“Things ended with my long-term girlfriend, Elena, and it was like this sudden rip, this sudden change, and I didn’t know how to handle it. We were spending all our time together. At the store, and we were sharing a house.”
I raise my hand and point across the intersection to the house with the red SUV.
Connor looks up from Havi’s picture and follows the line of my finger. “That’s where you lived?”
“Yeah.” I nod and swallow hard. “That’s where we lived.” At first, I wasn’t sure what caused it, if it was the fact that I was single or something else. It took me a while to figure it out. “Around the time Elena and I split, there was this night, um, where Havi and I were out at Dorothy’s…Dorothy’s is a—”
“I know what Dorothy’s is,” Connor says quietly.
Dorothy’s is a gay bar near campus. It’s loud and in-your-face, like Havi. “I used to go there with him once in a while, and it was always a good time—like I said, I’mnothomophobic.” Connor attempts a smile and an eyeroll. He fails at both. “I was stonedthat night, and there were guys all around us. Havi pointed to this jacked guy who was dancing like a stripper and said, ‘Are you seriously telling me you don’t find that hot?’ and I laughed, and said, ‘Course I find him hot.’
“I was out of it, and I didn’t even remember I’d said it until Havi started acting weird toward me the next day. Until then, my attraction to guys was something I hardly thought about. It was…on the periphery. It was something that hardly ever happened, and I guess I knew, deep down, that it wasn’t something I wanted Havi to know about. I guess I knew that the glue that kept our friendship together was the fact that he thought I was straight. You can’t tell your best friend you’re curious, possibly bi, when he’s in love with you and you aren’t even a little attracted to him, can you? No. There’s no way.” My voice fades to near nothing. “Not without breaking his heart.”
I shift on the curb, trying to get more comfortable. When I’m unsuccessful, I lightly trace the fold at the top of the photograph of Havi with the tip of my finger.
“So anyway, until then, I’d never mentioned it to him. I didn’t mean to lie. I was trying to look out for him. But after that night, he started doing shit like coming into my room when I was getting changed and trying to get into bed with me when he’d been out. Sometimes he’d grab me, and a couple of times, he tried to kiss me.”
When I think of it, I feel the same way I did then. Uncomfortable. Itchy. Wrong. I loved Havi, but thinking of him like that didn’t feel right. He was like a brother to me. Family, not a fuck buddy.
“It bugged me and made me really anxious because I knew what he felt for me was love…I knew he loved me. Really loved me.” I run out of breath and my eyes start to water. “So I didn’t shut him down hard because he was my best friend, you know? I didn’t want to hurt him.”
Connor flicks his eyes up to meet mine, and a soft sheen warms them. “I get it.”
“I didn’t want to upset him, and I didn’t want it to be awkward between us, so afterward, I kind of laughed it off and pretended it hadn’t happened, but as time went by, I started getting really pissed off. Angry. Likereallyfucking angry. He was putting me in a fucked-up position, you know, and it was like, no matter how much I pushed him away gently, he didn’t get the hint. It started happening more and more often, and by the en— By that night, it was on my mind all the time because there wasn’t enough of a gap between incidents for me to cool down properly. I was like, really tense and expecting him to do something all the time.
“The night…of the fight… He’d been out, and he came back late. He was a little buzzed, so of course, he came to my room. I was asleep, and we had work the next day, so it pissed me off royally that he woke me. And then, before I had a chance to ask him to leave, he grabbed my dick. I got really mad, and I, I guess I snapped because I pushed him away hard. Really hard. Not in a way he could ever misunderstand.”
I close my eyes and see Havi in my room. My Tony Hawk poster in the background behind him. His hand curled around his upper arm, rubbing the spot I connected with when I shoved him away from me.
I see his face. Horrified. Hurt. His eyes wide and rapidly welling as betrayal was drawn all over his features.
I see his face and hear my words. Loud. Angry. Ugly. “Why can’t you get it through your head thatI don’t want you?”
I remember how I felt when I said them. Raw and removed from everything that wasn’t rage. Removed from everything but the heat that pulsed in my temples and the fury that took command of my body.
Months of being backed into a corner erupted out of me.
Tears spilled down Havi’s face fast and hard. So many tears. Liquid tracks that ran down his cheeks and made me angrier. He crumpled, shoulders shaking, and looked at me with more than pain, more than hurt. Accusation.
It made me angrier than I already was.
“Asshole,” he cried. “You have no idea how much you’re hurting me.”
I saw him like that—my best friend, tear-stained and in pain, and I said it. I said the worst thing I’ve ever said to anyone.
I did the worst thing I’ve ever done.
I looked straight into his pain, into his splintering heart, and said the words that ended our friendship.
I turn to Connor and look into his face. His beautiful face. His kind, unforgettable face. I stamp it into my memory, then I look away. “Havi got it then. He finally got that I didn’t want him, and it hurt him as much as I thought it would… More, it hurt him more than I thought it would. He told me so. He said, ‘You have no idea how much you’re hurting me,’ And I…” My insides tighten and my lungs spasm. I breathe in and out at the same time. “I saw him like that, sad and upset, and I said—” My lungs scream. There’s no air. Not in my body, and not around me. “I said, ‘Good. Now maybe you’ll stop.’”
I screw my eyes closed as tightly as I can, but still, pain and regret, and regret,and regretroar out of them. Onto my cheeks. Onto my chin. Onto the photograph I hold in my hands and onto the cold concrete slab I’m sitting on.
Part of me is here with Connor, but the rest of me is there. Across the intersection, in my room with my Tony Hawk poster, watching as Havi turned and walked out.
The way he moved was different from the way he usually moved. Usually, there was a kind of grace to his movements, a fluidity, almost. It was absent, replaced with high, jerky steps and an uncoordinated sway of his arms.
I watched as he walked away, making no effort to stop him.
