Tessa
‘So you’re gay, then?’
I gave him a long look, slowly reaching for the offered bottle and then pulling away from him with a sharp movement that hinted at my anger. ‘You know I’m not’, I responded finally.
He seemed impatient, leaning back on his palms with an unintended sigh and glaring out towards the highway. I wonder if I’ve hurt him and I feel bad until he tells me that he doesn’t get it, and then I’m only pissed off.
‘Then don’t you sleep with her’, I snap.
He has a wounded expression on his face but he’s still not looking at me, and so I put the bottle down and crawl around the cramped space until I can lean up against him. The tension in his shoulders freaks the hell out of me because for a minute I can’t tell if he’s going to push me away and if he does I feel like everything in me might shatter. I can’t say sorry for this, I want to tell him, over and over until it makes sense. Having a ten-year-old kid say that you apologize too much is really in an entirely new realm of personal criticism and I’ve always been exceptionally skilled in taking criticism personally. It stuck in my head and made me realize just how much I apologize for. It’s constant. It’s a flow of regret that catches me up and sees me repeatedly apologize to cashiers when I have to break a fifty. But I can’t. I can’t say sorry, because if I apologize for this, I will be guilty.
Then the tension breaks like a dam and with a long breath its as if the whole moment fades into nothing, into the air, to be gulped up by tiny insects and taken away. He leans forward and our foreheads are almost touching before I can breathe again, but by then he’s gotten himself together. Mostly. ‘I can’t think of you not being here anymore’, he says quietly.
My silence is a little too long and he must have guessed what I was thinking, because he tells me suddenly that his girlfriend had left without a phone call that day, without a note, with nothing. She was trapped inside her own head and nothing else even registered, to the point that everything she saw was distorted beyond recognition. By the time they found her and dragged her out of the water, so was she.
A car goes past, honking aggressively. It’s still blaring when it fades from view and I wonder if the driver was trying to punish a misdemeanor or if they were simply making noise, saying ‘Someone notice me! Someone notice!’ Horns seem to me a strange way to communicate, and I consider briefly the mayhem of using horns in everyday interaction, following around people I disliked with a consistent aggressive blaring.
I push myself up on my palms, scraping my fingers across the harsh rock just to look him in the eye. It’s as easy to lie looking someone in the eyes as not, and perhaps easier so that you can judge whether they believe you or not, but I want to reinforce the words when I tell him firmly that I wasn’t leaving. He nods once and then looks away again.
A few minutes pass before he leans over to pick up the bottle, drawing his knees up to rest lazy arms on them. I recognize confusion instead of grief when he asks ‘What will you do about Tessa?’
I want to sigh and laugh at the same time, and my body compromises by producing what could be considered a snort. ‘I’m not gay, Watson.’ It sounds careless and dismissive, which is odd considering how much this question has played on my mind. ‘I like who I like, that’s all.’
