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by J. R. Rogue

  I couldn’t escape my best friend’s questioning eyes. Sera had a silent intimidation to her. It was unintentional and a trait she often told me she wished she didn’t own. I had never been on the receiving end of it and probably wasn’t at the moment, but my paranoia told me that I was.

  Chace and Sera showed us around their place, an expansive downtown apartment off Broadway in downtown Nashville. Their home had two levels, the top being a loft bedroom, allowing large floor to ceiling windows to cover the front of the apartment, taking up both levels.

  Next to the windows, a sliding door led to a large balcony. I could see potted plants, patio furniture, and white Christmas lights glowing off-season. Eventually, our tour brought us outside. We stepped out to the warm summer air and the sound of tourists partying in the streets. Straightaway, the guys leaned over the balcony and began chatting, leaving Sera and I alone behind them.

  After a moment, Sera reached out and grabbed my elbow, pulling me back inside. Over her shoulder, she announced our departure. “Kat and I are going to go back inside. I want to show her something.”

  I followed my friend silently up the stairs to her bedroom, the farthest we could get from the guys, save for holing up in the bathroom.

  Sera walked over to her large bed and sat. I walked over to a small chair in the corner and did the same. My friend was smiling when my eyes found her face.

  “What?” I laughed, reaching up to cover my face.

  “Sooooooo, what’s new?”

  I groaned dramatically and fell back into the chair. “Nothing. This is old news.”

  “What do you mean?” she questioned.

  “There’s a lot I need to tell you,” I said as I sat back up. I pushed off the chair and walked over to the bed, taking a seat next to Sera. I pulled my feet up and crossed them at the ankle, fixing my eyes at a spot on the carpet and began. “When you came back to Missouri two years ago, that’s…that’s when this started. The night we went to that country bar, something happened that night. It all snowballed from there. Reese and I would meet up and fool around all the time. And I just couldn’t tell you. It was so weird and short lived. He’s your little brother, and I wasn’t sure how you would react.”

  Sera spoke immediately, saving me from the uncomfortable silence I was sure would follow my confession. “I’m not surprised, Kat, not really.”

  “Seriously?” I huffed out a breath and shook my head slowly.

  “Yeah, I saw the signs between you and Andrew,” she paused, “or Reese. No, it’s weird to call him that. Andrew. Andrew. I saw the signs back then.”

  “What’s the deal with the names anyway?” I asked, turning and relaxing against the footboard, facing my friend.

  Sera shrugged her shoulder and moved, too. She relaxed back on the pile of pillows at the top of the bed. “He’s always been Andrew to me. I don’t really remember when it was brought up that that was his middle name. But I remember asking him why he didn’t go by Reese. It’s such a cool name. His little boy logic was ‘Reese is a girl’s name’ but the truth of it is, Andrew has always sort of lived a double life. Paul wanted to name him Andrew. His mother wanted to name him Reese. Andrew was Paul’s father’s name so he wanted his son to carry the name on. The best he could get was a middle name. My stepfather and his ex-wife don’t agree on anything. I am surprised they stayed married as long as they did. She is an artist, a free spirit. She has always encouraged that side of Andrew. His music and now his painting. Paul has never taken any of that seriously. He is type A, stiff. I guess Andrew started to split himself in two at a young age. He would be one person with his mother up in Kansas City and another down south. Even going as far as answering to different names with different parents.”

  “That makes me sad,” I said.

  “Me too,” she answered. “The reason Andrew and I have always been so close, I think, is because I have always encouraged him to be himself, unapologetically. I’ve been trying to get him out of Missouri for a while now. I love my stepfather, I do, but they are never going to see eye to eye. Andrew can’t be himself and be who his father wants him to be. Honestly, I think moving down here would be great for him.”

  “I agree.” It would be great for him. That was the truth. But what did I need? Was this the best option for me as well? Being away from our hometown, here with my best friend, it felt right.

  “So, what’s the deal with you guys then?”

  Kill shot. Thanks friend. “God, Sera, it’s so complicated.” I paused. Did I tell her the truth? The truth only I knew? Before I could even get it out to Reese? “It would take me forever to get it all out. I really care about him. I think I may even be in love with him.”

  “Fuck.” She choked a little on the word.

  “Yeah.” The silence hung between us for a while. Finally, I spoke again. “Your brother seems to have trouble with whole truths.”

  “What do you mean?”

  “Remember two years ago, when I was talking to an unknown number?”

  “Yeah, whatever happened with that? You just stopped talking about it. No, that’s my bad. I mean two years ago, I was a mess over everything that happened with Chace and I was holed up in my apartment. I wasn’t exactly easy to talk to. I wasn’t responsive to anyone, to anything.”

  “I know, that was a really hard time for you. It was for me, too. Everything fell apart. You left, your brother moved back to Kansas City, and the mystery guy stopped texting.”

  “Shit.”

  “Yeah, it was your brother.”

  “It was my brother what?”

  “Your brother was the mystery number.”

  “Wait, what?!” Sera exclaimed, jumping up from the bed.

  I brought my index finger up to my lips and widened my eyes at her in a warning. “Quiet! He doesn’t know that I know.”

  Sera brought her hands up to her face and started pacing her bedroom. She spoke again in a lower tone. “Okay, back up and explain.”

  I crossed my arms in front of me and spoke. “So, I was talking to the mystery number. And I was also fooling around with your brother. He would always get ahold of me with the Facebook messenger app. He said his phone was broken. A lie. I guess he already knew I was his mystery number and didn’t want me to know.”

  “That’s shitty as hell,” Sera spat.

  “I agree,” I answered somberly. “It gets worse.”

  Sera glared downstairs in the direction of the balcony then fixed her eyes back on me, urging me to continue.

  I prayed that the guys wouldn’t come back in for a while. There was so much I needed to tell my friend. “I think you should sit down,” I said, pulling my knees up to my chest, wrapping my arms around them.

  The anger in Sera’s face washed away, swiftly replaced with concern. She crossed the room and crawled back up onto her large bed. She mirrored my position, resting her chin on her knees. “Hang on,” she said, reaching for her phone on the nightstand, typing something. “I just told Chace to keep Andrew out there until I tell him it’s okay to come in.” She tossed her phone to the side of the bed and focused back on me.

  My stomach tossed in my center, and my neck flushed. The truth needed to come out. Sera was the first person I should have come to, but I had been so afraid, and I didn’t know she would understand my pain so well. When she revealed her truth to the world with her first collection of poetry, I was rocked. Words could never fully explain how proud of her I was. How she was turning her own past, her sexual abuse, into a way to heal others.

  She looked more alive now, sitting in front of me. There was a softness to her that hadn’t been there before. In long phone conversations, she told me of the weight being lifted from her heart, and despite how it exhilarated me to hear this, I couldn’t tell her my own truth. Until now.

  “Well, the text messages between he and I, the ones where we didn’t know who the other was, they started before Charles and I split up. I was just so alone, Sera, all the time. My husband was gone an
d even when he was home, he was so distant. I tried to reach out to him, to inspire him to want me, but nothing worked. Then I got the text from a wrong number and before I knew it, I was telling a stranger all about my life. If there was a hurt, I told him. If there was anger, I told him. We kept it anonymous, mainly because I wanted to because I felt guilty. I figured if we never exchanged names or pictures it wouldn’t be real. It wouldn’t be like an affair. I couldn’t stop though. It felt good to have someone showing interest in what I had to say, in how I was hurting.” I paused, bracing myself for the hard part.

  “On New Year’s Eve, we had a party. I remember drinking and Charles smiling at me. And I thought I’m going to end my secret friendship. I love my husband and when the clock strikes midnight, I am going to do everything I can to save my marriage. Therapy, date nights, anything it takes.

  Charles has never been an aggressive man. Never. I remember loving that about him when we met. He and I were so alike. So calm and collected, never letting anything get us riled up. But that night was different. I had left my phone in the kitchen, carelessly. We had all been hanging out on the back deck and in the dining room. Playing cards and playing beer pong outside. Charles saw a text come to my phone from a strange number so he unlocked it and looked.”

  “Oh shit,” my friend said, bringing her hand to her mouth.

  “Yeah,” I said with a laugh, though it wasn’t much of one. The room felt so hot. “I had gone upstairs to get some wine out of my shirt because I spilled some on the collar and it was driving me insane. I came out of the bathroom and Charles was there. I could see in his eyes immediately that something was wrong. He drank quite a bit that day. The stress of a long week was wearing on him, and this party was the first time in months that he let himself have a little fun. He had my phone in his hands. I felt sick when I saw it. I deleted messages from time to time like a cliché adulteress, but I didn’t that week. He tossed the phone on the bed and dropped to the floor onto his knees. It broke my heart to see the hurt I caused him.” My voice broke at the memory. Not at his broken heart, but at mine. At the hurt I felt for the man I had loved right before he ruined me.

  “Oh, Kat. Fuck,” she said.

  Sera was always such a potty mouth and I couldn’t help the laugh that bubbled out, I was on the verge of hysterics. So many warring emotions ripping at my heart. I didn’t want to continue. But I desperately needed to.

  “I left him the next day,” I whispered. “He raped me that night.”

  Sera stopped moving. She was so still I wondered for a moment if my life had suddenly paused. If the universe was granting me a moment to collect myself. It wasn’t, but my friend was. In all her shock, she was giving me a moment to figure out how to go on.

  “The only person I told that year was your brother. And he left town right after that.”

  “What the fuck?” she breathed.

  The way she said it, it wasn’t directed to me, she was speaking to herself. She pulled her hands up and pressed her fingertips into her temples.

  My best friend was not touchy-feely. She was not a hugger. But she would bend when the moment was right. She reached across the space and pulled me into a tight embrace. She squeezed me so hard I thought my head might pop off.

  When she released me, tears were falling down her cheeks. Her voice cracked when she spoke. “So let me get this straight. You told my brother that your ex-husband raped you and his reaction was to leave town?”

  “And to change his phone number and deactivate his Facebook. Cutting me off from both of his identities.”

  “I’m going to fucking kill him, Kat.” She moved past me, making her way toward the stairs leading down to the lower level.

  I grabbed her arm, stopping her, twirling her around. “Don’t say anything,” I begged.

  “Why not?” she seethed.

  “He doesn’t even know that I know. He thinks I have no clue that he was the mystery guy from two years ago. We haven’t talked about it. We have been putting off two very heavy conversations for a while now. When he came back to town, I wanted to hate him. But I didn’t. I was just so happy to see him again. And time can do strange things for you. It lessened my anger.”

  “You forgive him?”

  “I think a part of me has, but no, I haven’t fully yet. Maybe I’m afraid I can’t forgive him so putting off this conversation means I can spend more time with him. Before we have to face the truth of it all.” I paused. “I believe that in all of us, there is something beautiful yearning to come out. We don’t all tap into it. We don’t all have the strength, the courage to rip it out, and to show the world. But he does when he lets himself. I was mesmerized by him the first time I saw him play two years ago. His energy. When I was in a room with him, I felt alive. I’m not sure how to explain it, and I’m not sure there really are words that can do it justice. But I needed it back then. And I need him now.”

  “You need to have that talk,” Sera said, reaching for my hand.

  I squeezed it in response. “I know. Soon. This week.”

  Kat and my sister were upstairs for nearly an hour before Chace let me come back into the apartment. It was only after a text sent to his phone that he led me back inside. I knew it was my sister who was urging him to keep me out of the apartment in an earlier text. I prattled on about random shit with my old friend on their balcony while the girls talked inside. I wasn’t even sure what I rambled on about. I just remember shaking my foot so rapidly to calm my nerves that I accidentally knocked over one of my sister’s plants.

  There was too much up in the air. Too much that needed to be said between Kat and I. I needed to redeem myself, and I worried that my sister was learning the truth of two years ago. Her opinion of me was so important to me. She was my confidante. She was on my team, always, when my father got to me. She encouraged the side of me that he tried to push away.

  I heard the low murmur of Sera and Kat’s voices upstairs when we walked in. Chace and I walked to the bar extending from their kitchen. I reached for a stool and took a seat.

  Chace made his way toward the fridge and stuck his head in. “Want a beer?”

  “Sure,” I said, looking up to the level above us, wondering when the girls would come down. “I didn’t know you drank beer.”

  “I don’t,” Chace said. “Sera and I had some friends over last week and they left it.”

  Chace had never been much of a drinker, and when he did drink, it was never beer. It was whiskey, which was not fitting. Chace could best be described as soft. It could be taken as an insult by insecure guys, but he wasn’t one of those. My best friend was quiet natured, the observer. He got along with everyone but if you took a moment to step away from casual conversation and laughter in a room he was in, to check your surroundings, he was always the one on the edge, watching and reading everyone. If I couldn’t quite pin down the nature of someone, I would just introduce them to Chace. Nothing got past him.

  He slid a beer to me and began rummaging around in a cabinet low to the floor. As if he read my mind, he pulled out a large bottle of whiskey and set it on the counter. I twisted the cap off my beer and tossed it into the trashcan across the room. Pumping my fist in the air when I made it.

  Outside, I barely stopped talking to let my friend get a word in. It wasn’t abnormal with us. I was the talker; he was the taciturn one. There was so much about his life here that I didn’t know about. I needed to rectify that.

  “So, how’s life with my sister?” Normally a question like that, coming from me, would be followed by a punch in the arm or a raised eyebrow. But that time was over. His relationship with my sister wasn’t a joke or a fleeting thing. That was never Chace’s style, and my friend had been harboring a longtime crush on her, going all the way back to his childhood. Their romance was epic. It was the kind of thing you only read about, and I had never seen my sister so light.

  Chace smiled in response and knocked back the drink he made. “There are no words,” he responded.
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  “Well, you’ve always been a man of few,” I joked back.

  “Any moment before her, it was a half-life. A waiting. Just a waiting for her.”

  I took a drink from my beer in response to his heavy comment. I set the bottle on the table and spun it in my hand. “So, back when you were writing songs for the band, how many were about her? How many songs did I sing to the crowd that were about my sister?” I dramatically groaned in fake disgust.

  Chace’s shoulders bounced up and down at my display. “Do you really want to know?” he edged.

  “No,” I said.

  “You can’t help who you want,” my friend offered, with a knowing smirk.

  While out on the balcony, I had discussed every aspect of my life except the person I had shown up at his doorstep with. The person walking down the stairs to me now.

  The four of us ended up in a bar off Broadway after a tense back and forth over what we should do with the rest of the night back in my sister’s living room. I knew I would eventually have to answer to Sera for my sins, and that terrified me. Luckily, after last call, Sera and Chace headed home and Kat and I decided to walk the streets and talk. My sister handed over the key to her apartment with her mouth set in a straight line, and I think she tried to stab me with the key a little. Yeah, I was fucked.

  Kat and I walked in silence for a while, no real destination in mind, except maybe for me, toward forgiveness.

  Eventually, she stopped walking and sat down in front of a large high-rise office building, on the steps leading to the sidewalk. I circled for a moment, finally taking a seat next to a line of manicured hedges jutting up from the concrete.

  I opened my mouth to speak but stopped when a group of loud people hobbled by, finding their way to the line of tourists congregating at the designated spot for hotel shuttle buses to pick everyone up. Their boisterous conversation was still within earshot when Kat spoke. I was in a daze and didn’t hear her, so I turned her direction and asked her to repeat herself.