Frenemies(23)

Event three: Nate. Thanks to that strange little moment we’d had at the party, and his repeated assertion that he could count on me, I was more hurt and confused than ever.

Event four: Henry. More specifically, knowing that Henry and Nate were roommates had started to panic me. Talk about too little, too late. The fact was, Henry could at any moment decide that he needed to come clean with Nate. He could be doing it right now. And yet, somehow, every time I saw him my brain vacated the premises and my mouth took over, and the next thing I knew I was exchanging insults with him. As plans went, mine needed some serious work.

I pulled my heavy coat tighter around me while I kept half my attention on Linus. I called him back from an overenthusiastic sprint toward some distant pedestrians, and then scowled. I was still hearing Henry’s threat in my head, and I didn’t like it.

Here was the story with Henry: I slept with him.

Georgia’s epic crush. Boston’s number-one male slut. The roommate of the guy I had literally just found out was cheating on me. I still didn’t understand how it had happened. It was an accident, and then it was embarrassing, and then he was a jerk.

Well, he was always a jerk. That was sort of his niche.

This was what happened that night, in its entirety:

Nate had called to tell me that he didn’t feel well and couldn’t come over as planned. As planned meaning as decided after I all but begged in a humiliating conversation I could never tell my friends about; they’d disown me. I had decided that I would be like the physical embodiment of chicken soup. I’d soothe him. And if he wasn’t actually sick, as I was trying not to suspect—well, we could talk.

So, clearly, I kind of knew.

There was a moment, the way I guess there always is, when I second-guessed myself out there on the doorstep. I hadn’t rung the doorbell yet. I could have gone back home and let things play out however they were going to play out. I didn’t have to force the issue by showing up. I didn’t have anything to prove, after all. Nate was my boyfriend. He’d actually said so himself to a third party (if Henry counted) a few weeks before. I had no reason to worry—except for the fact that I was already worried enough that I’d hauled myself over to his house to prove to myself that I had no reason to be worried.

I rang the doorbell and Henry answered. He lounged across the doorway in that lazy way he had, and smiled at me. I remembered it as a smirk, but I thought that was just retroactive editing.

That night, he was doing that thing guys do, with his hand against his belly so his T-shirt rose up and his six-pack peeked out. It was impossible not to look, so I did, even though the truth was, I never really permitted myself so much as a stray fantasy about Henry. He was hot, true, but he had always been Georgia’s domain. End of story. He said hello, and told me that Nate was in the kitchen.

And then he just stood there for a minute, and looked at me.

“What?” I said. With absolutely no sense of foreboding of any kind.

“Nothing,” he said, and then he stepped aside so I could walk into his kitchen and find my boyfriend kissing Helen in the shade of the copper cookware hanging from the ceiling.

It was a bad scene.

The thing no one ever told you about scenes like that was how completely unlike television and the movies they were. Because first of all, there was no soundtrack. That sounded like an unimportant detail, but trust me. Without a soundtrack, there was just you. Standing in a doorway, watching your boyfriend kiss a woman who was supposed to be a friend of yours. Just you. And the desire to walk back out, or blink, or do something to make it not real. No music as you spoke, and no writers to make you say something interesting when you did. I wanted to denounce them both—scream—demand explanations—

But I said, “Um.”

They looked at me.

“Um,” I said again, in a very high voice that sounded nothing like me, and certainly didn’t sound the way I wanted to sound, which was unaffected by what I was looking at. “What are you guys doing?”

As if I couldn’t see what they were doing.

But my brain was already racing, constructing stories, making excuses, making it right. Making it not only okay, but necessary that Nate was kissing Helen.

Before I could come up with anything, Nate sighed. He shook his hair back from his forehead with a jerk of his head. He looked pained, as if he were the wounded party.

Helen touched her hand to her lips, and then squared her shoulders. She didn’t look even slightly pained.

She looked me straight in the eye and said, “I told him to tell you.”

And then everything went to pieces for a while.

When the smoke cleared—and I mean that literally, since the meal they were cooking got forgotten in the oven in all the yelling and started smoking right around the time Helen decided she was too fragile to handle all the drama so Nate (the scumbag) chased after her to make sure she was all right, leaving me to sob and rescue the charred remains of their illicit feast—I found myself sitting at the table in the kitchen, going drink for drink with Henry.

I wasn’t sure when he’d turned up in all the commotion, but I didn’t much care. I was stunned and angry. I was hurt. I couldn’t believe either one of them could have betrayed me, and certainly not together. I cried, and Henry handed me a bottle of Jack Daniel’s. I thought that he was a good listener. And that my nose was running. Things got a little bit blurry.