Luke
Beside me on the futon, Cassie curled her knees into her chest. The flash of her lower back under her tank top, her calm breath, the waving black strands of hair falling on the back of her neck—it all kept pressing, pushing some tender part of my chest out into the open. Since I’d come back from the cemetery I still hadn’t figured out how to broach the subject of what she meant to me, what we meant to each other, let alone what to say. I’d tried to get some sleep before she woke, but I couldn’t. So I’d taken a shower. I had put on her music, letting it loop quietly, realizing I’d learned the words. I’d made her eggs and avocado toast.
And now I just wanted her to lean into my arms, against my bare skin, and stay there indefinitely. I didn’t want to reach out to her without knowing she wanted me to, without knowing that what happened last night was not just a fluke because we were both so exposed, so vulnerable.
“Can I ask you something?”
She nodded, her chin still against her knees, her eyes ahead.
“When we were talking last night . . . ,” I began.
She suddenly adjusted her legs, shifting to face me, her gaze set on mine. I didn’t break it.
But now that she was listening, not just listening, but listening for something, there was so much to say. There’d be no way I could say it all without messing it up. I started slow. “Talking about Frankie meant a lot. And I didn’t get a chance to thank you.”
“It meant a lot to me, too,” she said. “And—”
“And—” I echoed, almost on top of her. We paused, waiting for the other, and burst out laughing.
“You go,” she said.
“No, you,” I said.
“Well,” she said, then swallowed. “I was thinking about what I said at your dad’s barbecue. I mean in the attic. When I said if you talked this much all the time, our lives might be a little easier.”
I remembered what had taken root that day, the day I showed her my dad’s medal. “Right.”
“And you have, lately.”
“I’ve tried.”
“You’re different,” she said. Then she shook her head, holding up a hand. “Not that you were bad before,” she added.
“I was, though.”
“What do you mean?” she asked, quick.
Another step toward the truth. I realized I had stopped breathing. Honesty was a new sensation. It wasn’t unpleasant, but it still shocked me, bit by bit. Like descending into a cold pool. I was probably making that new face Cassie pointed out. I tried to relax, to breathe again.
“I was just in this for the money, and now I’m not.” The truth, lapping harder. Refreshing. Cleansing. Wishing I could take her hand.
“Yeah, yeah,” she said, sitting straighter, nervous. “Yeah,” she repeated. “Me, too.”
My heart skipped.
I saw her eyes glance at where her phone lay dead on the coffee table. She was thinking of Toby, probably. Trying to tread carefully. She brought her eyes back to mine. “Now that we’re better friends,” she continued, and the word “friends” felt like a stab, though it shouldn’t have. “I can’t help wondering why you needed the money. I mean, the real reason you were in debt.”
“Right.” This part of the truth was harder, cracking ice. The feeling of Johnno’s bones under my foot. His crumpled form on the bed. “I’m sorry. I should have told you a long time ago.”
“That’s okay,” Cassie said, quiet. “You don’t have to tell me now. But sometime.”
“No, I want you to know,” I said, and hoped I didn’t look like I was in as much pain as I felt. Here was the rotten core, the snake in the water that didn’t belong with all the other sweet, cool facts. I wanted to tell her that I loved her, not that I was even worse than she could have imagined. I was a criminal. Even before we played this marriage game, I was an addict and a thief and a terrible son, a terrible brother.
“You can tell me,” she said, and held out her hand, palm up, on the futon between us. I took it and tried not to grip too hard.
If I was going to tell her the truth, that I was paying for pills that I flushed down a toilet, then I’d have to tell her I was too addled to understand what I was doing, and then I’d have to tell her that not two days before I flushed the pills, Johnno had kicked me awake because I had washed down some crushed-up Oxy with beer and “it didn’t look like you were breathing,” and then I’d have to explain that it wasn’t a big deal because I regularly smashed Oxy into a powder and either sucked it up my nostril with a straw or put it in my drink, and that I’d been doing it for years.