by Zach Jenkins
Before he turned down the hall that led toward the bedrooms, he turned back, and said, “The money was your idea, jackass. Even the sex was your idea. I’ve been honest all along. You’re the one that’s lying. To both of us. You were the guy pretending to be the knight in shining armor who was going to help some random stranger get his business on its feet. Then you were the one that decided to take it further, and now you’re ruining that. I’m sure before this is all over you’ll ruin my business, too. You’re even better at ruining things than I am.”
Like a robot saying the lines my dad had programmed into it, I said, “Relax. The money is on its way. Three days, at the most. You’ll still get what you wanted out of me.”
“Fuck you. Fuck you, and your money, and the way you made me feel good about myself for a little while. I’m going to Echo’s. If the two of us are through, I don’t need any more space than her couch anyway.”
He was out the door before I could move. His tires squealed as he raced out of the parking lot, apparently desperate to get as far away from me as possible.
I couldn’t blame him.
If I could have abandoned myself, I would have, too.
Instead of going to my bedroom, I fell onto the couch, still wearing all my clothes. I was too lonely to sleep alone in my big bed.
Nineteen
Icarus
My neck hurt from sleeping on the couch the last few nights. My body seemed to be trying to tell me to go find Harley and make things right.
Not that I was going to.
I missed him, but the whole thing had been his fault as far as I was concerned.
I took a sip of my coffee and burnt my tongue. “Fuck.”
Fuck had become my favorite profanity since I’d moved out of Harley’s place. I said it whenever I was frustrated, and I was almost always frustrated without Harley.
“Are you okay?” Griffin asked.
“Sure,” I said. “Just burnt my tongue a little. I’ll be fine.”
“I didn’t mean your tongue. You’ve been moping around all day. What’s wrong?”
Pierre and Matty both turned their attention from something they had been looking at on Pierre’s phone to our conversation.
Trying to deflect all of their attention without talking about my marriage—fake marriage—I said, “I’m just mad at a lady this morning at the bakery who got mad at me when I gave her the blueberry muffin. She ordered the fucking blueberry muffin. If she changed her mind, she should have just said so. I would’ve eaten the fucking muffin myself, and given her the strawberry one for fucking free.”
I blew across the top of my coffee and tried to take a sip. Still too hot.
“Bullshit,” Griffin said. “That’s not what you’re moping about. That was this morning, and you’ve been a real prick for days now. We all know you moved back in with Echo. So obviously something happened between you and Harley. Do we need to go kick his ass?”
I laughed out loud when Matty and Pierre both nodded their agreement. Combined they barely weighed as much as Harley did.
Still, it was nice to know they were willing to die to try and help me out.
“No. Please don’t do anything like that. Even if you managed to knock him down, his lawyers would be on you before he hit the ground. Anyway, I think I’d rather just let him go. I don’t know what I was thinking letting myself think a straight man would ever fall for me.”
“Straight guys fall for men all the time,” Pierre said. “A lot of times they just never knew what they were missing until they had a taste.”
“I must not taste all that great, then,” I said, hoping we could change the topic before we got any deeper. “I’m not really focused on all that right now though. Right now I’m just trying to figure out whether to give up on my business entirely or give it one last try without the money he promised me. With the hours you guys are all giving me I should be able get through this year as long as Echo doesn’t kick me out.”
Someone slapped me on the back of the head.
My friends all suddenly decided there was something very interesting on their telephones to look at.
“If I kick you out,” my sister said, picking up my coffee cup. “It’ll be because you stop taking chances and giving yourself a chance to be happy. It won’t be because you sometimes forget to put your dishes in the dishwasher.”
“What are you talking about?” I asked. “Moving out here from Tennessee was a risk. Focusing on starting a business was a risk. I take plenty of chances.”
Still standing beside me, she said, “You take some chances. I’ll give you credit for that. But you never take a chance on love. You run from it at the first sign of difficulty. Who was the last man you stayed with after your first fight?” she asked.
“I don’t understand your point. I’ve been with a lot of jerks. What’s the point in staying with them once I realize their true nature?”
“Sometimes, I think you over-exaggerate your bad luck. I won’t go dredging up the past, because you did date some assholes, but Harley seems like a good guy. I’ve seen the way you look at him and talk about him. It’s different than any other man you’ve been with.”
“Sure. He’s fun. But that doesn’t make him a good guy. And even if it does, it doesn’t mean he’s the right guy for me. So why would I fight to keep that relationship going? Are you saying I should only do it for the money? Like I’m some kind of whore?”
“Of course not.” She pulled up a chair from a nearby table and sat down next to me. “Listen. Pushing away a jerk is one thing. Pushing away someone you care about because you’re worried something bad is going to happen is a totally different ball of wax. Unfortunately, you never learned the difference. Harley is your chance to learn that lesson and find a little happiness in this life. Plus, if you want to be a little selfish about it, there’s nothing better than makeup sex. What more reason could you possibly need to give him at least one more chance? He didn’t hit you or anything, right?”
I shook my head.
She made it all sound so simple, but if it was so simple, wouldn’t she have found her own man by now? It was hard to take love advice from someone who’d dated even less than I had since moving to Colorado.
Just like me, she had her own excuses. Starting a business was hard work. But I wasn’t about to let her bully me into chasing after some idealized romance, one that she probably wanted for me just to convince herself that she had a chance of her own.
“It’s just not that easy, Echo. And don’t shake your head at me and try to tell me otherwise. This is my life, my marriage, my husband. Go find your own guy if you want to tinker with love.”
I pushed my chair away from the table and hurried out of the coffee shop before she could follow me.
I couldn’t walk back to her house because that was the first place she would look. I couldn’t go back to Harley’s because I was entirely unable to deal with him.
So I walked aimlessly around town.
Every time I saw two lovers holding hands, I turned at the next block. I ended up turning frequently, and wondering how so many people were all able to make it look so easy.
I just needed to accept what I had always believed.
Love isn’t supposed to work out for me.
Tired of walking, but with nowhere to go, I walked through the doors of that new microbrewery on my route. There were plenty of tables open, but I sat down at the bar where I would be able to get faster service as I searched for the bliss of intoxication.
I ordered my first beer, and slouched my shoulders while staring at the counter and hoping no one would decide to try to talk to me.
I just wanted to be alone.
It was what I was best at.
Twenty
Harley
It was fourth down. We were down by five points, but we had the ball on the two-yard line. It would be the last play of the game since time was about to expire.
I lined up near the sideline and checked to make sure
I wasn’t offside.
As the quarterback went through the snap count, I wondered where Icarus was. I would have liked nothing more than for him to watch me make the winning catch.
With the way I’d screwed everything up, it seemed like I needed some kind of fourth-down miracle to save my marriage, and who didn’t like to watch their loved one make the big play? Practically every sports movie ever made ended with the love interest rushing into the arms of the athlete for the big kiss.
It was stupid to think that something so meaningless would fix the marriage that I had ruined, though. That didn’t happen in real life.
Distracted by thoughts of Icarus, by the time I noticed the football had been snapped, I was already a half second behind. I took two steps forward and slanted toward the middle of the end zone. The plan was to use my body to shield off the defender and make the easy catch.
Normally, I would have drawn a double-team at the end of a close game because everyone would know that the ball would be coming to me. Because of that, I was frequently just a decoy.
Worrying about how I’d left things with Icarus, I’d already dropped several passes throughout the game. Just like we hoped, the defense gambled that my team wouldn’t throw the ball my way.
But the play we were running required precision timing.
While I was supposed to sprint to my spot, the quarterback was supposed to drop three steps and fire the ball to where I was supposed to be, while freezing the linebackers by looking in a different direction until the last second.
I grunted and pushed myself to try to make up the distance, but the ball bounced off the tips of my fingers and fell to the ground.
I’d lost the game for my team just as surely as I had lost Icarus.
My teammates still came over to pat me on the shoulder and let me know that they weren’t mad. I had a good bunch of guys on my team. We always had each other’s backs no matter the final score.
Rather than picking apart my mistake, everyone shrugged off the loss almost immediately and started joking about mistakes they had made during the game, too.
I hoped Icarus’ friends were supporting him the same way.
After all, he wasn’t the one who had dropped the ball. Our breakup had been my fault. I had once again refused to let somebody in behind my defenses. I always assumed the worst of people; I realized that said more about me than it did about them.
If I ever got a chance at love again, I promised to try harder so I wouldn’t die a miserable, lonely old man.
“So what’s up with you?” Hank, our quarterback, finally asked me.
“Sorry guys. I don’t know what happened out there today. My thigh’s a little tight. Maybe that’s why I was a step behind all day.”
“Your problem wasn’t your thigh,” Tavian, our running back, said. He tapped himself on the temple. “It was in your head. Something was eating at you all day. What’s going on? You okay?”
I didn’t normally spend a lot of time talking to my friends about what happened after a breakup. About all I ever mentioned about my relationships was the sex, and none of my football buddies had wanted to hear those details about Icarus and me.
Still, I had no one else to turn to.
My parents wouldn’t help. They’d made everything worse.
I had kind of become friends with Icarus’ friends, but surely they would stand by him instead of me.
My only chance at getting to talk to anybody about how I was feeling and what had gone wrong was with my teammates. I had to open up to them and hope they wouldn’t make fun of me.
“Icarus and I broke up. He left me.”
“I thought that whole thing was just a fake marriage anyway,” Tavian said. “Weren’t you guys supposed to get a divorce right away?”
I shouldn’t have ever let them pry that information out of me at the strip club.
“Yep. But somewhere along the way I actually fell for him. Crazy, right? Me thinking things could work out with a nice guy like him.”
“Don’t sweat it,” Hank said. “You’ve kicked dozens to the curb and you’ll kick dozens more. Would you have wanted to marry the first woman you’ve ever fucked?”
Not sure what point he was trying to make, I played along to find out where he was going. “No way. We were still in high school. God, we didn’t know anything about anything. We were together for all the wrong reasons.”
“Exactly,” Hank said, as if his point was obvious.
“What are you trying to get at?” Tavian asked, apparently as confused as I was.
“Young lovers are stupid,” Hank said. “Nobody knows what they want out of life when they’ve barely even experienced any of it.”
“Yeah, but I’m twenty-five now,” I countered. “I’ve been around the block. I may not know everything yet, but I do know some things that I want.”
“You’ve been around the block with women,” Hank said. “You can’t tell me that things aren’t different with a man. If they weren’t, everybody would just run around fucking everybody. But that’s not the case. Being with a man has to be different than being with a woman. So whatever experience you thought you had, the clock reset with him. You’re just an inexperienced idiot again. Now that he dumped you, you can move on and find a new guy or new girl or one of each—whatever you’re into these days—and you’ll be that much wiser.”
“That sounds stupid to me,” Tavian said.
I pointed my finger at Tavian to show that I agreed, but stayed quiet so that he could explain why, since no good explanations were coming to me.
“His problem isn’t lack of experience. His problem is he’s a pussy.”
“Hey,” I protested, not liking where Tavian was headed.
The other guys laughed, but no one argued with him.
“You know it’s true. The second things get meaningful with a woman—or now a dude, I guess—you push them away. Your problem, my friend, is that despite all your rough talk and macho exterior, you still haven’t learned to accept yourself.”
I looked around at my teammates to see if they were as surprised as me.
Tavian usually was one of the biggest macho assholes anywhere we went. He and his wife fought constantly because of all the stupid things he did while trying to make himself look like he was in control.
“Who are you?” I asked. “Are you an alien who’s possessed my friend? Tavian, if you’re in there and can hear me, blink twice.”
“Fuck you,” Tavian said. “I’ve been going to couples’ counseling because Kelly said she was gonna divorce my dumb ass. I’ve learned some things, man. If you can’t accept yourself, no one else ever will. So my question for you is are you going to cower behind your insecurities again like you always do, or are you going to man up and fight for what you want? You gotta start fighting for yourself if you ever want to be happy, man.”
I looked around for disagreement, but all of my friends were nodding at Tavian.
We never talked about our emotions when we got together, but apparently, despite our best attempts to pretend otherwise, we all had them, even though most of us barely knew what to do with them.
The problem was that I didn’t think there was any way that Icarus would take me back.
Sure, with my next relationship, I might have a chance to do better, but I had broken the good thing between Icarus and me. The easier thing to do would just be to go through the motions until the divorce was official and try to use it as a learning moment going forward.
But, I also knew that if I didn’t change something soon, the situation would repeat itself the next time, and the time after that.
I had to take some kind of action even if it didn’t work.
“All right. I’ll do it. He’s probably somewhere downtown telling his friends that I was an idiot again. I’ll go find them and try to make this right.”
“Hell, yeah,” Tavian said. “Come on, guys. Let’s go and watch his back and make sure he doesn’t chicken out again.”
; I didn’t like the thought of my friends watching me in my moment of vulnerability, but I was much more likely to follow through with them by my side. Relying on friends for something other than making sex jokes and being drinking buddies was weird, but if I could change that about myself, maybe I did have a chance with Icarus.
“All right then, assholes,” I said. “Let’s go save my marriage.”
Twenty-One
Icarus
I’d been inside Hops To It for three hours.
The sun must have set by now.
Whether I was talking about the real sun outside, or my love life, I wasn’t sure. I wanted to get hammered and forget about it all, but was still nursing just my second beer.
The bar wasn’t very crowded, so the bartender didn’t seem upset that I was taking up space without spending a lot of money. With only three other people in the bar on a Saturday night, they wouldn’t last long without finding new customers.
It felt good to worry about somebody else’s problems. My own were getting boring. I was getting tired of reminding myself that I could have done about a million things differently with Harley.
And he could have done things differently, too.
Who was to blame for what was irrelevant, though.
I was lonely and if I hadn’t been so foolish, I might still have had the man I loved. I laughed out loud at myself.
He’d made his own mistakes, but I hadn’t exactly fought to get him to understand why what he’d done had bothered me. I’d just run away.
Like I always do.
“Love. What do I know about love?” I mumbled.
“What’s that?” the bartender asked. “You want another drink?”
I frowned at my half-finished glass. “Sure. Why not?”
I would just put it on my credit card. I wondered how bankruptcy worked.
Do I actually have to like tell someone I’m bankrupt, or do I just kind of become it when I stop being able to pay bills?