He nodded. “Yeah…but they’re not you.”
I tried to catch his eyes, but he looked past me. I’d hurt him, and I wanted to make it better for him, but I didn’t know what else to say, and I didn’t want to give him false hope. Seth clapped my shoulder. “I’m going to get another beer.”
The party continued on. I drifted away from Seth in order to properly thank my Hilliard colleagues for showing up and for their contribution to the video. Then I got caught up with Caleb who’d come out to support Mitchell. Sasha wanted to come, but she had finals. They’d gotten back together. “She’s crazy, but she’s mine,” Caleb said with a rueful smile. He asked me if I could believe that Mitchell was going to be a father, which would make him an uncle. He shook his head in disbelief. I told him I thought they’d both do a pretty good job at it, and I meant it.
It was late by the time I realized I hadn’t seen Seth in a while. I started looking around the house for him, then outside on the patio where the kegs were set up. I was heading up the stairs when Tish intercepted me and asked to show me her art portfolio for a class she was taking. After giving her a bit of feedback about what pieces I thought were her strongest, I told her that I had to find Seth.
Tish placed a hand on my shoulder and said gently, “Stay with me, Hiroku.” Her soft hand on my arm and the tone of her voice, which was like a lullaby—it wasn’t for herself but for me. Seth was up to no good, and he’d sent Tish to distract me.
“Where is he, Tish?” I asked in a voice I didn’t know I had but reminded me a lot of my father. She only sighed and glanced back toward the stairs.
I tore up the stairs, taking them two at a time, and banged open every door like a one-man SWAT team. And here I am embarrassed to admit what I found because it is such a fucking cliché that it is almost unbelievable. But, here goes…
I found Seth in the master bath, shirtless, snorting lines off the bare, hairless chest of a boy about my age. The kid was laid out like a sacrifice on a waist-high countertop wearing nothing but his underwear, and even though he wasn’t the same guy, he looked remarkably like the kid with the cornflower-blue eyes I’d found Seth getting head from roughly a year ago—Seth’s type when he felt like cheating, I supposed.
They had fucked or were about to fuck or would fuck in the near future. But even more maddening was that Seth had broken his other promise to me, the one where he swore to stay off the hard drugs, and then I realized he might have gone back to using the very next day after our camping trip because you can’t trust an addict. I knew that fact from experience.
As we stared at each other from across the room. Lifetimes passed, his and mine. All of the trust we’d built up over the past few weeks since making our pact evaporated right in front of my eyes like lines being snorted up your nose. Here and then not. My eyes stung, and my bottom lip felt fat and clumsy as I bit down hard enough to draw blood because I’d be goddamned if I was going to cry.
“And so it goes,” I said, utterly defeated.
Seth wiped his freshly powdered nose with the back of his hand and smacked his latest kill on the thigh in a motion to hop to. Seth’s hand so casually slapping that boy’s flesh gutted me. The boy scrambled up, put his pants on, and seemed about to leave, but Seth ordered him to stay.
“We could share him,” Seth said to me, and it pissed me off because it seemed like further proof that he didn’t know me at all.
“Only if he can fuck me,” I said, calling his bluff.
Seth would never allow it. Getting head from another guy, maybe, but he’d never willingly let another man penetrate me. Seth glared at me, and that deranged look was in his eyes. I could taste his tang of aggression in the air. Maybe he would hit me. Seth’s fists or his words, I couldn’t bring myself to care which.
“You’d like that wouldn’t you?” Seth asked. “Getting railed by another man. Fucking Fabio with his perfect teeth. That biker at Eileen’s. God only knows who else…”
I shook my head. There was never anyone else, but I didn’t feel compelled to reassure him now.
“I could never be good enough for you, Hiroku, could I? No matter how rich or famous, I’d always be beneath you.”
I tore my eyes away from him. “I don’t give a shit about any of that, Seth, and you know it.”
“Don’t you though? With your nuclear family and your perfect attendance record and your daddy’s money. You never understood how hard it was for me growing up.”
I dragged my hands over my face, wishing he would just stop. I couldn’t believe he’d resort to this. “I tried to understand, Seth.” I jammed my thumbs into my eye sockets. God, how I’d tried.
“Who are you to judge me? You were nothing when I met you. Just some dorky kid with a cheap camera and a furry hand.”
I was a kid. A stupid, foolish kid, and two years later, I’d learned nothing because there I was in the same exact place, experiencing more or less the same devastation. Shame on me.
“Imadeyou, Hiroku,” Seth raved. “I fucking molded you from nothing. From fucking mud. And now you’re an artist, thanks to me. You should be grateful to me for turning your boring, ordinary suburban life into something special, but instead, you constantly look for ways to punish and deny me and remind me of what a piece of shit I am.”
“You really believe that?” I wished I could say it was only the drugs talking, but they also had a way of unearthing truths you’d rather keep buried. For him to think I existed as a mirror to only reflect his flaws...
“Your love always comes with conditions,” Seth hissed. “You’ve never loved me with your whole heart, Hiroku. Never.”
He said the word “never” with so much vehemence and hatred that I couldn’t stop the tears. Couldn’t stop the pain either, welling up inside me. Filling up my organs, shutting me down. God, it hurt. And the idea that if only I’d loved him more, accepted him without conditions, then this awful end might have been avoided. “I did love you, Seth. You know that I did.”
“That’s right. In the Before.” He narrowed his eyes at me, then snapped his fingers. Seth’s hot piece of ass jumped to like a trained monkey and came to stand by his side.
“Meet Cory.” Seth ran his hand lovingly over the boy’s shoulder and down his arm. The boy shivered. He must be high. It looked so familiar and so grotesque. “Say hello to Hiroku, Cory.”
“Hello,” Cory said with a nervous hitch. With his Texas drawl and shaky confidence, Cory was as innocent as a lamb.
