Slowly We Trust

  To be honest, yeah, it hurt that she didn’t think she could trust me with her secret. But even more than the hurt was the fact that she was suffering and there was nothing I could do about it. I wanted to help her, to make it better. I just had no idea how.

  When I dropped her off, she sat in the truck for a minute, as if she wanted to say something.

  “You know, one of these times you’re going to get mad at me for jerking you around and decide you’re done with me and a little part of me is looking forward to that day. Because then I won’t be jerking you around anymore.” Her voice was quiet, almost too quiet to hear. She twisted her hands together and wouldn’t look at me.

  “I’m not mad at you, Aud. I just want to be with you, and here for you, whether that’s as a friend or someone you want to date, or whatever.”

  She shook her head.

  “Why are you so patient with me?” I didn’t know. Patience wasn’t one of my virtues and my sister didn’t have it either.

  “Because you need me to be,” I said before I thought about the words. She brushed her hand across a cheek, maybe wiping a tear away, but before I could ask, she opened the door and was walking toward the door of her building.

  I resisted the urge to smash my head on the steering wheel. I wanted to go after her, but I sensed she needed some time alone. I just hoped that time wouldn’t last too long.

  “You knew what you were walking in on,” I said to Lottie. Simon wanted some alone time with Brady and I’d decided to spend the night at my sister’s. Not that you got much privacy in a dorm room with paper-thin walls, but still.

  “Of course I did. But aren’t you glad it was me and not someone else?” Not really.

  “We were just . . .” I couldn’t say what we were just about to do to Lottie. I’d never had an issue of discussing my relationships with her before. This was different.

  “I know what you were just. With her just. In a nasty apartment, on a stranger’s bed that may or may not contain remnants of several STDs. How absolutely romantic, Will.” She smacked me on the back of the head.

  “Hey!” I grabbed her arm and yanked her over the back of the couch, pinning her arms behind her back. “What’s with the hitting?”

  She struggled to get free, and I twisted a little.

  “My boyfriend is going to kick your ass.”

  “Your boyfriend isn’t getting involved,” Zan called from the other side of the room.

  “No sex for you,” Lottie called back at him. Ugh, I did NOT want to think about my sister and Zan. Especially not at the present moment.

  Lottie finally stopped resisting and I let her go.

  “For someone who is so attuned to me, you seem to know next-to-nothing about how women think.” That was definitely not true and she knew it.

  “You mean I shouldn’t have tried to make a move on Audrey in someone else’s disgusting bed. That she would want something more special, would deserve something more special. Is that what you’re getting at?”

  “Obviously.”

  “Well, my answer to that is that I didn’t PLAN anything. She was upset and I was trying to comfort her and then we started kissing and I stopped thinking and then you barged in. Maybe if you’d waited, nothing would have happened anyway.” Nothing had happened, no matter how many times we’d been in compromising positions. We would be kissing and I’d go for something more and she’d stop me, or I would worry that she would want to stop me, so I would beat her to it.

  “There’s a whole lot more to this than sex, Lot.”

  She gave me a look as if I’d just said the dumbest thing in the history of dumb things.

  “Don’t insult my intelligence. I know that what you have is more than just sex. This is the first girl I’ve ever seen you so torn up over. And I may not have known Aud that long, but I can tell that this is different for her, too.”

  “Has she . . . has she said anything?”

  Lottie shook her head and put her hands up.

  “Nope, sorry bro. That breaks Girl Code.” Again with the Girl Code.

  “What about Twin Code? Doesn’t that supersede Girl Code?”

  She thought about it for a second.

  “In some cases, yes, but not in this one. That’s not saying that I know anything. But hypothetically, if I knew something, I couldn’t tell you.”

  Sometimes I wondered how I was actually related to her.

  “So do you know something, or not?”

  “I’m sorry, Will. This is her thing. I’m taking myself out of it. This is between the two of you.” She hopped up from the couch and ran to give Zan a kiss on the cheek.

  “Well-played, L.” He smiled down at her as if she’d split the atom.

  “Thank you.”

  “One of these days, she and I are going to gang up on you and then you’re going to be sorry,” I said to Zan. He didn’t look as terrified as I wanted him to. Seeing as how he was several inches taller than me, it probably wasn’t much of a threat. Lottie, she could do some damage to him, but he was aware of that already.

  “Secrets aren’t easy things to carry. Especially when you care about someone and want, more than anything, to tell them,” Zan said. He didn’t talk much, but usually what he said was worth listening to. It was hard to believe that just a few months ago, I’d imagined all the ways I could kill him and now he was a few steps away from being my brother-in-law.

  “True. See, we have firsthand experience,” Lottie said.

  “So what should I do?”

  They looked at each other and seemed to exchange some wordless communication. It was different than how Lottie and I seemed to almost always know what the other was thinking.

  “That’s up to you,” Lottie said. “And her. It’s up to you. Together. But you have to decide what you want, and how far you’re willing to go to get it. What you’re willing to accept, or forgive.” Anything. I’d accept or forgive her anything without hesitation. That was a stupid question.

  I loved her. Nothing she said, or did, could change that. But a relationship was two people. I could love her more than anything, but it could never work if she didn’t love me back. If she could even love me back.

  Lottie sensed my mental distress and came to give me a hug.

  “I’m here for you, William. Your heart is my heart. When you hurt, I hurt. I wish I could wave a wand and make this better for you.” I hugged her back and swallowed hard. “Love sucks, doesn’t it?”

  Yes. It did.

  Once again, I was jerking Will around. It made me feel awful, and I knew it made him feel awful, but I just couldn’t seem to stop. Whenever we got close to anything physical, I would absolutely freak out and put a stop to it.

  Not because I didn’t want to be with Will. Oh, I definitely did. More than I’d admit. At night, when my mind would wander, I would imagine how it would be with him.

  And then I would remember seeing Eddie again, something so unexpected that I was definitely still in shock about it.

  When I’d closed that chapter in my life, I’d shoved him so far to the back of my mind that it was almost like he’d never existed.

  I thought about telling Will. Imagining his reaction, wondering what he would say. How he would take it.

  But those thoughts would just lead to me imagining the worst case scenario, where he stormed out and said he couldn’t deal with it, and then I’d lose him. But it wouldn’t just be Will. I’d lose Lottie and the rest of them, too. Above all, that was what I couldn’t let happen. So if that meant keeping my secret forever, that was what I’d do.

  In an effort to get my mind to think about something else, I threw myself into my work. Before I’d met Lottie, and during my senior year of high school, homework was just about all I did. I’d done it before and I could do it again.

  I spent most of my time at the library, hiding in a corner so no one could find me. Will and Lottie and everyone else would call or text and I’d ignore them. I claimed to be busy with classes, which was th
e truth. The only downside was the class I had with Lottie, because when I looked at her, the only thing I could see was Will. They shared so many features and sometimes she would make a face and all I could see was him making the exact same face. It made my heart twist in uncomfortable ways.

  Not that Lottie intentionally made things harder for me. But every now and then her words would get the best of her and she’d ramble on about Will and then things would get a little weird.

  “I’m so sorry,” she’d say, her face completely red. I’d assure her it was fine, but it still made things harder.

  I ended up spending a lot of time with Trish. She didn’t remind me of Will so much, and she had the ability to not talk for hours, as long as I didn’t mind her smoking occasionally. It was trade-off.

  “So what was the deal with you and that guy? You bang him?” she said one afternoon after both of us had gotten back from class as we stood in the designated smoking area outside my dorm.

  No one had directly asked me that specific question. Will and Lottie had bought my other explanation and spread it to the others, who had accepted it without question.

  One good thing about being honest 99 percent of the time was that the one time you needed to lie, people believed you.

  But Trish was more skeptical than most.

  “You did, didn’t you?” she said, stubbing out her cigarette in the bucket as we headed back inside.

  I still didn’t say anything until we got up to my room and she flopped down on my extra bed.

  “You don’t have to say yes or no. Your silence is enough of an answer. But don’t worry, I keep my mouth shut.” She grinned and put her hands behind her head.

  “Thanks,” I said.

  “No problem. The only thing I don’t get is why anyone would care if you were with another guy. Now, if you were with a girl, or you got married or something, that would be different.” I turned away to fiddle with my dresser so she wouldn’t see my face. Granted, she hadn’t gotten it exactly right, but if she kept guessing, she might.

  “Okay, okay, I’ll stop fishing. But you know I won’t be the only one who wants to know your deep dark secret.” I tried to make my face calm and passive as I turned around.

  “Do you have one?” The only way to get the heat off me was to turn it on her. I hated to do it, but I was desperate.

  “Maybe . . . but doesn’t everyone?” She smiled one of her rare smiles and then stared up at the ceiling.

  “I guess.” I couldn’t imagine Will having a dark secret. He didn’t seem the secret type. Plus, any secret he would have he shared with Lottie. Nor did she seem like the secret type. She was terrible at keeping secrets. They’d come out without her even knowing.

  “I don’t want to talk about secrets, especially my secrets. How are you?” Trish usually bristled at personal questions and just gave a sarcastic response.

  “I’m fucking peachy,” she said, which I’d expected. She’d taken the death of her friend Ric really hard, but she liked to pretend she hadn’t. I hoped she at least talked with Max about it, since they’d been close at the funeral.

  “Everything good with the boy?” She glared and tucked her hair behind her ears.

  “Sex is good. What more could you want?” Okay, something was definitely up with her. I sat near her feet at the edge of the bed and waited.

  “We’re good, I swear. I just . . . I never thought I could care about someone this much.” She mumbled the words, as if she was admitting to some terrible crime.

  “For a girl who claims to love Nicholas Sparks, you’re certainly an anti-romantic.” I wasn’t supposed to mention her secret book obsession, technically, but I took the risk.

  “It’s not that I don’t believe in that crazy, all-consuming, can’t-breathe-without-you kind of thing. Just not for me. Those kinds of stories aren’t for bitches like me. But we can all fantasize, right? Some people get off on bondage or peeing in public. I get off on sappy love stories.” There was a lot of weird in what she’d just said, but I got it.

  “Well, what if those kind of stories are for you?” They definitely weren’t for me, that was for sure. But someone like Trish, who had been through so much, she deserved a great love. A blue-haired boy who thought she was the sweetest girl in the world, even when she wasn’t.

  “Whatever. I feel like I need another smoke. How about we grab some dinner or something? I was supposed to eat with the ‘family’, but I’m not feeling it and Max has to work tonight.” The poor kid was putting himself though school and working three jobs to try to do it, so they didn’t get much time together.

  “Sounds good.”

  We walked across the street to the cafeteria. I’d barely eaten here since school had started back up, since I’d always been with one of the “family”. We needed a more cohesive name. All the groups in Harry Potter did. The Death Eaters, Dumbledore’s Army, the Order of the Phoenix. They all sounded so epic. We needed an epic name for our weird family. If I was even going to be able to stay a part of it.

  “This is why I eat off campus,” Trish moaned as we looked at the meager offerings. Thousands of dollars in tuition and all we had to eat was strange meatloaf, potatoes (because it was Maine, after all) green beans and small slivers of dry cake. I could have made a sandwich or a salad, but I just loaded up my tray and called it good.

  Trish and I found a quiet corner away from some of the more rowdy diners. You’d think, being adults, that they would behave as such, but no. If possible, some people seemed to regress. I guessed I couldn’t talk. I was obsessed with a fictional wizard.

  “So how are the ears?” Trish asked.

  “They still hurt sometimes. How’s yours?” She touched her new piercing and winced.

  “No pain, no gain. I went back to get some new jewelry and Magnus asked when I was bringing you back to get your first tattoo. He wants to do it for you, if you’d let him.” I shook my head. No way.

  “You know that’s the worst idea ever. I’d pick something stupid and then be stuck with it.”

  “So? At least it would be a reminder of being young and stupid. A learning experience on your body. And I believe I read a study that said eighty percent of people don’t regret their tattoos. So there’s that as well. You have statistics on your side.” She still wasn’t going to convince me.

  “I’m not getting a tattoo under duress.”

  She set her fork down and sipped her soda.

  “Fine, fine. I’m not going to hold a gun to your head.” We didn’t speak much for the rest of the meal. Trish was moody, which could mean any number of a thousand things, but usually it was just the way she was most of the time.

  I walked with her to the parking lot and she gave me a ride back to my dorm.

  “Just one more word of advice. Keeping secrets from the person you need to tell most usually backfires and bites you in the ass. Just something to remember.” Didn’t I know it.

  “Thanks, Trish.” She waved and chugged away, the exhaust pipe of her car banging against the pavement.

  Audrey and I sort of made an unspoken mutual decision that we needed a break from each other, at least for a few days. She said she had a lot of studying to do, and I had to admit that I did as well. My New Year’s resolution to keep a high GPA, and the money incentive, were more than enough to get me to hit the books.

  Audrey and I hadn’t spoken about Eddie or the party, or Lottie barging in on us. She seemed to want to forget about it, and I kind of did as well. I found out through some of my friends that Eddie wasn’t a student at DU, but had friends here and had been visiting for the weekend. So at least I didn’t have the chance of running into him again, which was a relief. Whatever he’d had or not had with Audrey was over and I didn’t want to dwell on what might or might not have happened.

  I didn’t want to be “that guy”. Besides, Lottie would never let me be that guy. She’d tie me down and tickle me into submission first. Or she’d tell Mom and then I’d be screwed.

  Taki
ng out my frustrations on my academics was something I’d never really tried before. In high school, I’d used sports as my outlet when my girlfriend pissed me off, which was often. Thinking about our relationship through the lens of how I felt about Audrey was like looking at someone else’s life. I couldn’t believe what I’d put up with, and what I’d let happen. Not that I’d been a saint, because I definitely hadn’t treated her very well, either.

  “Wake up, boyfriend,” Simon said one morning, a week and a half after the party. It was almost Valentine’s Day, which was something that weighed heavily on my mind. Did I do something? Did I not do something? If I did something, how much should I do? I couldn’t let it be like New Year’s when I’d said I loved her and she’d thanked me. No, I wasn’t going to screw this up.

  I moaned and then Simon tore my covers off. I hated how much of a morning person he was. I also hated how he cleaned my side of the room without my consent and got mad at me when I got mad at him for it. Like I was the crazy one for not matching up my socks. They were either white, or white with a red toe. No one ever SAW the red toe, so what the hell did it matter?

  “There’s no time like today to start making your dreams come true.”

  “Are you quoting Oprah?” Her show might not be on anymore, but that didn’t mean Simon didn’t hang on every word she’d ever said.

  “No, I’m quoting me paraphrasing Oprah. She’s helped a lot of people, you know. And her houses are gorgeous.” I rubbed my hands through my hair. It fluffed out everywhere, and if I wasn’t careful, it was going to turn into a white boy fro. It had gotten so bad that something had to be done, but Lottie was off on a field trip with the marine bio department, so I was shit out of luck for today.

  Maybe I should just borrow a pair of Simon’s scissors and do it myself. The idea of actually going to a salon or something made me cringe. No one had ever cut my hair besides my mom and my sister. I didn’t trust anyone else with a pair of scissors.