d want to go to grad school,” he says, very good at echoing my own train of thought. “I wish you would have mentioned it before. There’s never been a need to keep something like that a secret from me.”
A horrible sense of numbness settles over me as I stare at him on the floor.
His mid-season body is in peak condition, and the scruff on his face is thick.
He doesn’t look like a kid anymore. And he certainly doesn’t look like the dumb jock my stoner friends and I used to pretend they all were freshman year. “What difference does it make?”
He shrugs with no answer to that because there isn’t one.
In his head, I think he hoped I’d follow him wherever he went, and there was a time I might have wanted to.
Needed to. But, while my trauma still has a way of rearing its ugly head at inconvenient times, it is more predictable now.
I’m capable of being on my own, of not having my life centered around Knight’s.
“Did any of this mean anything to you?” he asks.
“I told you it did,” I say.
“Other than ‘making life bearable’,” he says with air quotes.
“I love you,” I tell him, adding some firmness to the words.
“As a friend, or…”
“As everything.”
“But when I mentioned having a future, what? Did you just tune that part out?”
“No. But I never really thought it was possible.”
“Even when I was willing to come out?”
“Yeah, even then.”
“But when we were here over the summer—when you drove all the way up to be with me and stay with my family—could you at least see it then?”
“Maybe? But I also kind of saw you quitting football at that point. I didn’t know what you were gonna do. And then you just came back stronger.”
He tilts his head slightly to regard me. “You’re stronger, too, you know?”