Love and Other Words(75)

I love you as the person I want to be with forever.

Will you marry me?

“Oh, my God.”

“Macy, it really isn’t what you think,” Brandon said, cupping his hands on my shoulders. “Please trust me.”

“It looks like he had sex with her,” I said numbly, shrugging him off. As much as the scene horrified me, I couldn’t look away. Emma’s mouth was open on his chest as she snored. Elliot’s dick hung limp along his thigh.

I’d never really seen him naked before, never just… looked.

Brandon shifted anxiously. “It’s her, Macy. Elliot wouldn’t —”

“Oh, shit,” Christian said, coming up beside me. “Not a good look, Ell.”

I made some gasping, choking sound that he seemed to interpret as a question.

“Nah, they have a history. Just… let it go,” Christian said, and then held in a rumbling belch and punched his chest with his fist. “It’s not really a thing. They just fuck around sometimes.”

I turned, bursting past them down the hall, my feet fumbling down the stairs, through the kitchen and then out the front door to the cold, stark air where I couldn’t seem to breathe. I tried to pull in a breath, but it was like I’d been punched over and over in the diaphragm.

Two thirty in the morning on New Year’s, and I was the most sober but least safe driver on the road. Through a wall of tears, I navigated clumsily down the winding road, zigzagging up the narrow hill and down the gravelly slope of the driveway. I screamed at the windshield, and nearly turned around a handful of times because I almost couldn’t believe my own memory. The two of them lying there.

I didn’t look at Elliot’s house as I vaulted up the front steps, afraid I would pound on the door, demand that he come downstairs, even though I knew he wasn’t there.

I didn’t know much in that moment, but I knew I couldn’t make it back to Berkeley in one piece.

Inside, the house was ice cold. Wood was neatly stacked in the back pallet – I could make a fire, have something to eat to settle the grinding in my gut – but I could barely make it to the couch. I pulled a blanket from the back of the easy chair and curled up on the floor.

Honestly, I don’t remember anything else but the feel of the cold floor along the right side of my body. I think my brain must have shut down immediately. Some self-preservation instinct didn’t want me to see his naked hips anymore, see the familiar press of her hand to his navel. Some protective piece of my mind didn’t want to recall the thick smell of that room – the cloud of bodies, and sweat, and beer, and sex – or the casual way Christian referenced their intimate history.

But was he right? Had that been what it was like all week long, and for most of their lives? Emma and Elliot, casually hooking up, filling the tedium of their days with each other? Texting each other to hang when there was nothing else to do. Hooking up at the park because – why not? I had no doubt that Elliot loved me – I knew he did, felt it in the marrow of my bones – but I was there barely a third of the time, and the other two-thirds, there was Emma. Every day at school, all year long: accessible, convenient, familiar.

I had no idea who Real-Life Elliot was. My Elliot existed only on certain days, only in the confines of our library closet.

I don’t know him at all. I don’t know him at all. That was the horrible thought that threaded through my dreams – dreams of running into him on a bus and not recognizing him, dreams of passing him in the hall and feeling the uncomfortable echo that I’d somehow missed something important but didn’t know what it was.

now

sunday, december 31

I

shift my hips up, feeling the clench in my chest when Elliot’s body slips from mine. I feel him retreat beneath me, his eyes filled with an ache that seems to build the longer we’re silent.

“You never let me explain what happened,” he says.

I can’t meet his eyes. It goes so much deeper than this, but even though these details seem tiny now, I know it’s where we have to start. “You said you loved me that night,” I remind him, “for the first time.”

He nods eagerly. “I know.”

“You asked me to marry you.”

Elliot reaches for my arm, circling his fingers around my wrist. “I meant it. I had a ring.”

I look at him in shock. “If I’d said yes, would you still have fucked Emma?”

“Okay.” He stands, pulling his pants up, buckling his belt. “Okay.” His shirt hangs loose, hair remains a mess from my fingers. Elliot looks down at me, backlit by the moon and the distant glow of the party. Bending to retrieve his glasses, he slides them on. “Do you know how many times I’ve told you this story in my head?”

“Probably about as many times as I’ve tried to pretend I didn’t see what I saw.”

He crouches. “I didn’t know what happened until a few days later.”

“What?”

“I mentioned to Christian that you hadn’t called me back, and he said, ‘Probably because she saw Emma naked on top of you.’”

I blink away. I still see the image, so clearly.

“And the worst bit of that,” he says quietly, “is that until he said it, I didn’t know I’d been with Emma. She wasn’t there in the morning.”