Never Loved

by Charlotte Stein

  Thank God he can’t see me do it.

  “I swear to you. Honestly, I do.”

  “The debt is almost done with now anyway, got it? You get that, right?”

  “Yeah, I get it. I get it.”

  “Because if you did something, and it caused trouble for you, hurt you, took anything from you, I would never, ever forgive myself. I would hate myself just for telling you this, but I want to be able to because I need to be honest with you. I don’t want you to feel like you don’t know me, or have to search my back in the dark for answers,” he says, swiftly followed by my face heating to seven thousand degrees centigrade. I thought he was asleep when I did that. I was sure he had no idea.

  But shows what I know.

  “I didn’t do that because—”

  “I know, and it’s okay. The problem is not that you did it, the problem is that you had to. I’m too closed off and too careful, but that has to stop.”

  “Not if you’d prefer it. Not if you like it like—” I start, so eager to cover over my intrusive, foolish mistakes that I almost miss the point. I think of him feeling forced to be open with me instead of understanding what he’s trying to say. But it’s okay, because that’s when he decides to drive it home. He stabs right into my sentence before I can finish it, and leaves all the words I wanted to say lying bleeding on the floor.

  Not that I care.

  Not that I care because oh my God.

  “It has to stop, Bea, because I love you. You must know I love you. I know you know I love you. And if I want you to love me, too, I have to share my secrets,” he tells me, then has the absolute gall to follow my stunned silence with, “Was that too much?”

  He even winces. I think he blushes.

  He said it first and he’s blushing.

  “You would never ask that if you knew how much I love you. I love you so much I barely feel afraid to say it. So much I want to stop it, in case it swallows me whole. I know I’m not supposed to feel this way and maybe one day I’ll regret it, but for right now I do not care. I love you like someone falling into the sun, still thrilling as I burn.”

  —

  For the first time in my life, I wake feeling like the world is a wonderful thing. I can hear birds tweeting outside the window. The rays of dawn light piercing the paltry curtains over my dorm window are soft and lovely. And the man scrunched up next to me is the one I love. Not to mention the one who loves me.

  He said he loves me.

  Everything is perfect.

  Everything is magical.

  And then I slowly, oh so slowly, turn over…and see the statue of my former roommate standing over us, mouth so open I could slide my fist into it, eyes like moons, eyebrows high enough to kiss the ceiling. I feel pretty sure that stumbling across my massacred body would have caused less of a disruption to her higher brain functions.

  Yet oddly, I feel less horrified about this than I should.

  Maybe because last night there was sex, and love, and Mob bosses that aren’t really Mob bosses, and plans to free my boyfriend from shady tyranny. Maybe because I no longer care about fitting in—after all, I never fit in anyway. I was a square peg in a round hole from day one of my life, and the problem has always been accepting that.

  Not the effort of sanding off my edges.

  But the challenge of being okay with them as they are.

  So if Sam wants to hate me forever for this, she can. If she wants to scream at me for the hair and the enormous man in my bed and the music still playing over and over like some electro-pop soundtrack to her probable nightmare, that’s okay. Do your worst, I think, as she watches Serge escape to the bathroom.

  Only her worst is not quite what I expect.

  In fact, her worst is pretty much Mars, and my expectations are wherever Jesus lives.

  The very second the bathroom door is safely closed she turns back to me and mouths the following two words…

  Oh, yum.

  And the way she does it…the way she does it actively embarrasses me. A great wave of red sweeps over my face, and not because she sounds so salacious. Not because she could well be talking about a chocolate fondant, instead of a half-naked man who just escaped to the bathroom. No, mostly I am embarrassed because I thought so badly of her.

  I thought so little that I really imagined she would be disgusted over my choices. I pictured being shunned forever over the littlest things, but when I look back…

  It was really just me all along. It was me and my choices and my concerns. I thought I had to be a certain way to become a person, and that if I failed, the hammer would fall. And maybe the hammer would have—but not because of Sam. True, she calls my hair bonkers. Yes, she wants to know if Serge has an enormous penis in ridiculously hushed tones.

  But she also whispers this as she dashes around, trying to get out of my way so I can carry on with the fuck-fest.

  “All this time trying to figure you out, like wondering why you wanted to do everything right and be this normal American college girl, and now I see. You were just hiding your secret life as a total badass. I am in awe. You have to tell me everything later, okay? You’re going to tell me everything later, right?” she asks.

  And then I feel sad and happy at the same time.

  Sad, because I could have told her everything before now.

  But happy, because now I know I finally can.

  “When you get back, Sam, I’ll tell you all about me. The real me,” I say, and I mean it. I actually buzz at the thought of talking to her about all my secret things, including the ones that hurt like the devil. I think about telling her about my dad and giving her details about my past life, and feel almost no fear.

  How can I possibly?

  I have no idea what’s really going to take me out.

  —

  It takes me a long time to realize something is off. One area of my life is going so well that it’s almost easy to miss. I find myself in actual conversations with groups of people in the cafeteria, and stay up at night with Sam chatting almost casually about things I never thought I’d share. I tell her about what it was like to be thrown down into a dark basement by my own father—and not the sanitized version of it, either. Not the one where I make some Virginia Andrews joke about the whole thing.

  The one where I say that it was a never-ending nightmare, that he treated me that way. How it used to feel to walk on eggshells every day of my life, wondering if this was the thing that would make him murder me. I even say that word to her—murder—despite never having said it to anyone, not even to myself. Not even to Serge.

  Most of the time I look back and imagine that he would never have dared, but then I remember my mother. I remember all the occasions when he shoved us through that door. All the times I missed steps on the way down and wound up bruised and broken. The hovering sense of words I so badly wanted to say, and the fear that I would actually say them.

  Leave us alone, I used to imagine myself screaming at him, the urge strong enough to almost get over the terror of dying. Sometimes it didn’t even feel like terror at all.

  “It would have been a relief,” I say to Sam.

  And the best part is—she understands.

  More than that, in fact. She cries, and hugs me.

  Apparently all the clichéd quotes on Tumblr are right. You really do just have to be yourself.

  Pretending only puts you on edge—with the added bonus of keeping away people who might actually like the same things you do. Tonya Stevenson writes down all the music I list on the back of her notebook. Hannah Yates suddenly wants to swap movies and books with me. Everything is just more relaxed. I’m more relaxed. I could have probably driven off into the sunset of my own life, if it were not for the sudden silence from one particular quarter.

  The silence that I ignore at first.

  I pretend it must be something else, even though I know it probably isn’t.

  Because the thing is, no matter how much you think you have grown and changed, or
what wonders your life promises, or how bright the future now seems to be, there is always something. Another step that you didn’t see, on your way out of the basement. A hole right after you climb out, three thousand feet deep and filled with acid. I fall right into it before I even know it’s there, and now I can feel that acid eating away at my insides. Even before he calls, I feel it. Any fool would know it.

  If you grasp the brass ring with one hand, you have to pay in blood with the other.

  And I pay, all right. I think someone takes an ax to my wrist. It feels like it, at any rate, when I finally get through to him after a week of telling myself over and over that everything must be okay. I can even hear that false okayness in my own voice, as the sharp edge comes down. Muscle splits from sinew, and blood arcs up over my right side, but I hold on.

  And then he speaks, and I feel myself slipping.

  “I can’t talk right now,” he says, which I guess is bad enough on its own.

  But the tone of his voice with it…the tone of it.

  He sounds like the insides of a tomb, I think. Empty and surrounded by stone three feet thick. I could hammer on those walls forever and never get through. I could use a wrecking ball and barely get past the first layer—though I have to wonder why I would want to, when the only prize is something long dead. It could have died when I spoke about burning in the sun. Maybe it went as I kissed him goodbye at the door.

  More horribly: It may never have been alive at all.

  What do I know of love, to recognize it when I see it? The simplest charade could fool me. The first kind word from anyone would have been enough, and he gave me a hundred. He said everything I could have wanted to hear and did all the things I’ve always longed for, every bit of it so easy to read. He said right at the start that I was easy to read. He told me he saw it in my eyes. Oh, God, he told me and yet still I can hardly believe it might be true.

  Not until he speaks into my stunned silence.

  “In fact, I don’t think we should talk again. It’s better if you don’t call me. We had fun, but now I think this has to end—don’t you? It’s better that we end it now. I gotta go, all right? I gotta go,” he says, at which point I think he cuts the call dead. I think he does, but I don’t hear the dial tone. I don’t hear anything, in fact. I’m too busy looking in wonder at the red wound where my right hand used to be.

  Chapter 14

  My dad used to play this game with us. He would tell us that for every hour we spent in the basement without crying, we could have five minutes of television. Show me that you are not a pair of babies, he would say, and of course at first we believed him. We believed in all of his little games like that. We honestly thought that if we just followed some bizarre request to the letter we would get a reward, and then came the shock when we emerged into the light.

  I remember him saying: You honestly think you get something for just behaving yourselves for once? And I guess that’s kind of what this feels like. I trusted in what seemed to be a perfectly reasonable set of rules, but got slapped anyway. I did what I was supposed to do, yet still taste blood in my mouth.

  Though I tell myself otherwise. I say to Sam that I hardly care at all, until it almost feels like I believe it. He was just a fling, I tell her. It was nothing, I tell her. Then inside myself I find every tiny bit of evidence that I ever cared or said I loved him, every piece of myself I gave so guilelessly, and cover it over before I can die of cringing. Because it feels like that might be a thing.

  It feels as though I’m drowning in a sea of humiliation, whenever I remember how vulnerable I was with him. How easily fooled I was, and what things I gave away. I gushed to him about falling into the sun right after the sex that was probably his only goal. I said we were the same and shared all those painful memories with him and good God, it stings so much. More than I thought possible, and all because of one terrible thought…

  All of this probably means my father was right.

  God, please spare me from the pain of my father being right. Let me never think of this as karma, and I promise you, I promise I will never ask you for another thing. I can cope with feeling heartsick and sore, and go on just like I did before. I can.

  If you will just let this not be a lesson.

  Please let it not be a lesson. It’s too cruel to stand; too awful for me to live with. I don’t want to spend my life thinking that darkness is where I belong. That my sin is unspeakably real, and not just a thing my father made up to torment me with. Surely, surely it was just a thing he wanted to torment me with. He didn’t even believe in God. He wasn’t a Christian; he had no morals. It was all just nonsense. I can’t stand the thought that it wasn’t nonsense.

  I can’t stand it so much that I go to see Tommy just to ask. To finally talk about what we never speak of and see for certain. Though once I’m sitting on the bed in his little room, I find it hard to start. He looks so whole now. He looks so peaceful and good. When he talks there is no jump and jitter in his voice as he offers me a cup of tea.

  He has a little kettle on a table under the window.

  He brews me a drink and gives it to me with a little biscuit on a plate.

  And that is probably why I cry. I honestly do not mean to. I think I spent so long convincing everyone that I am fine I sort of started believing it myself. But when I see him all well put together like this, it only emphasizes how much I’m falling apart. It pushes tears out of me before I can stop them.

  Much to his disconcertion.

  “I thought you were doing better, sis,” he says, which is bad for two reasons. The first being the attention it draws to me and my struggle to blink back my stupid sadness, and the second is the sudden knowledge that he thought I was doing badly before now. My silly little brother, always getting into scrapes and never really seeming to care about me.

  He knew I was hurting, too. He understands, I think.

  And then I feel upset all over again. I look at him sitting there with his hands underneath his thighs like the way he used to do when we were kids—always so wary of touching things he was never allowed to or breaking something that would earn him punishment later on—and I suddenly collapse beneath the weight of what we went through together. I have to take a second to compose myself, and even after I have, my words come out all wavery and wrong.

  “I was. I am. I’m fine, I just…it’s just that…” I say, slowly struggling through threatening tears toward some kind of explanation that makes sense. But the thing is, I suppose—there is no explanation that makes sense. I somehow can’t quite wrap my mind around what he did. I go back over everything that happened and all the words he said and just cannot fathom why anyone would expend that much effort on a lie.

  He could have fucked me the first day we met.

  Why go to all that trouble? Why do any of that and then just let it go? It seems insane and so strange I don’t know how to explain to Tommy.

  But that’s all right.

  He explains for me.

  “Did they do something to him?” he asks, quite suddenly. The way someone might interrupt an important conversation to ask if you could pass the peas. He even sounds quite casual about it, to the point where I don’t fully understand what he means. I think he must be talking about someone else. A different him—like his buddy who got them into all of this.

  And then Tommy clarifies for me.

  “Because you should know I never asked him to pay it. I didn’t even know who had paid until he came by and warned me that they were mad about him wanting out. He worked it all off, but I guess they just liked him doing it,” he says, and even though I see—I see it with a terrible and dawning clearness that almost ends me—I have to ask.

  “Who are you talking about, Tommy?”

  “The big guy. Your boyfriend.”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend, Tommy,” I say, voice so flat and cold you could almost mistake me for one of the dead. That’s good, though. That helps brace me against the shock of what Tommy tells me n
ext.

  “They didn’t kill him, did they? Because if they did, it’s not my fault. When he told me it was paid I said to him they would probably keep on at him. I said that they just never let anything go. They always use some excuse or another,” he says, as the cabin pressure inside me drops to some absolutely fucking terrible levels. Did he say kill? Did he say never let anything go? What does he mean, what does he mean?

  I do not think I can take what he means.

  “Oh my God. Oh my God. Oh my God, what are you saying here?” I ask, prepared for the worst and still getting something even more nightmarish than that.

  “Shit, I forget I wasn’t supposed to tell you.”

  I mean, what on earth can I say to this? I try, but no rational-sounding words come out. Instead, I just let out this broken moan of horror and pain, at the idea that he told Tommy not to say anything. For a second I have to put my head in my hands, and it’s only when Tommy finally seems to sense that something has gone wrong here that I react. I feel him touch my shoulder and attempt to soothe me.

  Then I explode. I find the words.

  “Goddamn you, you tell me now. Tell me now,” I spit, as though for a second I become another person. A frightening person, I think, and then want to back away from it. But how can I, when he says this?

  “I don’t know if I should. He might hurt me.”

  “I’m going to hurt you if you don’t answer,” I tell him.

  And I might just mean it, too. I have to clench my fists to stop myself from grabbing his wrist as he steps back. I want to stand up, but I know if I do, I might shake him. He had to know that I needed to be told. He should have understood, and even if he didn’t, the raging part of my brain is shouting at me that all of this is his fault.

  An idea that he does not deny.

  “I only know what he told me after it was all done. He said he had done stuff for them before to pay off some debt of his dad’s, so they said okay, and it was all cool. They weren’t even mad about him beating up those two guys who came to get some other stuff I owed, because he makes them so much money. Seriously, he can like make thousands in a night. He’s amazing—”