Sin With Me

by JA Huss

  “Oh, fuck!” I scream. “What the fuck?”

  “Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” she keeps saying. And the worst part about it is that I heard her say those same words a little while ago, but with a very different meaning.

  “Oh, fuck,” she goes on, “oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck.” And then she starts coughing. And then she leans over my beautiful, fancy, industrial-looking, stainless-steel sink… and she throws up.

  Maddie Clayton. Maddie Clayton, the kid I last saw when she was thirteen years old and I was driving out of town. Maddie Clayton, the adorable, fresh-faced little over-achiever I used to marvel at because she was smarter everyone else, even then. Maddie Clayton, who always looked at me like I was the coolest guy on the block, and who you could just tell was gonna do great things one day. Maddie Clayton, WHOSE HAIR WAS LIKE MORE OF A REDDISH-BROWN! WASN’T IT?

  Maddie Clayton. My dead best friend Scotty Clayton’s baby sister.

  Here.

  With me.

  Caught in an eruption of flame that consumes us both.

  “What the FUCK?” I exclaim, over and over—and over—as I pace frantically but aimlessly, both hands running through my hair, trying to pull my brain from my skull.

  Maddie has finished throwing up and is now sitting on my kitchen floor. I approach her. “Don’t you fucking come near me!” she lets out. I stop. Again. I put my hands out in a gesture that says, ‘I’m staying here, see?’ as I lower myself to the floor in kind.

  We both take a moment to try to figure out… fuck… anything. After what feels like a while, she goes first.

  “When the fuck did you come back?”

  “I… few months ago.”

  She nods her head and gives an air-snort-laugh kind of a thing.

  I decide to keep talking. “I didn’t know you were still here. Evan told me you guys moved to, like, Monaco or something a few years back.”

  She shakes her head. “Mom and Dad. I stayed.”

  “Fuck me. Evan said he hadn’t talked to you in… and that he thought that… Shit. I didn’t know.”

  She looks at the wall. She looks back. After a beat she says, “You’ve seen Evan?”

  I nod. “Yeah. He’s pretty much the only person I see. Him and my shrink. That’s it.”

  “Fuck you,” she says over a bitter laugh. And now all the things that I liked when they were exclaimed at me sound harshly different.

  There’s so much, I don’t know where to start. I go with, “What the fuck are you doing working at a strip club?”

  I wish I hadn’t started there.

  “Oh, Jesus, fuck you. Go fuck yourself,” she responds. Which seems fair.

  “Dammit,” I say in return, “Maddie… I… look, there’s clearly a lot to… but… listen, are you in like trouble or something? Those guys who were—?”

  “No!” She stops me. “No. You do not get to ask me questions. You get that? You do NOT.”

  I nod. I’m stumped. I don’t know what my next play is here. So I just wait. Finally…

  “What happened to you?” she asks.

  I look up. “What? Whatayou mean? All this shit?” I point up and down at my scars.

  “No. I could fucking give a shit. I assume you must’ve almost gotten killed. Which would be a much better sentence if I could take the word ‘almost’ out of it.”

  Ouch.

  “I mean… you know… one of the things I remember about you most was how goddamn rah-rah you were about loyalty. You remember that shit? How you and Scotty and Evan were the fuckin’ Three Musketeers and how loyalty is the most important thing in the world and how… what was that shit you used to talk? All that hoorah, military bullshit about like, ‘be whoever you are, just be there for me when I need you’ or whatever it was?”

  Hearing my own bullshit mantra thrown in my face like that hurts worse than any goddamn explosion could ever feel. I’d take getting blown up a hundred more times over what’s happening to me right now.

  “So,” she continues. “So. What. Fucking. Happened?”

  I have nothing to say.

  “You were family. And you just… you were a ghost… in the wind. I sent you emails. I tried to call you on a damn sat phone. I wrote letters! Like actual fucking letters to a dude at war like it’s 1942, and I never heard back from you. I don’t know if you can even start to get your head around how fucked up that is, but it’s pretty damn shitty. So it’s a simple question. What happened to you?”

  Here’s what happened. I felt guilty. I felt like a piece of shit. I felt like it was all my fault and I was too ashamed to tell you all. I felt like I could’ve saved Scotty and I failed. I felt like I would have to answer questions and own up and be responsible. I felt like my life was over too and so I threw myself headlong into work, hoping I could make it a reality. I became reckless. I tried to get myself killed. And then instead I got even more people killed. That’s what happened.

  I’m sorry.

  But, of course, I say none of that. Instead… I shrug.

  She goes stock still for, I’m not exaggerating, ten full minutes. Then…

  “I gotta get the fuck out of here.” She stands. And—and I know this is fucked up, I do, but—she looks so sexy, naked, and angry, and spent, standing there in front of me. I just want to grab her and fuck her and pretend none of this is real, and that what is real is that she’s Scarlett and I’m Ford and we can live happily the fuck ever after.

  But that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is… I’m fucked.

  “I need clothes,” she says. “Gimme some goddamn clothes.”

  I nod slightly and stand up. “Bedroom,” I say.

  I walk into the bedroom. She stops outside the doorway. I reach into a dresser drawer and toss her the first t-shirt I find. A white Reservoir Dogs t-shirt. One of the ones with all the characters wearing their suits and walking and smoking.

  “Really?” she says. I shrug yet again. “Fuck it. Give it to me.” I toss her the shirt.

  “Pants?” she asks.

  “Um,” I say, “Shit. I dunno if—” I start looking through drawers trying to find anything that might fit her. “Uh, I don’t think… I might, um—” Suddenly I find a pair of women’s yoga pants in my hand. “Oh. Here,” I say and toss them to her.

  “What the hell are you doing with these?” she rightly asks.

  “I dunno. Not sure. Somebody musta left ’em, I guess.”

  She takes them and, with disgust, puts them on. Then she heads for the front door.

  “Wait,” I say, following. “You don’t have shoes and you can’t—Where are you going anyway?”

  She turns, fiercely. “I’m gonna go see if my car is still there, which I’m sure it isn’t because I left my bag in it and my keys inside, which is perfect because that means my house has probably now been robbed too, but you know, Tyler? Even with all this…” And then she points me up and down. “I mean even with ALL this, this isn’t the worst Halloween I’ve ever had.”

  I know what she’s going to say. Of course I do. The worst Halloween she had was seven years ago, when Scotty died.

  “The worst Halloween I ever had was six years ago, the year after Scotty died.”

  Oh. Guess I didn’t know.

  “Because, and there’s no way you’d know this, I guess, but…” She takes a breath. It’s clear she doesn’t want to say whatever it is she’s thinking.

  I tell her, “If you don’t feel like—”

  “Shut the fuck up,” she says. I do. She stares at the floor, fills her lungs with oxygen, and begins.

  “I don’t know how I made it through that first year. I really don’t. Partially because I was drunk and high for a lot of it. But I did. I muscled through. Even managed to pull a 2.5 GPA, which… I mean not flunking out was a miracle in and of itself.”

  “Why didn’t you just take some time off? Don’t they let you—?”

  “I said shut. Up.” I do. Again. She continues. “And I figured all I had to do was take the su
mmer after that first year of school, pull my shit together, and then I could go back the next fall, kick ass, and show myself what I was made of. Because that’s what Scotty would have done, right? That’s who my brother was. He never quit. He never backed down no matter how hard something got. He never gave up.”

  She pauses, I’m assuming to give me a chance to say something stupid again, but I refrain. She resumes.

  “I had no idea if you were aware of any of what was going on at the time because all my calls were unanswered and my emails and letters didn’t get responses, but I kept writing them and making the calls and trying, because I felt like I was at least sharing with somebody. Somebody who could maybe understand. Somebody I—Whatever. You know how my parents are, so…”

  I’m getting the sickening feeling that I know where this is going and I’m starting to feel very, very ashamed right now.

  “So even though you never responded or tried at all—and I didn’t know then if you were reading the letters and just choosing not to respond, which is shitty, or ignoring them altogether in the first place, which is worse—but even though I never heard back, it made me feel OK to at least pretend that there was someone out there helping me through. But. That illusion got dispelled for me on this day, six years ago. Because on that day, the one-year anniversary of my brother’s death, I came home—I was living back at home—to be greeted with the news that Dad had accepted a new job and that my parents were moving to fucking MONACO. Which, I’m sure you’ll understand, was quite a shock. And I think I was still a little in shock when I went to the mailbox to find that the last letter that I ever tried to send to you had come back to the house marked ‘Return to Sender.’ With a handwritten note on the back—in, I presume, your handwriting—that read, ‘Please stop sending me letters.’ This sound familiar at all?”

  She’s trying to look me in the eyes, but she can’t because they’re facing the floor, my chin buried into my chest.

  “Yeah. And for whatever it’s worth, I poured my guts out in that letter. Oh, man, I really did. I said all kinds of shit. Shit about how I was feeling then. How I had been feeling for the last year. How I felt about YOU. How I had felt about you for a long time. How—even though I was a kid when you left—I had kind of always thought I loved you—”

  That snaps my attention back up.

  “Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I said ALL that shit. And I meant it. I meant every word of it. I don’t wanna brag, but as letters to soldiers at war go, man, it was right up there with the all-time greats. Shame you never got to read it.”

  And this is how the world ends. This. Is how the world. Ends.

  “And so…” She keeps going. “So that was the night that I realized, ‘Oh, shit. Wow. I am really and truly ALONE in the world.’ And y’know what?”

  She takes a long, long breath.

  “I guess I kind of have to thank you. Because tonight…” She shakes her head. “Tonight could’ve been really, really awful, but THIS doesn’t even compare to THAT. Oh, it sucks. I mean, sure, it sucks, because I thought maybe I’d met this weird guy who I had some kind of strange, inexplicable connection with and that maybe, just maybe, things might get be getting better for me or they may start turning around or becoming, like, y’know, tolerable. And that, gee, maybe I won’t have to keep rumbling along all by myself, just bouncing off wall after wall until I become numb to the pain. But then it turns out that it wasn’t a real, like, decent human man hiding behind that beard… but you.”

  Ouch. Again.

  “And so yeah, this BLOWS, but it’s nothing new. I didn’t learn a single new thing. This just reinforces everything I’ve known since that night six years ago…”

  She gets close. So close that I can smell myself on her, still. And just like before, it’s fucked up, but my dick twitches a little. And she says, “I’m the only person in this fucking world I can count on.”

  She turns.

  “So I will.”

  And before I can say a goddamn word, she has her hand on the doorknob.

  “Maddie, please! Wait!”

  And I don’t know why, but she does. She pauses. Head down, hair covering her face, but she pauses and I take my Hail Mary shot.

  “I’m sorry! I’m so, so, so, so, so, so very sorry. I was scared. OK? I was scared and I was destroyed, and… and… you talk about being alone? Yeah, I get it. I fuckin’ get it. I feel that way too. Felt that way the whole time I was gone. And I never knew if the next day was gonna be my last, and I was so scared that if, y’know, something happened to me that you—and your mom and dad too, but mostly you—wouldn’t be able to deal. And I did read your emails and your letters. I did. But they were hard. They were hard for me. Because I was over there and you were here and I hadn’t seen you in so long, but I could hear in the writing and in the things you said that you had become this amazing, special, really cool woman and it hurt. It hurt my heart for you because I knew you were hurting and I… I know me, Maddie. I do. I know myself. There’s no way that I wouldn’t make you hurt worse. Because that shit is what I do. Best case: I die and you have to deal with that loss too. Worst case: I live, show up back in your life and fuck it up some other, terrible way, because that’s what I’m known for. Ask anybody.”

  I take a breath so she can say… something, but she doesn’t.

  “So, I mean, look, this is obviously some bitter fucking irony here, because what’s happening RIGHT NOW is the very thing I was trying to avoid, but… I’ve changed. Or… AM changing. Am trying to change. And I can make it right. I know I can. I swear. Please. Because everything that I have felt for you over these last couple of weeks have been real. Even though I didn’t know it was you. And you didn’t know it was me! And when you didn’t know it was me, you felt it too! I know you did! So let’s just be those people. Or… those versions of ourselves. Because—and it makes so much sense now!—because I think I may love you, Maddie. Like, I think I’m falling in love with you. YOU. Because, because of course we knew each other. Of course we did. That’s why this feels like it does. Because we have known each other since our old lives, since before all this broken reality for both of us began. So we are connected. Pure. Real. On a cellular level. Somehow, this is what was supposed to happen. I did dream of you. I did. And in my dream you were so ethereal and kind and wonderful. Just like you are now. Just like the real you is now. And I’m SO sorry. And I’ll never be able to say it enough, but we have connected and I think we need each other and better late than never and please just give it a chance. Please. Please… Because I do. I think I love you. I… think I love you, Maddie.”

  That’s it. That’s all my inside voice spilling out in an unedited torrent. I have laid myself bare in all ways, and I stand here naked and stripped in all ways, prostrating myself before her. Begging forgiveness for my sins. Asking for her grace.

  She continues staring at the floor. Then, out of seemingly nowhere, she says, “Do you know how Scotty died?”

  “I—” I do, but suddenly I find myself questioning. “I—I mean, I think… Yeah, I mean, he died trying to save that guy, the other hotshot guy who he pushed out of the way of the falling tree or whatever it was… right?”

  A beat as she twists her head slowly back and forth in a tiny shake, before she sighs out and says, “Fuck, man. It’s funny. Some people, y’know, like Scotty? They do all the right things, live with as much integrity as they can muster, try to stand for some kind of… I dunno… principle? Give of themselves to others, sacrifice, live a righteous life, and then at the end of it all they get handed the most horrible kind of fate imaginable. And then other people, shitty people, people with no true north, no guiding principle, no reason for you to believe anything they have to say, and who just kind of do what they want, when they want, how they want without thinking about how it’s affecting other people, people they claim to have love for…” She sniffs a bitter little laugh. “Shit… they get to go to sleep tonight in this fucking penthouse.”

  She twists t
he doorknob, opens the door, steps into the doorframe, and—silhouetted by the shadow of the door on her face, trapped between the light from the hall and the flickering neon lights of Vegas shimmering through the windows onto her cheek—she turns her head enough for me to see her profile, sighs a small sad sigh, and almost inaudibly, she lets free her final, parting words.

  “Why did it have to be you?”

  And as the door falls softly shut, I close my eyes knowing…

  There will be no joy. There will be no morning.

  Chapter Nineteen - Maddie

  For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction.

  I know this is some kind of universal law I learned in seventh-grade science class, and why I know it—and have known it since the first time I read it in my middle-school textbook—is about as understandable as anything else that’s happening to me at the moment. But it fits. It fits my life like a goddamned glove.

  I clearly did something once, something terrible and ugly, and all this bad luck isn’t bad luck at all. It’s fate. It’s destiny. Maybe I’m just an inexplicably evil person or have one of those dark souls. Or fuck it… maybe I’m just paying the price for original sin.

  Who really gives a fuck?

  I deserve this. It’s the Third Law of Motion. I am a million examples of equal and opposite reactions. Every single thing that’s happened to me has been nothing but a reaction to my actions.