Chapter 30
I watched Jack walk away and sought to find comfort in the fact that, since my heart already felt like it was in my shoes, it couldn't actually sink any further.
I needed to get home before my mascara began to run in a really bad way, that much was obvious to me, and I broke into a blind run to my car. I drove home slowly, not overly keen to go back to the continually empty flat but unable to really think of anywhere else I could go. God how sad is that?
Once home, I pulled out my law textbooks, refusing to acknowledge the similarity between my sudden, intense bouts of studying and the hours I'd spent with my head in textbooks helping Jack with his scholarship test. I stopped every now and again to indulge in a bout of completely selfish tears accompanied by a mental soundtrack of 'woe is me!' until, by the time the evening news came on, there was a veritable mountain of tissues next to the couch.
I didn't regret pushing Jack away, honestly I didn't, because I knew it was for the best but I did wish I could have explained better. And why oh why had I told him that I'd kissed Adam? Obviously I'd become a fan of masochism in a big way.
As some truly awful blur-out nonsense came on I wished Matt would get in contact with me, crap TV just wasn't the same without him. I wondered where he'd been staying and what he'd been doing. It was so unusual for me to be completely clueless as to his movements and, frankly, I was becoming a little annoyed by his radio silence. I mean he hadn't even called to yell at me for my antics on Monday night and, while that was a relief in some ways, it was quite disconcerting in others.
However, as if my thoughts could summon him up, no sooner had the credits on the first load of rubbish started to roll then there was the sound of a key being slid into the lock and in walked my brother.
"Hey," he said nonchalantly as if he'd just popped down to the shops for a couple of minutes rather than being MIA for four days.
Too stunned to say anything, and suddenly remembering our last meeting when I'd slapped him, I nodded dumbly and looked back at the TV as if watching some scantily clad girl squealing (which seemed to be all that was ever on these days) fascinated me.
Matt wandered over to the kitchen and grabbed a can of beer out of the fridge, taking a long draught of it before looking over at me and lifting his drink in my direction. "Tinnie?" He asked and I nodded again.
He collected another drink from the fridge and then collapsed down beside me on the couch. Taking the beer from him I broke the seal, making that satisfying scchh sound, and took a dainty sip. After a moment Matt reached over and smacked his can against mine, eliciting a dull clunk rather than the traditional clink expected in toasts, and sloshing both our drinks over our fingers in the process.
"Here's to us!" He said grandly. "You and me against the world."
I fought my annoyance at his casual attitude, I really did, but all the pent-up emotion from the last few days just kind of exploded and I glared at him before snapping, "Where the hell have you been?"
"Geez, Talia," Matt sighed, obviously not that surprised at my question but not liking it either. "I've only just got back, give me a sec to settle in, won't you?"
"Well, I don't know when you're going to run away again," I pointed out cattily. "So I want to get my questions in before then."
"I didn't run away." A hint of anger slipped into Matt's voice at this but him being mad at me wasn't anything all that new and I ignored it.
"Well there was definitely running and then you went away so what would you call it?"
"A tactical retreat." He took another long pull of his drink and added, "Otherwise known as the only thing I could think of doing that didn't include bodily harm."
A nicely succinct little reminder of the events surrounding his dramatic exit on Monday, that. I shelved some of my anger and said, in a more conciliatory tone of voice, "Fine, please just tell me where you've been."
"Why?" Matt looked at me strangely. "Have you been worried about me?"
I rolled at my eyes at his stupidity. "Of course I have, you know I have, you moron. Storming off like that and not letting me know where you were going, I've been going mental here."
"Good." Matt gripped his can a little too tightly making the thin metal buckle slightly. "You deserve a bit of worry." Before I could express my outrage at this comment he continued, "And I've been at Kristin's place, not that it's really any of your business."
Kristin, Kristin, Kristin... I turned the name over and over in my head knowing that I recognised it, but unable to remember who it was. Then, suddenly, the name fell into place and I looked at Matt incredulously. "Kristin!" I basically squealed. "Kristin Kristin? As in Jack's Kristin?"
"She's not Jack's," Matt said, fury lighting up his eyes at the mention of his name, showing me clearly that Jack was far from forgiven. "But yeah, she's his ex."
"Well…" I couldn't think of anything to say, I was too shocked, but I eventually managed to get out, "How long have you guys been – what? - an item?"
"It's been on the cards for a while." Matt drew patterns in the condensation on his can and then shrugged. "I mean I never meant to make a go of it what with her and Jack doing the on again, off again thing, but…" He suddenly wiped the can clean of his designs and gulped down another mouthful of the brew before finishing, "Sleeping with your best friend's ex kind of pales in comparison to sleeping with your best friend's little sister, don't you think?"
"Oh you can’t be serious!" I slammed my drink down on the coffee table and looked despairingly at my brother. "You're dating her to get back at Jack? Grow up Matt!"
"Grow up yourself!" Matt retorted and I was worried for a minute there that the conversation was going to degenerate into a sibling argument. I was bracing myself for a comment along the lines of 'you're a cow' and getting ready to reply 'I know you are, you said you are, so what am I?' But thankfully, despite all the evidence to the contrary, we must have done some growing up recently because when Matt spoke again it was in a more mature tone. "Look, I'm not dating Kristin to get back at Jack. Not only would that be a pretty incredibly shitty thing to do to Kristin, but it would fail in its objective because Jack doesn't like her in that way."
Floating unspoken between us were the words: 'because it's you he likes.' Even unspoken it had a pretty profound effect on both of us I think.
After a short pause I felt compelled to ask, "So you and Kristin, it's good?"
Matt smiled in a way that told me his answer even before he nodded and answered, "Yeah, it's good."
Well, that was a turn up for the books! There I was thinking Matt was off somewhere sinking into the depths of misery and anger and in actual fact he was creating a little love nest for himself! I was glad, though, I didn't want Matt to ever be unhappy and if Kristin was distracting him from what his best friend and sister had been up to then I owed her one.
Thinking of Kristin threw another issue to the forefront of my brain and I leapt off the couch and gestured to Matt to follow me. Catching a fleeting glimpse of his confused expression I vaulted over the back of the couch and ran into my room. Once there I went down on all fours and crawled underneath my bed.
"Uh, Talia?" Matt's voice was muffled. "What exactly are you doing?"
"Just a sec," I replied, my hands reaching into the furthest corner and snagging around a scrap of electric blue lace. "Ta da!" I exclaimed, emerging out from under the bed a little dust covered but relatively unscathed. "If you're dating Kristin you can return this to her."
Because, you see, she is the only one I could think of who that blue bra I'd found on Jack's floor might have belonged to. I believed Jack when he said it wasn't Haley's and Matt had reminded me that Kristin was the one that Jack had been hooking up with over the last couple of years. It had to be hers.
My hopes at finding out who Jack had slept with on the 19th were crushed, however, as, taking a closer look at the bra, Matt smirked and shook his head. "That's not Kristin's, it belongs to Jack."
"Oh for heaven's sake!
" I burst out, rocking back onto my heels and looking up at him in disbelief. "Does Jack have some weird fetish that I don't know about? How do you mean it's his?"
Matt offered me a hand up and we both took a seat on my bed; well, I more like perched awkwardly waiting for his answer.
"To all intents and purposes the bra is his, right? He won it on the 19th." When I continued to look at him in confusion Matt sighed and added, "First one to correctly guess the barmaid's cup size got to keep her bra." I made a little sound of disgust and Matt shrugged defensively. "Hey, I never said it was a particularly classy bar."
We lapsed into silence as I twisted my hands together in a kind of physical representation of the knots my brain was tying itself into. He'd won the bra; all the various scenarios I’d imagined with Haley or Kristin or some random girl throwing the bra aside in some wild passion evaporated and I was glad they were gone. Something was still niggling at the back of my mind however…ah, the scratches!
"So all this time you thought," Matt was saying, "that Jack had had it off with Kristin?"
I didn't tell him that I'd originally thought it was Haley and just nodded.
"You should know that there was no girl, Talia. For the first time in six years Jack went to bed alone on the 19th."
"Oh don't give me that!" I exclaimed. "I saw his chest the morning after, there was either a girl or he wrestled with a possum and forgive me if I think the former is more likely."
I didn't want to look at Matt, but after a few seconds had passed with no answer, I craned my head around and saw him looking pityingly at me.
"Twigs," he said shortly.
"What?"
"One of the- ah- activities that night was to strip naked and run through a hedge in the park." When I continued to stare at him in confusion he blushed slightly. "What? You know me, I've done stupider things in my time."
"Yes, but Jack…?" I still wasn't convinced.
" I wouldn't be in any hurry to hold him up as a stunning example of maturity on certain nights, either."
Hmm, twigs. I had real trouble grappling with this concept and a voice at the back of my mind was demanding to know why I was more willing to believe he'd slept with some random girl rather than that he'd run through a hedge. The answer was, of course, completely obvious. If Jack had resorted to meaningless sex I kind of had a right to be angry with him, it was like my get out of gaol free card. I even wondered fleetingly whether Matt might have been lying but then, remembering his furious expression when I'd first mentioned Jack, I realised he wasn't really in the mood to lie for his erstwhile friend. I could feel my high horse shrinking away into nothingness and I couldn't quite decide whether this was a good or bad thing.
Pushing away my thoughts on my own relationship with Jack I decided to seize this moment between my brother and me to patch things up between him and Jack.
"Matt, I want to tell you the truth about what happened between Jack and me."
His face shut down immediately and he went to get off the bed. "I don't want to hear it," he snapped, but I grabbed him and roughly pushed him back down.
"Tough," I said in a hard tone, "because I want to tell you and you need to hear it." Our eyes locked for one long moment and then Matt sighed and leant back on my bedspread.
"Fine," he snapped, "but for God’s sake keep it PG, I don't need to hear the gory details."
"Like I'd want to tell you them," I retorted before taking a deep breath and remembering my objective. I needed to get Matt to forgive Jack, otherwise all the heartache and pain on both sides would have been for nothing. "I need you to actually listen, Matt, and not just jump to your own conclusions. I know what we did was beyond shitty but you've got to understand how awful we feel."
"We?" Matt's eyes sparked with anger once more. "You mean you and him have been having little meetings to discuss how to get me to calm down? Well forget it, I'm not going to just-"
"See, that’s exactly what I mean," I interrupted him. "Push all that testosterone to one side for a moment and just listen!"
I waited for him to capitulate and, although I could see that he hated to do it, eventually he nodded and gestured for me to talk.
"Right so, you remember when I told you what Brad had said to me when we broke up? Stuff about me having something wrong with me? I kind of laughed it off with you, but it cut close to home and I was in a pretty bad way when I got back to the flat. I was so sure that there was something wrong with me and I thought that if I just got someone I trusted to sort of acclimatise me to touching then I could get over it."
"Wait a minute!" I knew I wouldn't get very far without Matt interrupting but I was still annoyed and I glared at him as he said, "You asked Jack to have sex with you?"
"Not in so many words but, I guess, basically yes I did. In the back of my mind I never really thought it would go as far as it did. I mean at first it was exactly what I needed, Jack shook my hand and put his arm around me once or twice, that kind of thing. But then things kind of snowballed and weird stuff happened between Simone, Micky and Sam," I was careful here not to mention what that weird stuff actually was remembering my promise to Simone, "and it was like I fell into this big pit and I couldn't get out again. But, and here's the thing, if someone had offered me a ladder I don't know if I would have taken it, I kind of started to like the pit, mainly because Jack was in it with me. Does that make any sense?"
Matt refused to look at me but, after a moment, he said, "Kind of, but I'm a simple guy, Talia, so let's try and keep the similes to a minimum."
I smiled slightly and nodded. "Fine, I was in a big mess, but even if I could’ve seen a way out of that mess I don't know if I would have taken that road because I was enjoying being with Jack, better?"
"Oh so much better."
"Sarcasm is the lowest form of wit," I said automatically and Matt gave a little, bitter laugh.
"Just as well I'm not trying to be witty then. So where exactly did I fit in with all this? I was living with you, it's not as if you could just forget I was there and you must have known what I would think of your little arrangement."
"At first I didn't think you needed to know because it was all so up in the air and kind of innocent, I didn't want to get you all riled up over nothing. But then, when there actually was pretty major stuff going on, I didn't want to hurt you or make you mad at Jack and me."
"So how did you think you were going to get out of it?" Matt finally looked at me, but I wished he hadn't because the tight set to his mouth showed me that he wasn't in a peace-making mood.
"I didn't think, that's kind of the point. Everything got really confusing and every day it got harder to tell you and then there was the scholarship thing." Thinking back to the last couple of weeks I realised that, Jack's attitude towards me excluded, things were actually better now that the truth was out. My head was certainly less fuzzy. "Look, cards on the table time, it was never, ever my intention to hurt you and for screwing things up so badly I am so, so sorry. There is nothing going on between us now, I've told Jack that and he's had enough of it too. I'm not just trying to worm my out of blame here, I am fully guilty and I accept that."
Far from calming Matt down my last words seemed to increase his fury and he almost yelled when he spoke next. "What about Jack? I think he's been the most used in this. Jesus, Talia, he loves you, did you know that?"
I felt tears sting my eyes as I nodded. People should have to give some kind of warning before they say the 'L' word, he'd completely thrown me off balance saying it out of the blue like that. And what was he doing anyway? Was he sticking up for Jack?
"You know? You know he loves you?" Matt's disbelief was almost palpable. "So why isn't this little speech being delivered by the both of you? Shouldn't the pair of you be trying to convince me that I should stop being mad because love conquers all or some shit?"
I smiled feebly and shook my head. "I told him that loving me was inconvenient."
"You what?"
Oh, how to exp
lain this to someone who wasn't there! It’d made sense at the time…hadn't it?
"Well it's true!" I protested. "Our deal was supposed to be that he helped me get over my phobia, nobody ever said anything about love. It's not fair of him to tell me that he loves me now, there's you to think of and he's going away to England in a few months…" I trailed off as Matt gave my shoulder a hard shove.
"You bitch!" He exclaimed. "So you didn't tell him you loved him back or anything? You just told him that saying he loved you was inconvenient?"
"Oh what, as opposed to punching him?" I retorted, thinking about his reaction to Jack's words.
"He told me he was sleeping with my little sister, he told you he loved you, there's a bit of a bloody difference!"
We glared at each other, both breathing slightly more heavily than usual and refusing to back down.
"God dammit, Talia, you can't control everything!" Matt exploded. "You can't force him to stop loving you any more than you can force him and me to make up. You're so fiercely determined to make sure that our lives go how you think they should go that you forget that it doesn't work like that. For God’s sake, back off out of our lives and think about your own for a change. What do you want?"
"I don't know, OK?" My blood was boiling, my head was pounding and I couldn't believe I was being lectured by my usually so laidback brother.
"Bullshit!" He was properly yelling now. "Tell the truth, what do you want?"
"Don't make me say it." I’d tried so hard to build up a reality for myself that wouldn't break my heart and I hated that he was trying to destroy that. He wouldn't back down, despite the pleading in my voice.
"Come on, I know what you want and I've only had the last couple of minutes, you've had weeks to figure this out. Forget that I hate it, forget that he's going away, forget your jumped up notions of what's right for him and just say what you want."
"Fine!" There comes a time when the bough can't bend anymore and it snaps. "I want him. I want Jack. I don't want him to go, I don't want you to be mad at him or me anymore." I leapt off the bed and started to pace because a thrilling, restless energy was spreading throughout my limbs and there was no way I could stay sitting. "I want to apologise and have him forgive me and I want to be with him without the guilt. I want to stop crying all the time and I want to feel secure enough in myself and in him that I don't have these stupid fits of irrationality. Oh God!" I stopped dead and stared at Matt, my eyes wide. "I love him."
"No kidding."
"But it doesn't matter because I can't tell him that I do. That would be too selfish for words." I put my head in my hands and sank back down onto the bed with a frustrated groan.
"That's never stopped you before." Wow, blunt really was becoming my brother's speciality. "Be selfish because you know the one thing that selfish people get? What they want." I suddenly felt his hands grip my shoulders and I dropped my hands to look at him. "Let Jack take responsibility for himself, he might hate you for making his leaving harder but he might not. I might hate you for screwing up my friendship with him, but I might not. Are you prepared to find out?"
I pushed his hands off my shoulder with a sigh. "He's not talking to me, he made it pretty clear last time we met that he'd had enough of me. He's not going to let me get near him to make my big gesture."
"You are so frickin' thick sometimes," Matt sighed, getting off my bed and walking towards the door. "Who are the only people bar you and me who Jack would do anything for?"
"Our parents," I answered without hesitation.
"And what’s next weekend?" He asked.
"Their wedding anniversary...oh!" Yeah, now I really did feel thick. My mum had given me a massive hint and now even my oblivious brother had figured out what the anniversary party meant for me and Jack. He would go to it, I had no doubt of that, there was no way he would let my parents down, especially as he was getting ready to go away. I was confused, though, Matt seemed to have done a radical about face. "But what about you and him?" I called out as he exited my room. "What happened to 'I'll never forgive him' and all that? Because I don't understand why you're telling me to give Jack and me a go if you're then just going to mess it all up."
Matt reappeared back in my doorway, his expression fierce. "He messed up," he said seriously. "Maybe you did too but this is about him and me. I have no idea whether I can forgive him but I'm game to face him and find out. Are you?"
"Yes," I said with conviction.
I guess it was like Jack had said. I'd figured out what I wanted, now I just needed to bloody go for it!
So Much to Learn Page 56