by Jenn Cooksey
“I said STOP!!”
“Like she was a piece of trash, Tristan! And I wanna know why you did it! Why did you fuckin’ break up with her?!”
I’d finally done it. I pushed him to his breaking point but I didn’t see it coming. I didn’t see the all-encompassing breakdown that was imminent. Nor did I know the depth of what he was hiding or that I’d even played a role in what happened. It was a small role, but it was a role nonetheless. I was so wholly unprepared for what I was about to discover it was truly pathetic. Had I known beforehand…fuck, I don’t even remotely know how I could’ve prepared myself for what was coming. I was also completely unprepared for what would come after…when it was my turn.
“I DIDN’T BREAK UP WITH HER!!” He exploded at me, but, I didn’t get it. I didn’t understand how what he’d just said could be the truth, however, I knew it was.
“Then why the fuck does she think you did?!”
“The same fucking way you think I broke up with her!”
“You’re gonna have to be more specific, dude, so I’ll ask again, why does Camie think you broke up with her if you didn’t?!”
“Because I let her!”
HUH?
“Why in Hell’s name would you let her think you broke up with her? I don’t get it…” Honestly, I’m completely fuckin’ lost. Katy very briefly tossed that out when we were expostulating on everything, but we both threw it out of hand…I mean it’s just ludicrous!
“Because I love her, Jeff, she doesn’t know what happened and I couldn’t…I just couldn’t tell her the truth!”
Oh shit. Katy was right about why he broke up with her too—er…you know what I mean—and by the way he was rapidly falling apart, I think he’d been closer to this meltdown than any of us was aware of, but I had to keep him talking so he could get it all out.
“What’s the truth?”
“No.” Fuck. If he’s gonna start to dig his heels in now, I’m gonna have to get nasty again and I just really don’t think either of us is up to it anymore…
“Tristan, dude, you gotta say it…out loud.”
“I—I can’t…”
“Okay, I’ll say it for you. You had sex with another girl at Camie’s party.”
I didn’t think he would’ve done it after how bad he felt when he just barely made-out with some chick, but he was hammered and it had been a really long time for him. Also, he’d been fucking adamant about not putting any kind of pressure on Camie or even bringing it up to her at all because she’s a virgin, and that go directly to jail card told me how freaked he’d become about her being so much younger than him…really, it’s the only explanation. He just couldn’t hold out any longer.
Funny how you can be right and SO fucking completely wrong at the same time.
The maniacal laughter that bubbled up and escaped his mouth almost overshadowed his utterly nauseated expression and with that, I knew without a doubt that he hadn’t “simply” cheated on her and I’m gonna be honest here; seeing the self-loathing in his face and the guilty tears falling from his absolutely tortured eyes made my throat burn so much, I could barely choke out my next question.
“Tristan, what did you do?”
He buried his face in his hands, completely sobbing now, and when he finally raised his head and looked at me again, I swear to God I was looking at a guy who was pleading for Death to just take him and be done with it. Then when he finally said the words, I understood why and part of me wanted to die with him…
“I alm—I almost r—raped her, Jeff…Oh God, I almost raped her!”
I didn’t say a single fucking word. Partly because I was stunned speechless, but mostly because I knew I didn’t have to. I didn’t need to push him any more; it was all gonna come pouring out so I just sat there silently and waited. Waited for my best friend to tell me about the darkest hour in his life while I prayed like fucking hell that I could keep the sick churning that was going on in my stomach from showing on my face. It wasn’t what he’d admitted, although that was certainly appalling, but in truth, I knew that if he saw my inner reaction he’d mistake it for disgust and condemnation and that was in no way the cause of what I was feeling. I wasn’t sickened by him…I was sick for him.
“I was gonna hurt her, Jeff…I love her so much and I was gonna hurt her. We were both so fucking trashed and I wanted her so goddamned bad…but she said no…more than once. And I ignored her. I heard her and I fucking chose to ignore her!”
That was when I finally understood what he’d been saying when he told Camie there’s always choice and that some choices are harder to live with, but then, I found out the part I’d played and even though he wasn’t blaming me, the guilt that pierced me was unforgettable but, it was only a fraction of what he’s been living with and it still made me wanna puke.
“You’d been riding me incessantly for weeks about how long I’d gone and how whipped I was, and I’d been walking such a goddamned fine line as it was…sometime after that goddamned drinking game we played I crossed that line and became bestial. I was so out of my mind I didn’t even give a shit about what my brutality would’ve done to her body! Oh God…it would’ve hurt! She would’ve been ripped to shreds, Jeff, and I came so fucking close!”
“What made you stop?” I asked. It was my attempt at helping him move us past the abominable crime that he hadn’t actually committed but is still punishing himself for as if he had, because if I have any hope of getting him through this, I have to get him away from the almost and I have to do it now.
His face twisted up in painful regret again and with another sob he said, “I saw her face…I saw her beautiful face. She was so scared. I’m a fucking monster…I shouldn’t even be allowed to live for hurting her like that!”
Oh fuck! And that was exactly the kind of thing I wanted to avoid…now I have to talk him down from the seriously fucking high ledge he just stepped out on.
“But you stopped, Tristan, you didn’t hurt her!”
He practically gave me whiplash by immediately softening his expression and nodding. And just like that, he was back in control. His words only confirmed that he never even once considered ending his life. “But I was going to, and if I hadn’t looked up when I did, I would’ve. And I still ended up hurting her the next morning. It doesn’t even matter that she doesn’t remember a goddamned thing about me pleading for her forgiveness on my hands and knees later that night when I came back and that she told me it was okay and that she loved me. She’s hurt and I’m the one responsible. Jeff, I’d willingly lay my life down if I thought it would take that night away, but even if I could throw myself on an alter and die every single day for the rest of eternity, it wouldn’t turn back the clock and change what would’ve happened if I’d looked at her five seconds later…I have to live my life knowing that.”
“Trist dude, I gotta tell ya, I don’t even need to check my shorts…you just scared the complete shit outta me! I thought you were thinking about killing yourself.” Seriously, can we just pause here for me to say how fucking relieved I am that he’s not one hundred percent deranged or actually suicidal? I honestly thought he’d convinced himself that he’d truly raped her and thought his death would be a just punishment or somehow absolve him.
“No…it never even crossed my mind. Well, not consciously anyway and thanks to Pete, I still don’t know what it feels like to drown…I even owe Jillian for throwing me something like a life preserver.”
That threw me for a loop. I ran my hand through my hair and shook my head in bewilderment at all that I’d completely missed and now needed to be caught up on just so I could even begin to understand. “So, wait…can we go back? Explain what happened afterwards. I mean what actually happened?”
“Aw fuck, man, I’m just about all cried out and there’s so much…you don’t even wanna know.”
Oh what I wouldn’t do for a whiteboard right now… When the real serious shit happens, we go to the board so we can communicate without actually talking and
getting all emotional. It just works for us, but, since we’re on the wild frontier, he’s gotta speak the words. “Yeah, I do…and you need to tell me. We don’t need to rehash the ugly part so just start after that.”
He kind of chuckled in denigration and then, nodding his acceptance, he started up our trail ride and told me the story. “The ugly part…Jesus, that should make this real quick then. Alright, here we go… I did what I always do when I need to sober up in a hurry, I threw myself in the pool. Of course that was after I fuckin’ puked my guts out in a trashcan outs—”
“You puked?!” Yeah, I’m floored. He’s never thrown up in his whole goddamned life…not even when he wanted to know what it was like and tried to make himself.
“Yeah, I’ve done it three times now and I’m praying I’ll never do it again…God, after finally knowing what it feels like, I felt so fuckin’ miserable for her every time she did it that night. Seriously, Jeff, she was so sick…at first I thought she had alcohol poisoning but she didn’t, thank God, I guess her body was just purging itself and she blocked it out or literally blacked out.
“But that’s also why it took me a little while the next day to understand that she didn’t remember anything…she was conscious and talking most of the night. Well, borderline conscious and slurring, but you know what I mean…we spent the entire night on the bathroom floor. I fed her ice chips and when she could keep bigger amounts of water and some crackers down and I was sure she was done throwing up, I gave her some Tylenol, carried her to bed, and then I watched her sleep for a little bit while I thought about everything…and I even woke her up to tell her I was gonna take my stuff home and I’d be back later.
“I was thinking it might not be the best idea to stay that last night with her so I was gonna see if you or Pete could, but it was her birthday and I needed to at least see her and even though she’d forgiven me, I knew I still had a lot to make up for and I didn’t really want to, but we still needed to actually talk about shit, you know? I’d come to the conclusion that I just simply have to be one hundred percent sober one hundred percent of the time if I wanna be with her and after seeing how sick she was, I wanted her to quit drinking too. But I didn’t know she didn’t have the foggiest clue about anything that happened or what was said after I got pissed and stormed out of her room, and that’s when everything blew up. I went to say that I wanted both of us to quit drinking, only I never got it all out of my mouth.”
“So that’s what you were doing? You were just asking her to quit drinking? She came up with the whole breaking up over sex on her own?”
“Well, yeah, sort of. In her screaming at me, I found out she remembered me being so belligerently pissed off at myself when I came to my senses and stopped within less than a quarter of an inch of raping her, although she doesn’t remember it that way, she thought I was raging at her. But honestly, I could’ve phrased what I was trying to say that morning a little better, so in retrospect and taking all of that into consideration, I’m pretty sure she’d already convinced herself I wanted to break up with her because she said no to sex and then coupled it with that stupid fuckin’ fight we had the week before. I was about to say “both” and she fuckin’ flipped out the second she heard the “b” sound and slapped me across the face. I was stunned and I was so fuckin’ pissed that after all of the shit we’d talked about and been through just days before that she really and truly believed I would break up with her like that and that I would do it because she wouldn’t sleep with m—”
“Aw fuck! Trist…that’s my fuckin’ fault too. I told her about that talk we had that one day before English, remember? It was all about you guys not having sex…you told me you thought about breaking up with her when you guys were fighting about sex the day or so before and then how close you were to being completely done waiting for her…” I trailed off when he started firmly shaking his head as if he was disagreeing with me, but uh, I was there, that’s what we were talking about and I told her the whole thing. “What?”
“Jeff, man, you’re so wrong about so much of that…for one thing, you didn’t tell her about that conversation until days later so it had absolutely no bearing on her assumption and another thing…I was talking about you that day. I was fed up and at the end of my rope with you…not her. Your constant teasing was making my life an undignified nightmare and I was trying to tell you to back off because I could feel I was losin’ it with how much I wanted her. I just thought I was gonna lose it on you, though, because if you want the God’s honest truth, man, if I’d have just played by my own fucking rules in the first place, I would’ve waited for her forever.
“And it might’ve sounded like it because I didn’t give you any details whatsoever, but we weren’t actually fighting about sex. It was mostly about trust and respect. Wednesday night we got a lot of shit out in the open and after that, we were fuckin’ solid. Well, obviously not as solid as I thought, otherwise I wouldn’t have been so pissed off when she looked at me with hatred and the belief that the most phenomenal night of our lives together didn’t mean a single fucking thing to me, but by that time, I was so overcome with guilt that I just couldn’t stand there and tell her she was wrong. So I bailed. I was leaving town because I didn’t think I could live with how much it would kill me to see her everyday…fuckin’ Jillian…”
“Jillian?” It’s all making sense now that I know the backstory, but where the hell does Jillian play into this?
“Oh, you know how she is…she fuckin’ called me out on a lie and told me point blank that instead of living away from Camie pain free, I would rather be tortured daily if it meant I could breathe the same air as her. Anyway, I only made it to Carlsbad where I proceeded to get more polluted than I’ve ever been for three entire days and that was when Pete found me face down in the ocean, trying to “experience” what drowning feels like. He pulled me out, sobered me up, told me about the fuckin’ mess my leaving created, and then he made me come home. And that’s pretty much the long and short of it.”
I’d been waiting to ask because I was praying I wouldn’t have to; that somewhere in his account of what happened it would just come out, but, it didn’t so I asked, however, I couldn’t meet his eyes when I did. “Not to make this about me, but I gotta ask, because it’s really been eating at me, why did you go to him and not me?”
“I didn’t.”
“Yeah, you did!”
“No, I really didn’t. Think about it, Jeff. Think about everything I just told you and everything you’ve seen and heard over the last weeks…think about the few people who know a little about what’s been goin’ on, and then think about the specific people who’ve openly spoken out in support of me and not Camie. Now ask yourself, why would they do that?”
That’s been the question Katy and I have been asking ourselves daily and now he expects me to just know the fuckin’ answer?! Jesus Christ, I’m not fuckin’ Jil—Oh my God. Jillian. The chick who knows everything and video tapes it for proof or blackmail, whichever the case may be…and Pete, the only person in the world who can read Tristan like a fucking paperback book even in the off season when they’re not synched.
“She probably knew already, but showed him the video when he stopped by just to be sure and he immediately knew you hadn’t actually broken up with her sister because he read you…Camie’s been pissed off at Jillian since day one because she felt like Jillian was taking your side over hers by not even offering to come after you, and Jillian hasn’t been all that happy with Camie because…well, shit, I don’t know why, but regardless, both Pete and Jillian knew from jump that you never even intended to break up with her!”
“Right.”
Oh HALLELUJAH and can I get an AMEN?!!! Finally!
“I’m not even sure I wanna know why Jillian decided to let what happened that night go without punishing you in some way, but I’m really curious, did Pete hit you as hard as he hit me when he found out about it?” That’s something I could honestly see Pete having a hard time w
ith and I’m sure he probably did more than just considering punching Tristan’s lights out.
“They don’t know…not the specifics anyway. They both know something severely ugly happened and they both know about my deplorable guilt so that means they know that whatever happened, I’m rightfully to blame, but neither of them asked and I’m certain neither of them ever will. Pete has an idea of how severely ugly it was but he doesn’t wanna know anything past that, and Jillian just has too much goin’ on with her parents. Plus, for whatever fucking backwards reason, she trusts me implicitly. She almost always has…even way back in the beginning, and it’s weird because I don’t think it’s ever been a blind trust...she’s basing it off of something. But anyway, I can tell you part of why Jillian’s been ticked at Camie…it’s about their parents. Camie’s been behaving like a typical teenage girl with a broken heart thanks to yours truly and Jillian’s pissed because she believes her parents are gonna suffer right along with Camie if they hear what she thinks happened and why. Jillian wants Camie to suck it up at home for their sake and she wants the both of us to put on an act for their benefit.”
“Huh. Well that’s not evil or selfish at all.”
Tristan started chuckling as we came up to a spot close by the lake where he’d been leading us to and I was so goddamned thrilled that we were about to get off the fuckin’ horses for a while and that we were back to normal—or pretty damned close to it—but then something else occurred to me.
“Dude, I get why you let Camie believe the lie, but why wouldn’t you talk to me and tell me what happened?” I asked him as he got off his horse and tied it to an iron pole in the ground.
I shifted uncomfortably when his newly relaxed demeanor evaporated and he looked away over the water. “Just like she did, you believed it so easily… I’ll be honest, I was really fuckin’ confused when Pete showed up alone. I thought you would’ve been the one to search me out and rescue me. I threw up again when I understood that what Pete was essentially telling me was that after slitting my own throat and handing the dagger over to the one girl I might ever truly love so that she could plunge it straight into my heart, that my best friend, my brother, took it out of my chest…except instead of trying to stop the bleeding like I expected him to, he drove the goddamned thing right into my back. But it’s okay, you didn’t know…you didn’t have all the facts and neither of us was in a place where I could give ‘em to you.”