by Rachel Kane
…the only alternative was that I was in the wrong.
That I’d let my past drive me into asking him impossible things.
What if he’d told me more secrets? What if he’d revealed a hundred more things about himself? Would that have been enough, or would I have always been worried there’d be one more thing hidden away?
What was enough for me? When would my endless need for reassurance be satisfied?
It was time to be honest with myself. I had fucked up. Badly.
“Are you kidding me?” said a familiar voice from far away.
The afternoon sun was slanting over the backyard, directly into my eyes. I winced at the pain.
My mouth was too dry to speak.
“This is a lovely sight. I should take a picture and send it to your mother. How long have you been lying there, you fucking drunk?”
“Micah,” I whispered, proud of myself for recognizing him in the glare. I raised the bottle to him, although whether I was offering it to him, or just toasting his arrival, I couldn’t be sure.
“Yes, I’d better dispose of that,” he said, taking the bottle from my hand. The sudden loss was crushing, and I felt the tears start again.
Then his hands were under me, pushing me up.
“Come on, let’s get you inside before your neighbors call the goddamn police.”
The coffee was scalding hot, and the aspirin and vitamins felt too heavy to swallow, like I might choke on them.
“I can’t,” I rasped.
“Take the damn pills. Drink the damn coffee. I will not have you sliding into a black-out.”
“He threw me out,” I said.
“I know.”
“I fucking deserve it.”
“I know.”
“He’s a bastard, Micah. He’s a fucking bastard. I hate him. Why isn’t he here?”
The bottle of scotch had fallen on me, shattered me, so that my day was left in fragments.
I was in a hot shower, Micah standing on the other side of the shower curtain to make sure I didn’t fall and hurt myself.
I was on my sofa, drinking more coffee than one person could possibly stand, without a grain of sugar or drop of cream to take away the bitterness.
I had my head in my hands, describing my last conversation with Cam, as Micah listened. Memory fails me here, I’m not sure what I said. Maybe it didn’t matter. Nothing I said right now was going to make any sense anyway.
There’s no telling how long it was before the effects of the alcohol started to recede. It’s not like there was a line between sober and drunk, and I could tell when I passed it. But at some point, things started making sense again, stopped being flashes of me in new places, places I couldn’t remember walking to.
My nerves were electrical after all that coffee. I felt like if I touched anything metal, I might cause sparks. But at least I could think again.
“You told me,” I said. “You warned me.”
Micah raised an eyebrow, as though realizing I was back in the world. “Yes. The only reason I’m not saying I told you so is because you look like shit. But trust me, as soon as you’re back on your feet, I’ll explain in great detail why should never, ever have become personally involved with a client.”
“I know. It was a mistake.”
“Regardless of the ethics of it, it’s not smart, Alex. Cam was in a crisis. You took advantage of that.”
I blinked. My eyelids felt like I’d rubbed sand into them. “Wait…what? I took advantage of him?”
He leaned forward and stared at me. “Did you think it was the opposite? Yes. I can see you did. That explains some of the crazy nonsense you were spouting a few hours ago. You were in a position of power over Cam. He needed you. Regardless of how he felt, regardless of whatever attraction was springing up between the two of you, it was your responsibility not to follow that. So yes. This is your fault.”
“Thank god I am surrounded by friends in my time of need,” I groaned.
“Do I need to lay it out for you? Do you want me to get up in front of the jury and argue the case against you?”
I didn’t want to hear this right now. I wanted to go to bed. Maybe take something to calm down the coffee burn in my throat.
“You warned me not to get involved with him,” I pointed out. “Like he was bad news.”
“Yes, and you didn’t listen to that either. Let me ask you something, Alex. What other choices did Cam have? He could stick with us to get help, and have you leaping over a professional and ethical boundary—”
“It wasn’t like that.”
“—or he could be on his own, letting his character be defamed and his career destroyed. That wasn’t much of a choice.”
“I didn’t force him. You understand that, don’t you? Our feelings were mutual.”
“Mm-hm. I wonder about that.”
It wasn’t until I opened my eyes that I realized I’d been sitting here with them closed for a while. “What are you talking about? I’m telling you, Micah, this was a consensual relationship.”
“But was it an equal relationship? You had the power to delve into his life. To learn all his secrets, without him asking. He didn’t have the power to do that to you. He deserved better than that. He didn’t do anything wrong.”
“Well, he did break several laws.”
“I’m not a criminal attorney. I don’t care about victimless crimes. Hell, if anyone was the victim of his former life, he was.”
“Fine. So I brought all of this on myself by falling for him, and then getting freaked out that he had more secrets? Is that your point? Can I just remind you that you were in on it too? It was you who offered to do a background check on him. And I said no. That means something, doesn’t it? I was willing to stop digging. I was willing to let it go.”
Micah pulled his jacket off the chair behind him, and took a long envelope from the pocket. He handed it to me.
“I had my investigator do the check,” he said.
“I don’t want that.”
“Are you sure?”
“It’s over between us. I wrecked everything. I don’t need to know anything else.”
When I wouldn’t take the envelope, Micah set it beside me. “Look, it’s not my place to tell you things about Cam’s past. I shouldn’t be doing anything here but documenting your lack of ethics, and the harm you’ve done to the case. But…you need to understand that Cam is blameless.”
I looked down at the envelope. It was so thin. What could it possibly have in it? I picked it up. There couldn’t be more than a couple of sheets of paper in there.
“Fine,” I said. “Tell me.”
“His earliest records are sealed,” Micah told me. “But we found evidence consistent with abuse. We know he went through at least seven foster families, bouncing from one to the next, until finally running away from the last one as an early teen. Before that, there were repeated ER trips. I’ll spare you the medical details. It’s disturbing. But Cam went through hell, Alex. He had an early life full of hardship.”
“So the story about his parents…”
“It is completely understandable. Look, the amazing thing is that he rebuilt himself. That’s what you need to see here. Not lies, but construction. He created a life and a career that had nothing to do with the pain he’d suffered in his earlier life.”
I held the envelope in my hands, brushed my thumb against the white paper.
“But you didn’t care about that,” said Micah. “You didn’t care about what had brought him to this place in life. You were so wrapped up in…in whatever happened to you with David Black, this thing you refuse to talk about, that all you could think about was yourself. Were you being lied to, was your trust being broken. Meanwhile Cam is trying to do what everybody believes in their hearts is the best thing, rising above his upbringing to grow and become something new. But you couldn’t stand it, Alex.”
“I didn’t know.”
“No. But nor did you wait around to find ou
t. Maybe you don’t remember all the things you told me when I got here, when you were too drunk to string many sentences together coherently…but you gave me a pretty good idea of what went on between you two. You assumed the worst, and in the face of someone whose early life was pain, and who needed protecting here and now…you abandoned him. You gave him the choice of tearing himself apart, or losing you forever.”
My guilt stabbed at me, my recognition that Micah was right.
I’d taken all my fear and trauma and put it squarely on Cam’s shoulders, like it was his responsibility to bear it for me. And when he couldn’t take it anymore, when he couldn’t stand one more demand for his secrets…I left. Yes, sure, we’d had a fight…but I could have stopped it.
“I ruined everything,” I said.
“Yes you did. I hope you take this as a lesson for the future, Alex. Assuming you ever take on a client again, you must not get emotionally involved, and—”
“No. No, I have to talk to Cam.”
“What? God, haven’t you listened to anything I’ve said? Cam is the last person you need to talk to. You can’t go on hurting him, and ethically—”
“I can’t just leave things the way they are. I have to tell him that I understand—”
“You have to get on with your life and never see him again, that’s what you have to do! Alex, are you crazy? You can’t do him any good! I was wrong to ask for your help on this, I should have driven you to therapy instead of giving you this case, but now the best thing is the exact advice you always give, to lie low, to wait things out. Cam will forget about you, and you’ll forget about him, and you can work on rebuilding.”
“You don’t understand,” I told Micah. “I love him. I can’t live without him. And I have to get him back.”
It wouldn’t be easy. And it wouldn’t be instant. There was something I had to do first:
My job.
29
Cam
“You did all this yourself?” asked Eli, looking around the disaster of my living room.
I was on the couch in my boxers. I hadn’t managed to put on clothes. Or shower. Or brush my teeth, or sleep, or eat. Time had stopped for me, and I don’t know how long I lay there, staring into the darkness of my ceiling.
Long enough for my computer to have died. I had it here with me, unplugged, reading and reading and reading, sinking into the hatred, until finally the battery had drained.
Then I’d switched over to my phone and followed things there, until it too had died.
After that, all I wanted was silence. The echoes of the comments I had read were enough company for me. Reminding me why I didn’t deserve anything better in life. Why I didn’t deserve Alex.
Don’t get me wrong, I was mad at Alex. Furious. But I couldn’t really blame him.
“I tried to call, but you wouldn’t pick up,” said Eli.
“Phone’s dead.”
“I worried about you. Where is Alex?”
“Gone. Forever.”
Eli came over and studied me. “Oh, so that’s what this is. Cam In Despair.”
“If you’re going to make fun of me, would you mind doing it on the internet? That’s currently where the world stores its hatred for me.”
He shoved my feet off the couch and sat down beside me. My legs were stiff. How long had I been lying in this one spot?
“I’m sorry things didn’t work out,” Eli said.
“Me too. I guess I’m not surprised about it, though. No, don’t look at me like that, this isn’t self-pity. There’s… Ugh. Well, you’ve seen all this stuff that has come out about me.”
“Yes, I have. And I’ve been wanting to talk to you about it, really talk, friend to friend, and I feel kind of guilty that we haven’t had a chance to sit down and have that talk.”
I glanced over at him. “So you don’t hate me?”
“I mean, I was pretty surprised. Shocked, really. Jake had to talk me down off the ledge when I found out you were a…what’s even the right word? Rentboy sounds so stupid.”
“It was a pretty stupid career choice too. But I didn’t exactly have any other marketable skills back then.”
Was I crying? Apparently I was crying.
Eli squeezed my shoulder. “What Jake said to me was, anyone who doesn’t talk about their past, must have some reason for it. Whether it’s guilt, or fear, or…or whatever. It wasn’t my place to judge, he said. It wasn’t even really my place to react. It fundamentally wasn’t any of my business.”
Clearing my throat, I said, “Jake said that?”
“Well, you know Jake, he really said it in about three words and a grunt, and then got back to working on his engine. But yeah. So I’m here to say I support you. I don’t care what you did.”
I tried to smile through the tears. “There’s so much more,” I said. “You just don’t even know. I’m a horrible person, Eli. That’s why Alex left. He knew. There was no hiding it from him. He realized he could dig into my life forever, and never hit rock bottom, it just gets deeper and uglier, the lower you get.”
“I don’t believe that,” said Eli. “And if Alex had any sense, he wouldn’t either. We’re more than our histories. People love you, Cam. Readers line up to talk to you, to get you to sign their books. All across the country, people get excited waiting for your next book. Do you know how much I envy that? Do you know what I would do, to have readers love me as much as they love you?”
“They’re all turning on me. You’ve seen that. How much can they love me, if they’re going to jump on me like that?”
“Oh come on,” he said, nudging the laptop with his foot. “Those people? Most of them have never even read you. They’re just random people on the internet, who hear a bad thing and react to it. They don’t know you. They don’t know that they’re having this effect on you. Hell, never in a million years would I have thought an internet gang-up would hurt a person so badly, until I saw it happen to you. I think people just don’t understand. But nor do they represent all of your readers. They can’t. You’re on the verge of being a bestseller. Thousands and thousands of people are out there, ready for your next book, and they’ve never heard anything about this.”
I rubbed my face. “You’re a very good friend, Eli. I don’t deserve you.”
“You certainly deserve better than to spend another minute in this pig sty. When’s the last time you ate anything?”
I thought back, but shook my head. “Don’t remember.”
“All right. Get dressed—actually, shower first, then get dressed—and let’s go grab lunch.”
Glancing at the window, where I’d pulled the drapes shut, I now noticed glimmers of light at the edges. “Lunch? It’s day time? How long have I been here?”
It would have been properly dramatic if Alex had been waiting in front of the building when we returned from lunch. Eli and I had done a little shopping too, and I had a bag with three new shirts, swinging from my wrist.
I’ll be honest, I’d been hoping he would be there. It was just the sort of thing he’d do. Maybe leaning against my door, glowering.
But no. We reached the apartment, and he wasn’t there. I checked my phone, which had finally come back to life after being plugged in, but no messages. Not from him, anyway.
We didn’t talk about that. Eli opened the drapes to let light in, and helped me clean the place up. I had really come through like a hurricane after Alex had left. There was a lot to do.
It took hours.
Hours in which Alex could have called. Or come by.
Eli let Jake know he was staying for a while longer. We went out to dinner, then got dessert and talked for a while.
Alex still did not show up.
Eventually Eli left, saying he’d check on me tomorrow.
I’d felt some small hope earlier in the day. The food had helped, getting out of the house had helped, but I still felt the loss deep inside me, and each time I thought Alex might be back, each time I hoped he’d get in touch, that
sense of loss got a little bit deeper.
Three days later, I was standing by the iron fence, looking into the park. That sense of being lost in a fog of pain hadn’t quite left, but I was up and about, doing things on my own without Eli’s help. Eli had taken my laptop away, like a good friend. He’d watched as I’d deleted the forum app from my phone, and made me promise not to download it again. No looking at this stuff. Promise me.
I still couldn’t write. When I sat down at the desk, I’d pick up my pen, and nothing would happen. The first page of my new Katie book was nothing but spirals and little doodles. I drew a picture of a croissant, then scratched it out for some reason. But there were no words. It was like my ability to tell a story had dried up inside me.
So I’d gone outside.
I hadn’t made it into the park for some reason. Just looped my arms through the iron bars and stared inside. This had been happening a lot lately, finding myself just…stopped. Like my springs had run down. I wasn’t sad, at least not to the point of crying. And the anger and frustration had really died down.
It was an emptiness I was feeling, but not a bad emptiness. I felt like a room with no furniture. I wasn’t sure what to do with myself.
Someone joined me. Walked up, put his arms through the iron bars, and put his face through the fence.
“Hello,” I said to Alex.
“Will you talk to me?” he asked. “I understand if you don’t want to.”
It has been three days, I wanted to tell him. Even if you’re mad at someone, even if you just broke up with them, you could at least call. Or something.
But Alex didn’t look good.
Eli dragging me back into the real world had positive consequences: My hair was in place, my clothes were clean, and though I felt that horrendous emptiness inside me, I looked like a person who lived in the world.
Alex was unshaved, his hair tousled, shirt-tail hanging free, buttoned wrong. Eyes bloodshot. I wondered if he was drunk.
Suddenly I wasn’t sure whether I wanted to talk to him. I didn’t want to let him into my house, because I didn’t know how this was going to go. Maybe staying in public would be a good idea.
