Thinking of You

by Rachel Kane

  I leaned against the rail of the bridge, looking down. “I wouldn’t call it a career. Maybe a part-time job.”

  “But you stopped doing it.”

  “Oh god, of course I did. As soon as I could. Alex, don’t think I liked it. I didn’t. I hated it. It was demeaning and traumatic and… I’m glad that part of my life is over. So glad. But I can’t tell people about it. Surely you see that. Surely you understand why I hid it from you.”

  I don’t know why I allowed myself to feel a flicker of hope just then. Foolish optimism, I suppose. After all, isn’t the truth supposed to set you free? I’d spent my whole life lying about this. Shouldn’t I feel good now? Shouldn’t my new life begin, now that I’d said the words?

  “One more question,” he said. He still wouldn’t look at me.

  “Okay.” I prepared myself. Would he ask about the ugly details? Ask me to describe the men? The acts? I wasn’t sure I was ready to dive back into that humiliation, but if it was the right thing to do, I’d do it.

  “Is there anything else? Are there other things to find out about you, that you’re concealing?”

  He had spoken so carefully, as though he had been planning these words all night. Concealing, such a neutral word compared to lying.

  He was giving me the benefit of the doubt.

  “I don’t know how to answer that,” I said.

  “With the truth, preferably.”

  “No, I mean, it’s not as easy as that. Are there other embarrassing, humiliating things in my past? Probably, sure. Of course there are. Anyone’s life is embarrassing if you offer enough grisly details. I can’t promise you she doesn’t have more accusations in store.”

  “Come on, Cam, you know what I’m talking about. What else can she say? What else can she do?”

  What else are you lying about?

  He was being so careful not to say that.

  Other men might have started a fight with me. Might have ranted and raved. Not Alex.

  My life was a minefield and he was stepping gingerly through it.

  “What do you want me to say?” I asked. “I was a mess back then. You don’t reach that point without having a lot of things going wrong in your life, all at once. I did a lot of things I’m not proud of. Which ones are worth hiding, and which aren’t, I don’t know. I shoplifted back then. Is that sin great enough to be worth confessing? I stole food, but also eyeliner and cute shirts. Will she reveal that? I did drugs. A lot of drugs. Some of it was to numb to the pain of my life. That makes a nice story, but I also took plenty of them just because they made life more fun. That makes it into a bad story. Do you see what I mean? I don’t know what parts of my life count as a normal little detail you wouldn’t think of confessing to someone, and what parts are horrifying to other people. I hide them all.”

  I felt like I couldn’t breathe after that. Maybe I was hyperventilating. I don’t know.

  “The story about your parents. True or false?”

  I swallowed. Oh. He didn’t care about shoplifting, of course not. He cared about the things that actually mattered. The stories I’d told that constructed the person he knew, the person he thought I was.

  He had taken that picture of my fake parents off my shelf and looked at it. I’d told him a story about them. That event had created me in his mind, added a little stroke of paint to the portrait of me his heart was making.

  “False,” I said.

  “Your folks are still around?”

  I shook my head. “Possibly. I don’t know. I haven’t seen them since I ran away from home when I was 13.”

  Now he looked over at me.

  “Is that the truth?”

  “What, that I ran away?”

  “Micah offered to run a background check on you. He thought it might help us understand what was coming, what Secret Reader might latch onto next. More than that, he thought it might give me some certainty that you were who you say you are.”

  This sinking in my gut was like nausea. I was so tired of feeling like my life was in other people’s hands.

  “What did it tell you?” I asked, my voice shaky.

  “I told him not to do it,” he said. “I told him I wanted to give you the chance to talk to me.”

  “The chance to lie to you again. To trap me.”

  “Is that what you think?” he asked.

  “I don’t know what to think,” I said. “All you’re doing is asking questions and talking about proving things about me. You haven’t said anything about how you feel about all this. Shit, I just told you I slept with men for money, and I have no idea how you’re reacting to it, because you’ve slipped into detective mode. I don’t want to be investigated, Alex. I want to know how you feel about me. About this.”

  I think I was expecting an argument. A big fight. Maybe I wanted that fight, so that we could explode, and burn out all this anger, this frustration, this distrust. Something big enough to encompass just how awful this felt, this ugly truth now hanging between us.

  Background checks. Really? Who does that? How could you trust someone who would even think about doing that?

  Yeah, I don’t think I get to be self-righteous about that, I said to myself. I haven’t given him any reason to trust me.

  I was still insulted, hurt.

  If I’d thought he would blow up, I was wrong. There were no accusations. No more questions. Just his quiet, low voice.

  “I don’t know how I feel,” he said. “Maybe I don’t want to know. Maybe it’s better not to ask myself what I’m feeling right now. Half of me wants to pretend none of this ever happened. Like maybe if I just drag you to bed right now, we can put it all out of our heads, forget about it. The other half just wants to know why. No, no, don’t say anything. I know why you lied, that’s not what I’m talking about. But why… Why this keeps happening. Why I keep finding myself wrapped up with men who lie to me. What does it say about me? I don’t care what you did in the past. We’ve all got things we’re ashamed of. What I care about is that you don’t seem to have any problem with lying to me. It doesn’t bother you the way it should.”

  “Trust me, Alex, it bothers me—”

  “No. I’m not talking about guilt. Don’t misunderstand me. Something you said before, about not being sure which things were worth hiding, and which things weren’t…that’s a problem. That should bother you, that you can’t tell the difference. Because how can I ever trust you, knowing that about you? That you could lie effortlessly, because you’ve given up figuring out which things in life are bad, and which are awful, which are easy to tell and which are hard. It’s not the lying, is what I’m trying to say. It’s that you’re…sort of detached from the whole idea of truth. You’ve built this life, this person that I came to love, and I don’t know which parts of it are true, but to you, it doesn’t matter. Truth, lies, all that matters to you is that you’ve removed yourself from your past. Am I making any sense?”

  “I am real,” I said. “The person talking to you right now, the person you met in Micah’s office, the person you slept with. This is me. This is the truth about me. Not my past. The past is a liar. It’s just a bunch of stories that pretend to say something real about me. What fact is more important to understanding who I am, the one where I used to pass out at clubs every few nights because I couldn’t stop trying to numb myself with drinks and drugs, or the fact that I like browsing used bookstores for mysteries, because I love the old-fashioned painted covers they used to have? Only one of those is relevant to my current life. Who needs the other one? Why would anyone need to know it?”

  It sounded so rational to me, it made so much sense.

  But there was pain in his voice when he replied, “Just tell me if there’s more. Please, Cam. Come clean. Is this going to keep happening, lie after lie after lie? Tell me? Please?”

  It wasn’t a question I could answer.

  26

  Alex

  I was awake before Cam. I slid off the bed, leaving his arms. He murmured in hi
s sleep and rolled over, his back to me, curling under his blanket.

  There had been no real resolution to our conversation. After a while, we’d realized there was nothing else to say. We’d made our way back to his apartment, both of us feeling wounded. Holding on to one another in the night, trying to take what comfort we could from each other, knowing how thin and temporary that comfort was. Knowing that in the next room, his computer glowed with blue light, an infernal furnace ready to devour the world with its cold fire.

  It was that image that had woken me. A nightmare. I was back at David’s house, watching him eat breakfast, watching him ignore me in favor of his script. Except in this dream, it wasn’t the script he was looking at, it was Cam’s laptop. The glow on David’s face grew brighter and brighter, as more and more of his attention was absorbed by what he read, and I could feel myself fading, dwindling away in front of him, as he continued to read, and then there was the sudden realization that he was reading about me, that my secrets were there on the screen, everything bad I had ever done, and with every word he read, another piece of me vanished, until…

  Now I was awake, and the apartment was dark. I washed my face in the bathroom sink.

  Half past four, an ungodly hour. There was nothing to do. No way for me to occupy myself in this dark and silence. I didn’t want to risk waking Cam. Even now, even after all that had happened, I cared about him, and wanted him to get his rest.

  I thought again about Micah’s offer of a background check.

  The offer had come last night, after I’d told him I wasn’t sure I deserved any love in my life.

  Look, I know one way to resolve this, he’d said. We’ll just pull his records. Do a little digging. We should have done it from the start.

  But I’d shaken my head. I don’t want that, it’s a breach of trust.

  What trust? He’s lying to you.

  I couldn’t explain it to Micah. I could hardly explain it to myself.

  Realistically, I knew that any man I’d meet would have a certain amount of experience with other men. Finding a virgin was a rare, rare thing, after all, and what would you even do with one if you found him? What mattered was that, for the two of you, it was the first time, a time of discovery, a time for exploration, because no matter who was in your past, this relationship you were building was totally new. There had never been the two of you before.

  So what did it matter if Cam had been with other guys…guys who had offered him money? Did the money make it different? More sordid?

  What if he’d just had a time in his life when he was lost, and he’d been promiscuous, but without the money? Would I be having the same confusion and anger and hurt over that?

  Stop all this. It has nothing to do with the particulars of his life. It has to do with the lying. He is always going to lie, because it’s what he does. It’s central to him. It won’t always be malicious lies, hiding a horrible truth. Sometimes it’ll be little things, lies about liking a certain movie, or a lie about how he feels about vacation plans.

  Yes. That was it. It was the idea that I’d never know what he really thought about anything. I’d never know anything true about him, because there would always be this doubt.

  I would never know if he actually loved me…or if he was just using me. For protection, for comfort, for the status of having a boyfriend.

  I’d never know his true heart.

  That’s what hurt. No background check would bring me any certainty about that. There was no way to peer into the human soul. No secret file buried in some government bureaucrat’s office that could tell me the truth about Cam’s love.

  His arms had been so tight around me when we went to bed last night. Was that love, or was it need?

  Would I ever be able to trust him? Ever?

  Over a thousand notifications on his computer. So many that his computer fan whined with the strain; if you lay your hand against the side of it, the machine was blazing hot.

  I didn’t need to look at the messages. They weren’t going to change anything. But by now these updates had become a kind of addiction. I looked.

  > I was shocked Jess would stoop to that level. He’s always so snarky with guests he doesn’t like, but this was a whole new level of nastiness.

  I sat back, surprised. Really? Someone had a rational response to all this? Maybe it was time to be optimistic, maybe the tide was turning—

  > Jess was just saying the truth, and I’m not surprised, I always knew there was something sick about Cameron Carliar and now the truth comes out!!!

  > I am so grossed out by this I don’t even know what to do. Should I donate the books I have of his to Goodwill or just burn them?

  > I would burn them. Throw them in the trash, so nobody else has to read his poison.

  On and on like that, another nine-hundred and ninety or so angry comments. I read them all.

  While it made me hate myself a little, I found myself agreeing with them. Well, not agreeing, exactly. Not perfectly. Not on every point. But on their general sense of outrage, their notion that they’d been cheated out of an image of Cam.

  “Is it pretty bad?” Cam asked from the doorway. I’d been so absorbed in these messages that I hadn’t heard him get up.

  Almost as though the computer had heard him, three new messages chimed in.

  “See for yourself,” I said, moving from the chair.

  “I probably shouldn’t.”

  “Probably for the best,” I said.

  Our unfinished conversation from last night still haunted us.

  Was there more? What secrets was he still holding back?

  I suddenly found him very hard to read. Was he being nonchalant, the way he glanced down at the computer before continuing to the kitchen? Or had that glance been enough to take in at a moment the current threat level, that Secret Reader hadn’t posted anything further, and he wouldn’t have to defend yet more lies?

  It reminded me so much of David. Of all the time I’d spend staring at his face, trying to understand what he was thinking, feeling. It’s such a basic human thing. We look to the expression, almost more than to the words, to tell us what’s going on in someone’s mind.

  Babies do it, it’s one of the first instincts, to look up at the mother’s face. Dogs do it, looking to their masters for guidance in how they should feel.

  Staring at David’s face had left me confused, empty, bereft. Even at the height of his scandal, not a hair had been out of place, not a line of worry had crossed his brow. I needed him to feel something, anything—anger, frustration, fear—but nothing could crack that placid expression.

  My whole career was about putting on a positive public face, but when confronted with the blank mask of someone’s private face, I found I couldn’t handle it.

  Now here I was, watching Cam’s back as he went into the kitchen to make coffee, uncertain what he felt.

  Above all else, above all questions of what he had done, what secrets he kept, and how he felt, there was one more important question, one I had not spent enough time considering:

  Could I survive this with my heart intact?

  Because if I were going to be reminded of David Black in every moment with Cam, this was not going to work. The pain was too great. Even now, even with the distance of time, it hurt too much.

  “Water’s boiling,” Cam said, returning from the kitchen.

  I noticed that when he came back, he made a line for his chair, but took a path that would not bring him too close to me. Was that conscious? Or were we both just feeling defensive, and keeping a safe distance from one another?

  He sat and began to scroll through the messages. “I somehow never expected a life where one of my first jobs on waking up, would be to see how much the world hated me today.”

  “You don’t have to read it all. I don’t think there’s anything new.” I was talking in code. Will there be anything new? Will there be more secrets, more surprises?

  “It doesn’t matter. I find I’m almost u
sed to it by now.”

  “Micah will want to talk to you today—”

  “I’m thinking of firing Micah,” he said. “Maybe Jane as well. You have to admit, they haven’t done anything to help. This just keeps going. It’s like hiring a lawyer to fight a tidal wave. Eventually you admit it was a bad idea and move to higher ground…or you drown.”

  “You really don’t want to fire Micah right now. If there are more revelations—”

  “Oh, Alex, come on. Just ask the damn question you’re dying to ask: Are there more revelations? You want to know if there are more secrets. Just say it.”

  His words were angry but his face was a mask. There was that superior tone. The notion that he was better than everyone else, and shouldn’t be bothered by our plebeian questions.

  “I have tried so hard to protect you,” I said. “All while you were keeping things from me. Yes, I want to know if there’s more. I said it last night, I’ll say it again now. If you love me—”

  “If I love you, I’ll abase myself before you. That’s what you want. The only proof you’ll accept is if I dredge up every ugly detail of my life. You want me to give up any control whatsoever over my own past, my own story, and hand it to you. Every sin, every crime. And if you ever sense, even for a moment, that I’ve held one back, you’ll hold it against me. Trust me, Alex, I understand very well what you’re asking. I’m not sure you understand, though.”

  “Listen, I don’t care about your past, okay? So what if you slept with a few guys for cash—”

  “More than a few.”

  “—fine, more than a few. I don’t care if you took a lot of drugs—”

  “And wound up in the ER at least three times.”

  “—I don’t care about any of it, as long as I can believe you’re truly being honest with me.”

  “No.”

  He rose from his chair and faced me. The distance between us was almost palpable, almost solid, like a block of ice four feet thick.

  “No, you won’t be honest?” I asked.