Shark Out of Water (Grab Your Pole, #3)

by Jenn Cooksey

  “Tristan, do you know that to this very day that man has never put the toilet seat down? Not once! And the two of you might think it’s funny and believe it’s your God-given right being men, but relieving yourselves on bushes and trees or wherever it’s convenient does not constitute as being one with nature, and despite years of him using the great outdoors as a urinal and anything I’ve said in protest, your father has still failed to understand why I have such a problem with him and men in general peeing all over the place just because they’re equipped to do it!” My mom ranted and shook her head in disgusted irritation, while at the same time making me fight to keep my snickering from surfacing because honestly, I was about to crack up.

  “From your expression I’ll assume I was right about you finding public urination just as hilarious as your father and the rest of the men I know, but my point is, your father and I would get into some ugly, knock-down drag-out fights over some pretty insignificant things, but what we learned is that it was because we love each other and have unbridled passion. And that’s a very good thing.”

  “How is that a good thing though, Mom? Feeling hate for someone you actually love?”

  “Let me explain something to you, dear, I believe there to be a very fine line between love and hate and I believe that line is passion…but what side of passion you walk on is up to you. You can either learn to use it as an amazing tool to benefit you and your partner, or you can let it control you in which case, your heart can become hardened and you’ll never experience the joy and pleasure passion can offer,” she said and considered her now half-empty bottle of champagne. “Let’s use an analogy…first, how would you describe what happens when you and Camie fight? Not your actions or words, but how it feels.”

  I don’t know where she’s going with this and I’m not all that comfortable talking about it with her anymore either, but at the same time, I want to. I want to hear something that’ll explain why Camie and I react to each other the way we do when we fight and I want—No, I need to hear that I’m not doomed to lose control of myself every time I’m around her.

  “We burn. We hold in our emotions and when the pressure from the heat of holding onto them gets too high, like a pot of water does that gets too hot, we boil over and burn. We burn to the point of blisters, Mom.”

  She was nodding in acceptance of that analogy and then handed me the bottle of champagne. “Alright, that’s an excellent way to describe how passion can be damaging, but now let’s look at it another way. I enjoy fine liqueurs and spirits, I do, but I love champagne. I love everything about it but especially the bubbles. When I take a sip of champagne, I can feel the bubbles everywhere and I find it to be almost as exhilarating as flying a plane. However, I loathe opening the bottle. For whatever reason, it’s always been difficult for me and I get impatient with trying, so what would’ve happened if I’d gotten overly frustrated in trying to open that bottle just a little bit ago?

  “You saw what I was doing and took it from me so I’m sure you can agree that if you hadn’t, I would’ve become hasty during my struggle and the contents already under pressure would’ve been shaken, creating more pressure than before, consequently creating more bubbles than the bottle will allow, and when I finally got the cork out, it probably would’ve gone flying to hit me in the face and most of the champagne, finally free of it’s now too tight confines, would spill out, making it impossible for me to drink with any real pleasure. But, when you took your time and did it the right way, the cork came out without a problem and I’m able to enjoy the entire bottle and the perfect amount of bubbles.

  “Now, it’s my opinion that you shouldn’t keep things from your partner because that cripples trust in a relationship, however, sometimes it’s not convenient or proper to express your feelings right when you’re having them and you find that out of necessity, you have to bottle things up until such a time when you can express yourself without making things worse by publicly humiliating yourself or the individual with whom you have issue with. But you need to be careful in doing that too. You can’t put your emotions on the back burner for too long because you’ll eventually forget about them until something else arises, compounding the issue.”

  I was nodding my understanding, thinking back to that fight I had with Camie about her offer to have sex if I took her to the dance. That one thing pissed me off so much and I didn’t want to scream at her like I knew I would’ve, so I went to my room and after a couple hours I’d cooled off, but I didn’t go wake her up to talk to her and when morning came, we still couldn’t talk about it because of school. Then I found out about her drinking on the sly and that just made me even more angry than I had been, so by the time we actually got the chance to talk privately about it, those two things combined with the little things over the months that I’d tried to ignore, thinking they weren’t that big of a deal, and I exploded.

  “So before your confrontation, you need to take a reasonable amount of time for yourself to get a handle on what it is that’s bothering you, and when you’re in control, you can calmly and rationally express what you need to. Once the frustrating part has been dealt with, which is liken to opening the bottle, you can give way to the passion, or, the bubbles, that’s left and enjoy the exhilaration its effervescence creates in your relationship, which is the champagne. Once you learn how, you’ll be able to indulge in a healthy way rather than allowing the passion you have to run riot over you and your partner like it does when it comes from a place of anger, hurt, or frustration.”

  Wow. I don’t know about you, but that made perfect sense to me. And as a bonus, I knew I could do exactly what she’d said because I already have…once. Again, it was that almost fight we had about the whole of our relationship. I played dirty the night I found out about her drinking behind my back, but I was cooled off the next day, or rather, the next night and when she came looking for me, I did have a meltdown but I had a good idea what it was that I needed to get out, and Camie never came back at me because she recognized that I needed to vent. Besides, she’d had enough time to cool off as well and was pretty much ready to take responsibility for her part, so she just let me go on until I got it all out of my system. We didn’t burn that night. On the contrary, we flew like we’d never flown before. It was probably the best night of my life thus far.

  It was the night we said I love you…

  Twenty One

  Friday Proper, Week Four

  Hearts have been broken ~ Jeff

  Have you ever played the card game Hearts? If you have, you’re probably familiar with the term “breaking hearts,” but if you’ve never played, I’ll give you the general idea. In the game, the rules say you can’t play a heart if you have a card in the suit that was led nor can you lead with a heart until they’re broken. However, once someone “breaks hearts,” you’re free to lead them willy-nilly from then on out.

  Melissa broke hearts.

  I was staying out of it, like Katy and I’d agreed, but watching Tristan and Camie go round and round in a vicious circle was killing me. But then, on Thursday, Melissa confronted Tristan and said what we were all thinking, thus breaking hearts. It meant that since someone had played a card in the no-no suit, we all could. That is, if we wanted to risk it. The object of the game is to not accumulate points and every heart counts as one point so you really don’t wanna win a trick that has a heart in it. Anyway, when Melissa confronted him, she ended up taking the trick and the point because Tristan was out of hearts in his hand and he played a safe card, like a club. She didn’t really get through to him and although he tried, he didn’t get through to her either, but, I have a feeling he’s holding the bitch. The queen of spades. You really don’t wanna take a trick and get stuck with her as she’s worth thirteen points out of the twenty-six possible in one round.

  Thinking our friendship might not be able to withstand me throwing another heart at him so soon, subsequently forcing him to play the bitch, I left it alone Thursday night when we were all playing ba
ll and getting good and dirty. However, Friday afternoon I’d finally had enough. Camie was going to be getting ready for the dance with Katy at our house and that’s where the limo would be picking the three of us up as well. It was basically an excuse to not introduce her parents to the douche or explain why he’s taking their daughter to the dance instead of her “boyfriend,” and although I’ve kinda wanted to shake her for still going through with this whole dance thing especially after this past week, I’ve completely kept my mouth shut. But when I picked Camie and the cats up to take her to my house and she looked like she’d literally been crying all night and could barely choke out her request for me to take the cats to Tristan today, well, I asked what was goin’ on. She told me about Tristan’s midnight visit, what they talked about, and that he’d left her for probably the last time with him having the knowledge that without the truth, she couldn’t trust him or love him or, really, have any kind of relationship with him whatsoever. He still left without telling her the truth.

  Seeing her so despondent and knowing he was probably in even worse shape, well, it pissed me off so completely that I decided fuck the bitch—the queen of spades that is, not Camie—and damned the consequences. I’m gonna play trump and hope I don’t get slammed.

  I got slammed alright, just not how I expected to be. In fact, I was in for a major surprise. I sent him a text asking where he was, which he responded to almost immediately, and learned he was at home. So, with the cats, I made the three-minute drive to his house, ready to play my card. But when I got there, it took me a minute to remember why I was there to begin with. I walked into his room, which I don’t think I’ve seen this clean since his mom stopped picking up after him when he was ten, I let the cats off their leashes and had to shout above the raging of Disturbed’s “Down With the Sickness” for him to even notice I was there. When he saw me just as the song started to get particularly nasty, he pointed the remote at his stereo and turning it down, he said, “That’s enough out of you, next!” With that, a song I didn’t know being performed by people I didn’t know replaced the ugly swearing out of someone’s mom in the last song…granted, the first part of “Down With the Sickness” is awesome, but, no one wants to hear someone scream that his mom is a bitch and a whore…

  Watching Tristan struggle to remain still so the cats could greet him and listening to the guy and girl harmonizing while singing, “please read the letter that I wrote,” I asked,“Hey, who is this?” It sounded way old school, but, I really liked it.

  “Awesome song, huh? Alison Krauss and Robert Plant…” he told me, sounding far more upbeat than I’d expected to find him. Actually, I’d say he was on the hyper side, which combined with his practically spotless room and his buzzing around, randomly picking stuff up, hanging or removing something from the wall, and dusting, well, it made me think he’d finally had a mental breakdown. Either that or he’s on crystal meth…

  “Uh, yeah, it is…um…what’s goin’ on, Trist? You okay?” I asked and took a look at the surprisingly tidy bulletin board he’d stopped in front of.

  “Yep! I’m good…just cleanin’ shit up and gettin’ rid of crap,” he answered and went to remove Camie’s bra from its place of high esteem.

  “Aw dude…no. Not that… Jesus, just tell her the fuckin’ truth already and stop th—”

  “Already there, man,” he said, looking at the bra in his hands before adding it to a plastic bag at his feet. I hadn’t noticed it before, or I did, but it just looked like one of the many bags of trash lying around his room. However, when he stuck Camie’s bra inside, I saw it contained everything Camie that’d been visible and invisible in his room…pictures, cards, drawings on napkins…all kinds of shit he’d collected that reminded him of her.

  “Y—you are? When, er, how…I mean um…uh, what made you finally come to that decision?” Fuck. In my whole life, I can’t remember a time I was that tongue-tied.

  “You sound surprised,” he said in self-deprecation and when I nodded with my hands in the air like, “Well, uh-huh yeah, duh!” he pointed the remote at the stereo again to turn the music off, picked up the one for his TV and said, “It gets better…watch this shit.”

  Remember how I said I hadn’t been that tongue-tied in my life? I mean I just said it so really, it shouldn’t be hard. Well, this beat that hands down. And wouldn’t you just know it; he’d had the bitch all along, just like I knew he did. Only, he took the trick, not me…

  “Jesus fucking Christ…what the fuck?” I mumbled aloud. I think. Well, no, I must’ve because he explained what I was seeing.

  That being him defiantly not allowing anyone to hold a teeny-tiny baby for more than maybe a minute at a time. He was holding her, loving on her and looking like he was in toddler heaven when someone would wanna see her or hold her and then he’d grudgingly give her up, fold his arms, glare at the person, and then tap his foot impatiently for them to give her back. And when they did, he was right as rain again. He didn’t even play for Christ’s sake and it was his fucking birthday party! He just held the baby or stayed glued to the side of anyone who had her. Then when his cousin, Paul, skipped up wanting to see what was so special and pushed Tristan in order to take cuts in the baby holding line, Trist shoved him to the ground and standing over Paul he yelled, “You don’t get to hold my baby! She’s my baby! I love her and I won’t let you hurt her!” Tristan’s dad was chuckling behind the camera, proud to see his son finally stand up to his cousin, whom I’d completely forgotten until now used to bully us when we were really little. The dick used to bite us and push us down all the fucking time, and then one day, Paul simply stopped bullying us. I’m kinda thinking it was this event I’m watching on video that made him stop…

  When I asked Tristan about the bag after I’d processed as best I could, he told me about the talk he had with his mom last night and after watching this video a few thousand times since then, he’d had some epiphanies, come to some conclusions, and made some decisions. He said that he was dealing with his ghosts and demons, and was coming to terms with his past regrets…and that he was moving on.

  I looked at him when he said all that and couldn’t help but ask, “Dude, did you really just partially quote a Rascal Flatts song as the reason for cleaning your room, wiping away all trace of a chick you still more than love, and finally deciding to tell her the truth?”

  “Yeah, I did. Music’s some pretty powerful shit when you let yourself hear it…”

  I was at a loss for words again, but watching him shake the contents of the bag down and then pick it up, I found my voice, “Then why get rid of any of that? It’s not over, Trist, you know that, right? I mean if you tell her the truth, it’s not over…”

  Tristan sighed and sat at the foot of his bed with the bag still clutched in his hands. “No, I don’t know that for certain, Jeff, but, I can’t keep goin’ on like this and I can’t keep hurting her either. I hope she’ll forgive me, I really do, but I’m not doin’ it for her…I’m doin’ it for me. And yeah, I know there’s a small chance it’s not, but I’ve come to accept the more likely probability that it’s over between Camie and me and it’s gonna hurt like a mother fucker and probably for a really long-ass time. I mean I’m still gonna tell her everything, but, if after I do and she ends everything for good, I can’t come back to all this. It’d just be…fuck, it’d just be too much.”

  “But, dude, what if she doesn’t end it, what if everything works out? You’re tossing all this stuff, all these memories and symbols out the window based on an uncertainty!”

  “It’s just stuff…but, actually, I’m not. Tossin’ anything out the window that is. I’m not getting rid of any of it…I’m just making it easier on myself if my fairytale is over. I figure I’ll stick the bag in my closet and it’ll already be taken care of and easier if I do have to toss it, you know? I won’t have to relive all these things when I’m hurting as badly as I will be.”

  “Wow, um…well, okay…I guess that makes sense. Um, when are y
ou planning on talking to her though? I mean, I really hate to tell you this, Trist, but after last night, she’s afraid you’re gonna try to stop her from goin’ to the dance…like kidnap her or something.”

  He sort of chuckled and nodded. “Yeah, that’s something I’d totally do, but, I won’t. She really wants to go and while I’m really, seriously, vehemently opposed to her goin’ with fucking Evil, I—I gotta let her. She’s right…it’s not like he’s gonna be able to get away with much at a dance when they’re surrounded by my friends. Whom, I might add, I’m expecting to keep Camie in eyesight every fucking second of this stupid dance, you got it? I mean it, Jeff, you guys keep her in sight the entire time because I will honestly and truly murder that guy if he fucks with her in any way. And as far as when I’m planning to talk to her…well, that’s up to her. I want her to pick a time that works for her, you know? I don’t wanna be the reason she fails her driver’s test again or something. I’m thinking of writing her a letter just to let her know I’m ready to tell her everything so I might drop it by her house tomorrow or something…I dunno but, Jeff, promise me you won’t let her out of your sight tonight. I mean I get that you’re goin’ to a dance and Kate’s gonna wanna actually do that and all that shit, but, just promise me, okay?”

  “You really don’t trust this fucker, do you?” I know his reasons…Camie told Katy and me the Samantha story and I remembered that night and how weird and pissy he was, and even though Camie made a very sensible argument that I actually sorta-kinda agree with—a little-ish, I can tell Trist still really doesn’t trust the guy.