A rolled-up towel whips across the back of my head. “You’re anidiot,” she hisses.
“I didn’t ask for an opinion,” I grumble.
“You asked for a couch,” she counters. “The opinion comes free.”
Carting a massive bag of powdered sugar from her pantry to the counter, she nods toward my phone, flipped onto its face on the counter beside me.
“You did that before you came out – the guilty, hiding-my-screen thing,” she comments. “You’re texting her, aren’t you?”
“Finish your cake,” I tell her, quickly reaching for my phone to slide it into my back pocket.
“I always figuredI’dbe the more messed-up one,” she teases as she fills a measuring cup with milk.
Yeah, that makes two of us.
I’ve been racking my brain all day, trying to pull forward a single moment in time in which I’d felt so torn before. Just one moment; even just a few seconds. A moment like that doesn’t exist.
I know that what I’m doing is wrong. I haven’t deluded myself into thinking into existence some sort of grey area with any of this.
With every text that I send Julia and every time I get hard thinking about her, the blood in my veins replaces itself with a sharp, burning guilt. Guilt over lying to my best friend, over not telling him that he’s being cheated on, over being the one that she’s cheating with.
Every single part of it reeks of betrayal, and I can’t turn off the sting of it.
But I can’t turn off the part of me that wants her, either.
The house is quiet when I wake up, and it takes me a second to gather my bearings. While quiet during the evening hours, my place is almost always filled with some kind of noise early in the mornings, when we’re all scrambling to get fed, get dressed, and get to work on time.
I nearly roll off of the couch as I stretch my arms and legs as far as I’m able to, before I head into the kitchen to get a plate and a slice of cake left over from the old lady across the way from Irina and Grady’s place.
The two of them will be gone for most of the day, each of them off to school and work earlier than I managed to peel myself off of the couch this morning. I don’t mind having the place to myself; it’ll be good for me. The last thing that I need is for my sister to be in my ear, psychoanalyzing everything that I do and all of my relationships – or lack thereof.
Taking my plate back to the couch, I drop onto the cushion and scoop a spoonful of the dessert into my mouth before reaching for the TV remote to turn on some crappy reality television that I don’t actually care about.
Mindless. Mindless is good.
Mindless will keep me distracted and keep me out of trouble.
Or so I think, at least.
I last all of two hours before I pull my phone from its secure place in my pocket to read the messages Tripp sent me.
I quickly type out my response, hesitating for just a minute too long before I finally send it to him.
Is that a lie?
It feels a lot like I’m lying to him.
I don’t know if I’ll go back in a couple of days. I don’t know if I can go back at all.
Once is one thing; a mistake, fueled by alcohol and emotion. There is no explaining away the messages and pictures I’ve been sending back and forth with his wife. There’s no excusing the lunchtime visits to have sex in her car or the conversations on the phone when I know Tripp isn’t there. There is no making this okay, making it right.
It will never make any sense to him, and he’ll hate me for it.
A message from Julia waits unopened only a few threads beneath Tripp’s, the preview reading‘When are you coming…’
Instead of opening the message, I mute the notifications for the thread and slip my phone back into my pocket, taking my plate with me to the kitchen to deposit it into the sink.
After a quick change of clothes, I make my way out of the house and toward the park’s community center, which is blissfully empty at this time of day. Normally, I like noise. I like chaos. Today, though, I just want to put some music on my phone and tune out the rest of the world.
