He looks like he wants to argue, but simply frowns and glances away.
“Out with it, Elijah,” I demand. “I can see you over there killing yourself to keep something in.”
His shoulders settle. “You were always like this—something awful would happen to you, like the stuff your dad did, or your mom leaving, or the shit kids said at school, and you’d just shrug it off. For the whole time I’ve known you, no matter what happens, you don’t react.”
He’s wrong. After he ended things, I was so numb I could barely shuffle across the sand. I have almost no memory of the walk home, or how I got to my bed, though I remember I remained there for three days straight, too sick to eat. It felt like I would drown in my grief. Eventually I just had to shut the feeling off entirely.
“You can’t make good decisions when you’re upset,” I argue. “What good would it have done for me to sit around crying when Thomas broke up with me?”
“The benefit,” he says, reaching into the cooler and thrusting a soda in my hands, “would be that you aren’t repressing shit until it makes you sick. So that you’re not exhausted and pale and way too fucking thin. You would just claim you’re being stoic. But I think maybe you’ve got a little, uh, PTSD.”
I’d laugh outright, but isn’t that what the therapist at school told me too? I saw her only a few times, right after my life fell apart. But when she started talking about PTSD, I stopped listening. It seemed like too huge a problem for me to tackle, like something that would take years when I simply wanted to be set on my feet.
Hearing it again, five years later, makes it register. Maybe I’ve been siphoning off dopamine I didn’t have to spare for so long that I stopped even noticing it was happening.
“So why is it all coming up now, if that’s the case?” I demand. “I had one stressful night a week ago. It just doesn’t make sense that I’m still sleeping it off.”
He shrugs. “You’d be more of an expert than I would,” he says. “Maybe it’s that you’re finally able to relax?”
Perhaps. Or maybe it’s just that it wasn’t until I was here with Elijah that I finally felt safe and whole.
Which is ironic, since he’s the one who broke me.
17
EASTON
Ihave thought over the one night I spent with Elijah so many times I’m no longer certain what actually happened and what I’ve madeseemmore real than it was by hyper-focusing on it.
I think about him pulling my panties to the side on that table in the garage, in the middle of a party. Letting his tongue slide over me in long, gasp-inducing washes, then flickering hard and sharp in the exact right way.
Him groaning, saying, “I’ve wanted to do this for more years than you can imagine,” more to himself than me.
Anyone could have walked in and seen us. We were too far gone to care.
If you’d asked after he dropped me off in the early hours of the morning, I’d have told you there wasn’t a single moment I’d have changed, not one second about which I had misgivings. It’s only in these years I’ve spent picking over it that I’ve unearthed things I should have seen at the time, except I don’tknowthat I should have seen them, or if I’ve just roughed up the surface of that memory so much that I’m finding what wasn’t really there.
But none of those things occurred to me at the time. Not when he held me on my doorstep, telling me he didn’t want to leave, not when I woke the next day.
Sure, I didn’t understand why he hadn’t texted, but this was Elijah, who I’d known for nearly all of my life. Elijah, who’d told me he loved me the night before and that he’d loved me for years. Even when I began to wonder if I’d just imagined everything, even when he texted saying, “We need to talk,”I never lost faith.
He was pale beneath his tan, and there were dark shadows under his eyes when I met him on the beach. Later, I’d wonder if he’d just stayed up all night, agonizing over how he’d extract himself.
I’d wonder if he somehow knew what I’d done after he dropped me off.
But he didn’t. That was a secret between five people, and we’d all take it to our graves. It was just incredibly poor timing—the two worst things that had ever happened to me taking place hours apart.
Elijah told me he’d made a mistake and that he was sorry. The night before he’d said he’d wanted this with us forever. Now he was telling me it wasjust the sort of thing guys say, and that he didn’t feel the right way about me.
I wanted to scream. I wanted to beg him to tell me what I’d done or what I needed to change, but I did none of these things. Reacting in a situation only makes it worse. Let someone know that they’ve hurt you and they’ll know how to keep doing it.
He’d been my protector all of my life, and in a second’s time he’d shown me that at heart, he was just like everyone else.
“Thanks for letting me know,” I said, and then I turned and walked away.
For a long time after that, foryears, really, every breath I took felt sharp. I braced myself and made my movements small and careful enough that they’d cease to wound as much.
And I’d thought I was better but no, the memory still makes it hard to breathe. It probably always will.
