What He Left Behind(28)

“Do you know how frustrating that is?” He covers his face with his hands, then lets them drop onto the bed. “I wasn’t this wound up when I was a virgin.”

“Of course you weren’t.” I touch his arm, and when he doesn’t recoil, I move my hand to the middle of his chest. “Nobody had hurt you then.”

He closes his eyes and shudders.

“Nobody’s going to hurt you now,” I go on, “but it’ll take time for your mind to catch up with that. I’ll wait as long as it takes.”

He sighs. Neither of us says anything for a while. Eventually, Michael breaks the silence. “Can I ask you something kind of weird?”

“Sure.”

He opens his eyes and stares unfocused up at the ceiling. It takes him a good thirty seconds to finally ask, “When did you know Steve was…”

“An *?”

“Yeah. That.”

“Why?”

Michael shrugs. “Just curious.” He turns toward me. “I guess I’m trying to figure out how long I was the clueless idiot in the gilded cage.”

“You weren’t an idiot, Michael. He manipulated you in the beginning, and he scared you in the end. And he fooled us all. Early on, we all liked him.”

His eyebrows jump. “You did?”

“Sure. He seemed like a nice guy. Charming as all hell.”

“Yeah, he was.” Michael sighs, sinking back against the pillow. “And he wasn’t always a total *. We even had some good days right there toward the end.”

“Really? Even after everything he’d done?”

“Stockholm Syndrome will do that to you,” he mutters. Then he shakes his head. “Honestly, he was a terrible person, but he could be a good guy at times. You know how some people are perfectly nice most of the time, but sometimes they’re just insufferable because they’re in a bad mood, or they’re drunk, or whatever?”

“I do, and most of those people don’t do the things Steve did.”

“No, but he was kind of like that. To an extreme. Both extremes, actually. He was really good at making up for it when he was an *, and I stupidly ate it up every time.” He laughs humorlessly. “If I had a nickel for every time he convinced me he’d changed.”

“Like I said, he had us all fooled.” I absently run my fingers up and down Michael’s arm. “The closer you are to a situation like that, the harder it is to see the truth. Especially when you’re being played by someone as manipulative as he was.”

“There is that.” He inches closer to me. “The fact that that he wasn’t all bad all the time makes it worse. I mean, sometimes…” Michael moistens his lips. “Even now, I have to admit there were times when he was genuinely a good guy. Like when my mom died. He was a f*cking saint.”

“That doesn’t negate the other things he did.”

“Of course not, but those things don’t negate the fact that he got me through that period.” Michael turns to me. “I’m not making excuses for him or trying to paint him as a decent guy. To be honest, I need to remember those good times because if someone like him comes along again, I’m afraid of not seeing the red flags because, hey, he’s such a nice guy.”

I shudder at the thought, and take his hand. “Another guy like him comes along, he’ll have to get past me. Assuming there’s anything left after Ian gets his hands on him.”

Michael smiles, though it doesn’t reach his eyes. “Well, you’ll see it before I did. You saw it with Steve.” He pauses. “When did you see it?”

Now it’s my turn to stare up at the ceiling. It’s hard to imagine there was ever a time when I didn’t wish a fiery death on that man, but as sickening as it is to look back on it now, there was. Finding the dividing line, that moment when I began to see him for what he was, isn’t so difficult now, because there are few things in my life I remember more clearly.

I clear my throat. “Your sister’s wedding.”

“Really?”

“Yeah. I mean, I’d started getting a weird vibe off him for a while. Ian and I both felt a little ‘off’ about him, but couldn’t put our finger on why. That night…” I shift my gaze toward him. “You’d been acting really strange the last few times I’d seen you.” I cringe at my own stupidity. “I thought you were just exhausted from school. It was getting close to finals, and it didn’t even occur to me that there was something else going on. And he was kind of short with you whenever I saw you guys together, but… I don’t know, I guess I didn’t see it, or I didn’t want to see it.” I lick my dry lips. “But that night…”

Michael fidgets beside me. “What was it that tipped you off?”

Nausea creeps up my throat at the memory. “When you spilled your wine on him at the reception.”

He shudders hard. I lace my fingers between his and squeeze gently.

That moment plays through my mind like it’s being projected right onto the bedroom ceiling above us. We’d all been having a great time at the reception, even if Michael had been exhausted from—I thought—studying nonstop and his boyfriend had been a little irritable. Michael had just topped off his red wine, and he and Steve had exchanged a few terse words about it. What Steve’s problem was, I’ll never know. Unlike that jerk, Michael’s never been a problem drinker, and if he gets drunk, he gets giggly. He isn’t even loud. He just thinks everything is funny—Michael drunk is like me stoned, and I’ve always thought it was pretty cute.