“You don’t get much more personal than the love interest’s own brother.”
“It’s a bit incestuous that way,” I said with a laugh. “The plots sound ridiculous when I try to explain them out loud.” But perfectly adequate for escapist fiction.
“Then don’t,” Arden argued. “I’d rather go in blind anyway.”
Would he? Would I? Why did everything seem to have a double meaning these days?
“I’d like to read your memoir,” I said. “If you’ll let me.” Despite our estrangement, I still found him fascinating. Wanted to know all of his secrets and every abstract thought running through his mind.
“It’s not very interesting,” Arden said. “No car chases or explosions.”
“If it’s about you, I’m sure I’ll find it riveting.”
Arden hummed, the telltale sign that he was demurring. As always, I let him have his way. In the pregnant pause that followed, he said, “I’ve been thinking about you, Michael. And about us.”
I’d thought of little else. The insensitive things I might have said to him, the insinuations that he might not be clever or successful enough for me. Not meeting my standard. I’d never thought I had one, but I could see how it might come across that way. I did have a reputation of being snobby as fuck.
“So have I,” I confessed.
“I’ve been thinking about what might have happened if we’d met at a different time. A different season. If we’d decided to be friends instead of lovers.”
I had some remorse about what had transpired between us, but I’d never regretted our physical intimacy.
“How would it have been different?” I asked.
“Easier, maybe. Less painful.”
The thought that I might be hurting him was far worse than suffering alone. “Are you in pain, Arden?”
I heard him make some noise in his throat. His voice, when he spoke, was thick with emotion. “I feel bad… about the way I left things… with you. I was terrible. You only ever wanted to help me. And I… I was ungrateful.”
“It was arrogant of me to assume you needed my help. I should have listened to you and respected your boundaries.”
“I have a hard time expressing my feelings,” he said, perhaps one of the truest admissions he’d ever made to me. “My father didn’t have much patience for my sensitivity. Neither did Matteo. And I’m a little bit rusty.”
I smiled at his honesty. I wanted to be supportive. “Having strong feelings about things can make you feel vulnerable.”
“You overwhelmed me, Michael, in every way. I’ve only ever had to play pretend before, but with you… I began to want things… And then… I just panicked.”
I began to have hope, just a little, because I knew then that there was an opportunity for us to heal. If we could talk about our relationship openly and be honest with each other, then maybe we could try again.
“This isn’t the end of us, Arden,” I said.
He gave a wet splutter of a laugh. He might have been crying. “Oh no?”
“Definitely not.”
He was quiet then for a long while, perhaps trying to sort through his emotions.
“All right.”
“I was thinking,”I began one night. I’d just written a scene between my two main characters, the first of many arguments between them. It was somewhat revelatory for me to cast Arden and I in a fictional universe and use what I knew about each of our personalities to create conflict between the characters. My diary read differently too, since I knew that much more about him, now that I had the space to be objective.
“You thinking? Never a good sign,” Arden jested at my extended silence.
“I was wondering if you might tell me what I may have said or done to upset you.” I’d done some reflecting, and I wanted the opportunity to learn from my past mistakes.
Arden sighed. “You didn’t do anything wrong, Michael. It was me. All me.”
