"That's so fucking inaccurate." I curled my hands around the edge of the table to keep from slamming my fist down. "Have you considered for one minute that you don't know everything? Is it possible that you're not the authority on everyone's lives? Is it? I mean, you're the one still starved for your family's approval after all."
"Are you serious? You're telling me I'm the one who needs family approval? All you want is your parents' approval and—"
"This isn't about them," I hissed. "It's about me and—"
"Yeah, that's my goddamn point," Tom replied. "You're so busy wrapping yourself up in the Shawl of Disapproving Parents and playing the part of the estranged son that you've failed to read the room."
"So, what? Is this some sort of ultimatum? You want me to come out to my parents. You want to get married." I held up my hand, ticking off each point as I spoke. "What else is there? What am I missing?"
"Does it matter?" he snapped. "You're not interested in either."
"You don't know what the fuck I'm interested in because you've been busy airing your grievances about me for the past half hour."
Tom sat back, pushed his glasses up his nose, and crossed his arms over his chest. "All right, Wes. Tell me where you stand. Do you want to get married?"
19
Tom
I didn't even recognizeWes right now.
Worse than that, I didn't recognize myself.
His gaze darted around the table, his lips parted and his smirk nowhere to be seen. Then he frowned at my iced tea, saying, "I've spent more time thinking about what I'm eating for dinner tonight than I have marriage but since you're insisting I make a stand on this issue, no, I don't see myself getting married."
And I didn't see myself keeping any of my harshest thoughts to myself this afternoon. "It's time I see this for what it is—a crush. A flirtation. Like you said at the beginning, we're just two people having fun together while you're here. I never should've let myself believe it was anything else."
A muscle ticked in his jaw as he said, "You need to stop with that noise."
He was annoyed. He was hurt. He wasn't the only one.
"We want different things," I continued. "I want honesty and commitments and—"
"Oh my god," he muttered. "Just because I'm not prepared to get married at some point in the next lunar cycle, you're—what? You're done with me?"
"Why should I put energy into a relationship that will expire before the eggs in my refrigerator? You're leaving eventually and this has turned into a waste of my damn time, Wes." For a second, it seemed he was on the verge of tears. He blinked, he glanced away, he rubbed a hand over his brow. But then he looked back at me, as hard and angry as he'd been since sitting down. No tears. No real distress from him. He was mad about not getting his way with that insufferable argument about his parents. I couldn't find a shred of sympathy for him. So I kept pushing. "I don't bring fuck buddies to trivia."
"If I'd known trivia was the precursor to picking out a china pattern, I would've reconsidered that move," he said.
"It's not about the trivia," I snapped. "It's what trivia represents. I'm careful about the people I invite into my world. I'm selective. And I should've selected better."
"That fucking hurts," Wes replied. "Do you hear yourself right now? Do you hear what you're saying? Because it's brutal and I don't think I've earned it."
Wes was right. These words were sharpened to a point and I wasn't about to soften them. But the purpose wasn't harming him. It was shaking some truth and awareness into him. It was forcing him to see the consequence of living a partial life, always protected by a plastic shell that would eventually suffocate him—and forcing him to see how he wasn't the only one gasping for air.
"I know that's how it feels. I know how much it hurts to hear this. But you should know, Wes. You should know about living with a version of yourself that scrunches down. The version that sacrifices pieces of yourself. The version that knows you need to do it because there's no other way to get through. To survive. Because that's all there is for us. Survival. They say it gets better and they're right but what do we surrender in the process? Survival means treading water, keeping it together, burying yourself alive so you don't die trying to survive, smuggling the precious pieces of your soul through the obstacle courses of shame and hate and confusion and indignity and fucking abandonment. And when itisbetter, when you're not treading water and you're not holding your breath, you have to teach yourself to breathe, to exhale. You have to be with yourself, Wes. You have to take stock of what's left and figure out who you are after all that survival. What's left after years of being someone else?Whois left? It's not easy. You have to unpack it all and decide which pieces belong to you and which belong to the person you pretended to be in the name of self-preservation, and rediscover the pieces you buried so deep you barely recognize them anymore. You have to meet the salvageable pieces of you and put them together in a way that makes sense, and you have to learn to walk and talk and think all over again. And you have to release the person you pretended to be. You need to let him go and allow yourself to be the person you are, even when it's really fucking scary to smash the façade that served as your home, your life raft. And I can't be with you if you'd rather suffocate than allow yourself to inhale."
In the too swift, too forceful tone of someone unprepared to notice, let alone unpack, their baggage, Wes argued, "That's not me."
"How is it not? All you do is pretend, Wes. If you weren't here, if you weren't forced to spend the past few months recovering, you'd still be pretending."
"Your experiences aren't mine," he said.
"No, of course not. How could they possibly be when I've spent a decade finding myself and you've spent that time running away."
"I've been a little busy with the global war on terror," he murmured. "Sorry I haven't dedicated enough time to cultivating more self-awareness. I'll hop on Instagram this afternoon and solve my problems one pastel-colored square at a time, okay?"
"It's so much simpler for you to pretend," I whispered. "That's all this is, right? You're pretending to be a boyfriend. You never had any intention of doing this for more than the minute you were here. You were just—you were just playing a game with me, weren't you?"
