Everything We Are

by Janci Patterson

  But I also can’t hang up. I can’t walk away. Jenna is too important to me. The stakes are too high.

  And that’s when I’m sure what that third thing is. The thing I couldn’t bring myself to admit when I was telling Gabby about it after the hotel, even though it was already true then, and part of me knew it.

  I’m in love with Jenna. I fell in love with her over sushi on our date-that-wasn’t-a-date, or maybe I was somehow already there before I even walked into that restaurant. Either way, the situation scares the hell out of me.

  I’m in love with a woman I may not be able to be with—to even touch—for four years. I’m in love with a woman who doesn’t know the full truth about my past, and who might want nothing to do with me if she did.

  I’m glad Jenna speaks next, because the full force of admitting this to myself robs me of any words of my own.

  “I’ve thought that I’d like to give Ty the opportunity to be a part of a faith community,” Jenna says, “but I don’t know. It’s a lot of work, trying to find one that fits.”

  I hold my breath, though I’m glad to be back on a slightly safer topic. “Here’s another embarrassing truth. I’ve never actually been to church.”

  “Really? Never?”

  “Nope.” I’ve now attended an alarming number of meetings held in churches, but never a church service itself. “My parents aren’t religious. They never took us, and I sure as hell wasn’t going by myself. But I wouldn’t mind trying it, now.”

  Jenna sighs. “I guess we can put that on the list of things we can do in four years.”

  I groan. “That is the worst.”

  There’s a long pause, and then Jenna says quietly, “You talk about wanting to be forgiven—there’s more, you know.”

  For a panicked moment, I think she’s calling me on leaving out the rest of the story, but she continues speaking. “About my past. I was scared to say it last time, worried it might be too much . . .”

  “You can tell me anything.” I mean it.

  “It wasn’t just random guys at parties. I had boyfriends, too. I dated the last one for about six months. I finally ended it with him after Rachel died.”

  I’m guessing it’s not the fact she had a previous relationship back in her wilder days that she expects me to be upset about, so I wait for her to finish.

  “He—he wasn’t a good guy,” she says.

  The picture in my head shifts, and suddenly I think I see what she’s getting at. “He hurt you.”

  “I let him.”

  I dig my fingers into my hair and pull tight. “No,” I say. “God, if some guy hurt you, that isn’t your fault.”

  “Not like that, exactly,” she says. “He was into . . . choking, you know? At first he just wanted me to do it to him, but then he wanted me to try it. I know some people are into that, but to me it was—I didn’t like it. It hurt and I was so afraid, but I said yes anyway. Over and over again. And the awful things he used to say to me, that he would call me while he was—” She cuts off, and my gut twists. “I used to go home with these bruises on my neck,” she continues, “and my dad would threaten to call the police, but Mom would talk him out of it, tell him that if he did, I wouldn’t come home again, and they were right. And I kept going back, even though I knew my parents were worried sick about me. Even though I had a son at home. I kept going back to this guy.”

  I hold my breath. She’s so much braver than I am, and I wish I had the guts to tell her everything about my own past, but I’m not going to interrupt this, not going to make it about me now. I get the sense she’s testing me, seeing how I’ll react, seeing if she can trust me. “Jenna,” I say. “It doesn’t change how I feel about you. Not even a little.”

  She’s quiet for a moment. “How can it not?”

  “Because I know what it’s like to wish you could change the past.”

  “What would you change?” she asks. “Would you want to stay at Juilliard?”

  “No,” I say. “I’d drop out like a normal person, without getting mixed up with drugs. I’d go back home, and figure things out from there. Maybe I’d start auditioning, work my ass off and try to make it without doing school first. I don’t know. But I wouldn’t do drugs, and I wouldn’t hurt my family. I’d face my problems instead of self-destructing.”

  “Wouldn’t that have been nice,” she says softly, and I know she’s not talking about me.

  A question occurs to me that I’m pretty sure I know the answer to, but need to ask anyway. “Alec,” I say. “He . . . never hurt you like that, did he? Or made you do anything you were uncomfortable with?”

  “No,” she says quickly. “Alec’s a good guy. He can be a jerk sometimes, but nothing like that. He always treated me really well, showed me I deserved way more than those other guys. It was my first actually functional relationship.” She lets out a little breath like a laugh. “You know, until it stopped functioning.”

  I wonder if I should be jealous of Alec for being the one to show her a healthy relationship, but honestly, I’m not. I’m just glad he did.

  “What’s it like now?” I ask. “Pretending with Alec?”

  “It doesn’t bring the feelings back.”

  I’m grateful as hell for that, but that wasn’t what I meant. “I mean, are you miserable? Is it still fun, because it’s kissing?”

  She thinks about that. “I imagine it’s like being an actress. Your co-star is hot, but you don’t feel anything for them.”

  “That makes sense.” I wish I could get the image of them kissing out of my head, but sadly, Google is full of animated gifs.

  “It bothers you.”

  “Yes,” I say. “But really because I’m not even allowed to hold your hand. I just want to be with you, and I can’t.”

  “Mmm,” Jenna says. “And what would you do if you were here?”

  My whole body sizzles, and it takes me a second to respond. “What would you want me to do?”

  I can hear her shifting, sense the way her body is stretching out. “Everything,” she says.

  My body catches fire. Last night we stayed on the phone until neither of us could put two words together. For the last hour or so, we’d barely been capable of more than murmurs, lost in fatigue and each other. We’d whispered each other’s names, and though neither of us had admitted it, from the cadence of her breathing I was pretty sure she was doing the same thing I was. “You want me to tell you about it?”

  Her voice goes husky. “Yes, please. In detail.”

  I settle in beneath the blanket. “Are we allowed to do this?”

  Jenna hesitates. “It’s not technically against the rules. And with the grief Alec’s given me, I’m going with the strict interpretation.” A sly edge creeps into her voice. “Besides, if we’re not, what was last night?”

  “Mmm,” I say. “You did that, too, huh?”

  She draws a deep breath. “You want to hear the details?”

  “God, do I.” I check to make sure Gabby’s door is closed.

  Jenna whispers to me the details of her hands running up and down her body, and I wish more than anything in the world I was there, that it was mine instead. I remember that moment in the hotel, when we kissed and kissed, and I thought, this is the moment I want to disappear into and never emerge. My body is reacting now in the same way it did then, and any doubts I had about the Suboxone keeping me from getting it up are long gone. Hell, all we’re doing is talking, and I don’t remember feeling anything close to this kind of elation ever before in my life. I’ve felt stupid, wanting more out of sex, wanting to feel this cataclysmic emotional shift when I crawl into bed with a woman. We’re not even touching, now—not each other, anyway—and we haven’t done anything more in real life than kiss, but I feel it with her, this connection I’ve always wanted, always needed, and felt incompetent to ever find.

  And
now, even if I can’t be there with her, I know. Even after such a short time, I love her, and it’s real.

  Seventeen

  Felix

  The next morning, I’m making coffee on this ancient coffeemaker Gabby has inexplicably named Bertrude. Bertrude is loud and always appears on the very brink of appliance death, and yet every morning she manages to keep sputtering out a substance just close enough to coffee to justify her continued existence. In Gabby’s eyes, at least.

  It’s undoubtedly Bertrude’s obnoxious squealing that drags Gabby out of bed. Her hair is half falling out of its ponytail, and she’s wearing Cookie Monster pajamas. “Hey,” she says. “How’d you sleep?”

  There’s a hint of suggestion in her tone that makes me look over at her. “Fine. Why?”

  She stares at me with a look of horror on her face, and I know exactly why.

  “No,” I say.

  She covers her face. “I got up to go to the bathroom—”

  I step back against the counter. “No! What did you hear?”

  She winces. “There was moaning—”

  I cover my face and emit a guttural yell that spills over her next statement.

  “—and narration.”

  “Oh god.” This feels far more violating than my sister hearing me having actual sex, because the auditory component is the only part Jenna could experience as well. It’s like I was getting it on with a girl and accidentally stuck it in my sister.

  Gabby cringes. “And I couldn’t get it out of my head, so I woke up Will and told him about it, too.”

  “Ahhhhhhh!” I drop my hands and stare at her. “What? Why?”

  “I had to tell someone! But don’t worry. He doesn’t think you’re seeing anyone, so he assumed you were calling a hotline.”

  I choke. “Gah! Is that supposed to make it better? That your boyfriend thinks I’m some kind of perv?”

  Gabby raises an eyebrow. “Well, it was pretty specific narration.”

  I shove a cup of coffee at her and it sloshes onto the counter. “This is what it feels like to die of mortification.”

  “You’re mortified,” Gabby says. “I’m the one who has to keep sitting on that couch after this.”

  It’s my turn to cringe. “I’ll wash the blanket.”

  “Thank you.”

  “I need to get an apartment. But if I keep couch surfing, I’ll be able to pay Dad back . . .” I groan. “Would it make it up to you if I bought your couch?”

  Gabby takes a long sip of her coffee, and perks up. “I won’t turn that down.”

  “And maybe a new coffeemaker?”

  “That I will turn down. Bertrude is great.” Gabby looks offended on her coffeemaker’s behalf, and I decide not to push it.

  I run my hands through my hair, which needs to be washed. “Between the horror show that is my sister hearing anything from last night and the cello case debacle, I’m starting to feel like I’ve somehow taken over your ability to stumble into embarrassing situations.”

  “That’s what Anna-Marie said when she fell in love with Josh,” Gabby says. “Though she got attacked by a moose, and a bat, and some Boy Scouts. So you’re doing better than her.”

  “Boy Scouts?”

  “Yeah, that ended in a video of her nude on the internet. At least there’s not a recording of you ejaculating in my living room.”

  “Oh, god.” I cover my eyes again. “I will definitely buy your couch.”

  “It was a lot like that music you used to play in high school to bother Mom. Where the orchestra is playing and the chorus is making all those ohs and ahs and basically having a collective orgasm?”

  “Daphnis and Chloe. I did do that to bother Mom, but it’s a legitimately good piece of music.” I peek at her through my fingers. “You’re never going to let this go, are you?”

  “I’ll let you off the hook,” she says, “the day I forget the words my baby brother uses to describe his own climax.”

  “Ahhhh,” I say.

  “Yeah, that was part of it.”

  I chug my coffee in an effort to disappear. “On the internet or not, my humiliation is complete.”

  Gabby takes another sip of her coffee. “Does that make this a good time to ask if your band will play Anna-Marie’s wedding?”

  “Oh, yeah,” I say, grateful as hell for the change in subject. “They said that’s fine. I put it on the calendar and everything.”

  Gabby squeals. “I have officially won the wedding.”

  “Hopefully Anna-Marie wins the wedding.”

  Gabby rolls her eyes. “So?” she says. “I’m guessing things with Jenna are progressing?”

  Um. You could say that. “We talked for hours.”

  “And somewhere in the middle of that she verbally jumped you?”

  I have to laugh at that. “Something like that. There were some politics and religion in between. If this keeps up, I’m never going to sleep again.”

  Gabby gives me a look.

  “And I’ll be staying at Dad’s.”

  “Yeah, you will,” she says. “So she’s okay with you being in recovery and all?”

  My stomach drops. I tip back my coffee mug, even though there’s only a little left, and the dregs of this coffee are even worse than the rest of it. “I told her I used to do drugs. And that I did heroin. But that’s it.”

  Gabby raises her eyebrows. “She doesn’t know you were in rehab? Or how recently?”

  I don’t know why I’m telling Gabby this. Maybe it’s the embarrassment, but my relief from last night is gone and replaced with overwhelming guilt. “No,” I say. “I’ll tell her. I just—” I sit on Gabby’s counter. “I want to tell her everything, but I’m scared.”

  “Felix,” Gabby says. “If she can’t handle it, don’t you think it would be better to know sooner rather than later?”

  I don’t, but it takes me a minute to figure out why. “Did I ever tell you why I went back to rehab? The last time?”

  Gabby shakes her head. I don’t know why I phrased it that way—I already know she doesn’t know about it. I haven’t told anyone but my therapist outside of a meeting.

  “I’d been couch surfing for a while,” I say. “Staying with friends, mostly, after Mom and Dad each finally told me I couldn’t crash with them anymore.”

  “I remember. Mom cried.”

  My chest aches. “At the time, I was pissed, but now I see they must have agonized over it. Dad caught me shooting up in his bathroom, and that was the last straw, but with Mom it was kind of out of the blue.”

  “She wanted to let you stay,” Gabby says. “Just so she’d know you weren’t lying dead somewhere. But she thought maybe if you didn’t have anyone covering for you anymore, you’d be more likely to get help.”

  “I didn’t get help,” I say. “I burned out every last one of my friends, and then I started picking up girls and going home with them, just to have somewhere to stay.” Gabby looks at me like I’m a wounded puppy, which is wrong. I’m the monster in this story, not the victim. “I didn’t always have sex with them. Sometimes we just did drugs.”

  “Yes,” Gabby says. “I remember the sad tale of your flaccid penis.”

  I close my eyes.

  “Sorry,” Gabby says. “That was funny in my head.”

  It would be funny. If it wasn’t true.

  “I did have sex with the last one. And then we shot up after. Neither was great—I thought I had enough for her to take some and still get a good high, but the dose I’d been taking was starting to ebb, and I needed more.” I shake my head. “Or maybe I gave her more than I thought I did. I can’t be sure.”

  Gabby holds still, like she senses what I’m going to tell her.

  “When I woke up in the morning, she was dead.”

  Gabby looks like she’s going to cr
y. “She overdosed.”

  I rub my hands together. “Yeah. So I called 911. I mean, she was cold. Stiff. But I didn’t know what else to do, so I called, and they asked me for her name, and her address. I didn’t know either, so I found some mail in the kitchen and I read it off to them.” I can’t look at her and tell her this last part. “It was her roommate’s mail. I gave them her name, because I didn’t know any better.”

  Gabby puts a hand on my arm. “Oh, Felix.”

  I still can’t look at her. “So then I got to explain that to the police. And of course I hid the drugs, told them I didn’t know she was high. They knew I was lying, but they didn’t have cause to test me, so they let me go.”

  I swallow. “I went straight to Dad and begged him to send me back to rehab. I was shaking, crying. I didn’t tell him what happened. I just told him I had to get clean and I didn’t know how to do it without help. At first he refused. Something about the hundred grand he’d already sunk into my first two stints.” My voice breaks. “But eventually he agreed.”

  Gabby’s hand slides down my arm, and she squeezes my fingers. “Because he loves you.”

  “I know.” I take a deep breath. “Later, I looked her up online. I remembered her address, and her roommate’s name. The girl who died—her name was Katy. She played tennis and rode horses. She was an economics major at UCLA, before she dropped out because of drugs.”

  “She was an addict,” Gabby says.

  “I killed her.”

  “No.” Gabby squeezes my hand so hard my fingers ache. “You didn’t. You said she did drugs before you met her. It was just happenstance that you were there.”

  “I’ve asked myself a hundred times if that’s true, but I don’t know.” I shake my head. “And you’re right. I have to tell Jenna. But if I tell her that story and it’s over, I will damn well go buy some heroin and shoot up into oblivion.”

  Gabby looks terrified, and I take a deep, steadying breath.