Hard Truths

by Alex Whitehall

  A dry chuckle escaped my chest as I stood and tried to shake off the malaise that weighted my limbs. I didn’t want him to know I’d been worrying about my friends again. It’s nothing. He understood how important friends were, but he also seemed to handle conflict—in general, everything—with a natural ease I couldn’t grasp. No need to bog him down with my fretting.

  “It’s a little weird that I got here before you when you work from home,” I said, moving to greet him on the way to the kitchen. He had a bag of groceries in each hand, and I took advantage of his incapacitation to slide my hands up his chest and mold my body to his front. His strength seemed to seep into me. Not like I was stealing it, but like it overflowed from him. I smiled when he leaned down to meet my kiss.

  “Good evening to you too. I finished up work early, so I decided to run out and get something special for dinner.”

  “Oooh? Special?” I took one of the bags, because it was a nice thing to do, but also to peek inside. There was a head of lettuce, a clove of garlic, and a packet of shredded cheese.

  “Well, not like super special. But my mom’s fish taco recipe.” He threw a smile at me over his shoulder as he headed to the kitchen, and the warmth there melted away the last of my earlier tensions.

  “That sounds very special to me. I’m excited. Want a hand?” I followed him to the kitchen since I had half the ingredients.

  “If you’d like. You can prep the veggies while I cook the fish.”

  “I hope I don’t mess it up.”

  He grinned as he started pulling out bowls and pans. “It’s pretty straightforward. I’m doing the hard part.”

  “Frying fish?”

  “Well,” he amended, “I’m doing the hardest part. This is a special recipe, but I didn’t say it was difficult.”

  He stuck the recipe to the cabinet with a clip, so it was easy to access as he worked. I glanced over it. “It sounds delicious, and now I want to know why we haven’t had it before.”

  “Mostly because I couldn’t find the recipe. And once you’ve had Mama’s, no other recipe will compare.”

  “Oooh, the challenge is on!”

  Working side by side, we put dinner together without much fuss and only a small mess, laughing as the oil spit and hissed and we danced around trying not to get burned. For the first time in what felt like hours, the tension in my shoulders melted away, the knot in my stomach loosened, and I was able to breathe. Once everything was prepared, I set the table while he stacked the finished ingredients into the soft shells. I set out two beers as he brought the food to the table.

  “It looks delicious,” I said, sitting down.

  He bent over and kissed my temple. “It tastes good too. Thank you for your help.” He sat across from me, and we filled our plates with tacos.

  They tasted even better than they looked. The fish was tender, flaking apart in my mouth and spilling the spiced juices across my tongue. The pico de gallo’s flavors accented the fish, and the lettuce added the perfect amount of crunch.

  I swallowed the last bite of my third taco and leaned back with a sigh, resting my hand on my happily full stomach. “Thank you, that was exactly what I needed.” Later, I’d blame what came out of my mouth next on the immense satisfaction coursing through my veins. Or maybe I needed to feel wanted. Either way, I said, “I’m looking forward to moving in together so we can cook like this more often.”

  Across the table, Logan stiffened, and guilt shot across his face. If I’d been eating, if I hadn’t been watching him, hoping to see warmth in those lovely dark-gray eyes, I would have missed it. But I was watching, and I saw.

  That fragile peace I’d found in the past hour shattered.

  “You do still want to move in together, right?”

  Another hesitation that seemed to stretch between us like the gulf of a desert. That guilt lingered in his eyes. My heart plummeted to my stomach, where it lurched uneasily on the pile of food.

  “Never mind.” I found myself standing up. The screech of the chair against the tile sent a shiver down my spine.

  “Isaac, sit down, it’s not . . .” He wet his lips.

  I waited and waited, but he didn’t finish that thought. Maybe he didn’t know how it ended either.

  “It’s not?” I echoed, trying to gather up the pieces of myself and form them into something that wasn’t raw pain. The shape they took was anger. “You never really wanted to move in together, did you? I mean, sure, maybe at the beginning, but not now you’ve had time to think about it. You made that goddamn stupid rule about me telling my parents before we moved in together so that we wouldn’t ever do it. Because you didn’t think I’d come out, did you?”

  I sucked in a noisy breath, and he reached out, opening his mouth, but I was faster.

  “Well, joke’s on you.” My voice cracked, and I had to swallow down the revulsion swimming up my throat. “But don’t worry, I won’t demand anything from you that you don’t want to give.” I stepped away from the table, nearly tripping on the leg in my haste.

  “Isaac, it’s not like that!”

  Spinning toward him, I pinned him with a glare. “Not like what? Not like I lost my family for you because you said we couldn’t move in together until I told them? Not like you’ve been avoiding it ever since? I’ve seen you, Logan! I mention living together, and you act like you’d cut your leg off to get out of it. You say yes with the reluctance of a torture victim! I don’t need a goddamn diagram,” I spat. “You already drew me one.”

  I saw the wincing guilt in his face, and I didn’t want to see any more. I didn’t think I could. My cobbled-together anger was already beginning to crumble, and I couldn’t let him think me pitiful. More pitiful. He’d done nothing but be my strength when I was weak, and he was obviously sick of it. I marched toward the front door.

  He followed me to the small foyer. “Isaac, wait! C’mon, let’s sit down and talk.”

  A paraphrase of the old favorite We need to talk right before he broke my heart. I shoved my trembling feet into my shoes, clinging to my scraps of anger. “About what? About how I gave up my family for you and I shouldn’t have?” Why was I saying that repeatedly? Did I enjoy the painful crevices of guilt on his face that deepened each time I said it? “You don’t want to move in together. That’s fine.” My voice cracked. It wasn’t fine at all. “I just need to go home now.”

  I yanked my jacket on, and he grabbed my hand. I wanted to pull it away so he wouldn’t be able to tell my entire body was shaking with the earthquake currently happening, but he held tight. He kissed my knuckles, and I noticed, from some far-off distance, that his lips were dry. His breath whispered across my skin. “If you want to go, I won’t stop you. But we need to talk.”

  Those words again. His grip had loosened, and I tore my hand free. “No, we don’t. I think it’s clear what you’re going to say. God, I can’t believe I thought you were worth losing my family over.”

  Silence.

  The door slammed behind me.

  I hurried down the hall, not quite running, trying to get to the privacy of my car before the tears started falling. But I hoped this was one of those times when the love of my life would chase me down the hall and tell me it had all been a misunderstanding.

  The door I’d left behind never opened.

  As I cocooned myself in metal, my first tears fell.

  At home, the silence shouted my situation at me. I hadn’t realized how used to another person’s presence I’d become until it was suddenly gone with little hope of returning. The past week had just been a taste of what it was like now. Every movement made a resounding boom that echoed off the walls and bounded back into my chest. That was the only explanation for why I was shaking so hard, wasn’t it?

  I sank onto the couch, burrowing into the corner so that the back and arm embraced me, offering something stable to stop the world from rattling.

  I’d lost Logan. But maybe I’d lost him long before this if he wasn’t willing to move in with me
. Maybe he’d been drifting farther and farther away, like two boats on the ocean, and it was only now that I’d turned to check that we were sailing in the same direction that I noticed he was lost over the horizon.

  Oh fuck.

  I clenched my hands in my shirt and smashed my lips against my knuckles. My breath sang like the whir of chopper blades over my fingers—fuh fuh fuh fuh fuh. My heart would have been beating just as fast if it hadn’t given up altogether. I closed my eyes and forced in a deep breath. It rasped into me like shards of glass running down my chest, filling my lungs with their sparkling glitter.

  Fuck. Fuck, I needed to get a hold of myself. This was . . .

  Ridiculous? I didn’t know. The only things holding me together were the threads of doubt that clung to my fragments, begging me to question if I had overreacted. But they were tenuous strings threatening to snap as my shaking continued. They weren’t even strong enough to voice the concern as an actual thought—only a mere suggestion of the possibility that one day I’d look back and realize I’d done something foolish.

  At the moment, everything I’d done felt foolish, so the suggestion that this, too, was foolish got lost in the quaking.

  I wasn’t sure how long I’d been sitting there, staring at the wall and the carpet and the backs of my eyelids. Long enough for darkness to settle over my apartment and a chill over my body. The shaking mellowed to quivers. Reality, or a sliver of reason, finally asserted itself:

  I needed to talk to someone.

  Who? A glance at my phone and my friends’ thread reminded me that Jackson didn’t want me around. So that cut Emmett out too. I swallowed, hard, and tucked myself deeper into the cushion. It was okay. It would be okay.

  But I couldn’t talk to Jenna, who would put on her counseling hat and psychoanalyze me—she’d tell me why I was being silly and make it all seem so clear-cut, like she always did. Maybe it was what I needed, but I couldn’t handle that right now. Everything in her world was so . . . exact. And if I couldn’t talk to her, I definitely couldn’t talk to Laura, who’d either tell me to talk to Jenna or would blab everything to Jenna anyway.

  Mark was terrible at this sort of thing and would likely run screaming into the metaphorical woods.

  Roe. I really should have thought of them first. Roe was a good listener, and they offered input, not solutions.

  I closed the group text and opened a text to Roe.

  I took a deep breath, considered my words, then typed, Hey, I need to talk. Call when you get a second.

  Send.

  I stared at the screen. An inordinately long moment later, a check mark appeared by my text, telling me that they’d read it. I waited, my breath lodged in my throat. Waited for the icon to indicate that Roe was writing back or for the phone to switch to an incoming call. I waited until the screen went black, and then I waited a little more. I waited until the hum of activity in my neighbors’ apartments went silent. As silent as my phone, which was as useful as a brick in my hand.

  I waited forever. Then I turned off my phone, left it on the coffee table, and went to bed.

  Without my phone alarm to wake me, it was purely the luck of insomnia that had me up and out of bed in time to go to work for the goddamned Saturday shift I’d offered to put in. Although, without having slept last night, I wasn’t sure how much work I’d get done. I stood in the shower for fifteen minutes, ate a bagel without butter or cream cheese, remembered to put on clothes, and must have driven to work, because I was there swiping my card to enter the building.

  Some of my coworkers were there, but none of us talked—we sat in our cubicles and focused on the tasks needed to complete the project. Our boss got us pizza for lunch. At two, everyone celebrated having finished the job and talked excitedly about what they planned to do with the rest of their weekend as they shut down their computers.

  I listened to their chatter and let their joy wash over me, hoping I could ride the wave and find a hint of emotion besides exhausted numbness.

  But the chatter about the weekend made me wonder if my friends’ brunch was over and if they’d had fun. Sharp pain lanced my chest. I supposed it was better than the numbness.

  On the drive home, I almost headed to Logan’s house out of habit. When I jerked the wheel away from that exit, I nearly swerved into another car. A few tires squealed. Horns blared around me. I kept driving, staring ahead. Other than my stranglehold on the wheel, I was unaffected. My heart thumped along boringly. My head was blank but for the road stretched out in front of it.

  Somehow I got home without causing any accidents.

  In my cozy, echoing apartment, I changed into sweats and sat in front of the TV. For a moment I stared at the blank screen of my phone. Then I reached over, grabbed the remote, and turned the TV on. The Big Bang Theory covered the screen, and I set the remote down. I didn’t like this show, but I couldn’t think of something I’d rather watch. At least now vibrant colors flashed across my vision. Voices and laughter filled my living room.

  I pulled my knees up to my chest and wrapped my arms around my legs so I could rest my chin on my knees, getting comfortable as the commercials informed me this was a marathon running all weekend. Oh good.

  Watching meant I didn’t have to think about how my friends didn’t want me. That Logan didn’t want me. That all I had left was Sue. I hated that I’d been right. Sue was my family. The bonds to everyone else had snapped.

  I should call Sue. I picked up the phone and waited for it to turn on, then impatiently clicked away from the various notifications, blaring bright on the screen. But once they were pushed aside, I saw the time. Nine o’clock on a Saturday wasn’t a good time to call one’s sister when she had a new boyfriend. I’d already driven everyone else away; I wouldn’t want to piss her off too.

  It could wait until tomorrow.

  I blinked at the time again. Nine o’clock? Huh. I should probably eat dinner. I still had a packet of ramen in the cupboard.

  Morning came oddly early when you didn’t sleep. It also lasted longer while I waited for a late enough hour to call my sister and not have her murder me.

  When I finally deemed it a reasonable time, I skipped texting—my stomach lurching at the reminder of the unanswered one I’d sent to Roe—and called her.

  “You’re lucky I love you,” Sue answered, humor in her tone. But she was right. “Good morning, Zacky.”

  “Morning,” I croaked out. I blinked, stunned at my voice. It sounded weird. I cleared my throat and tried again. “Morning.”

  That was better. Less like a postmortem frog.

  “You sick?” she asked. So maybe not as undead frog as I’d thought.

  I swallowed a gulp of coffee, which seemed to help. “No. I’m . . . not sick.” Another swallow. “This isn’t too early, is it?”

  “Anything before noon on a Sunday is too early.” Now her humor was starting to feel forced. “But nothing’s too early for you, my dear brother.”

  There was a strange, sharp burning in my dry eyes and a tightness in my chest. Could insomnia cause a heart attack?

  Then a warm trickle slid down my cheeks. Oh. I was weeping. Great.

  “Isaac?” Her words were laced with concern. “You okay?”

  “Um. No, not really.” I paused, or maybe it was more of a hesitation, because I didn’t want to confess how shit everything was at the moment, but she waited me out. She won, of course, because this was why I’d called. “My friends hate me, and I think Logan and I broke up.”

  It was definitely a pause on her end. “You think? You’re not sure? What happened?”

  So I told her about how Logan hadn’t wanted to move in together until I told Mom and Dad, but that once I’d told them, he hadn’t wanted to do it after all, and then what had happened on Friday night.

  “Oh, Zacky,” she said, voice full of sympathy. But it wasn’t the sympathy I’d been expecting. Possibly pity rather than sympathy.

  “What?”

  “You say Logan want
ed to talk to you. Why didn’t you talk to him?”

  “I didn’t need to talk to him!” I might have shouted. “I knew what he was going to say! I didn’t want to hear that.”

  She managed to make a sigh that sounded pitying and disappointed. She was a talented one, my sister. “How did you know what he was going to say?”

  “Because he wanted to talk. That’s what they always say. We need to talk and then we need to break up. I can read the signs! It doesn’t take a genius when your long-term boyfriend doesn’t want to move in together and then says you need to talk.”

  “Did he actually say he didn’t want you to move in together?”

  I opened my mouth to scream yes, but the word died in my throat. I licked my dry lips. “He wasn’t very enthusiastic about it anytime I brought it up.”

  “Mm-hmm. Then he said he wanted to talk. Maybe he wanted to talk about why he ‘wasn’t very enthusiastic about it.’”

  I answered her with silence. Partially because I was thinking about what she’d said. Partially because I was a stubborn ass sometimes, it seemed.

  “Zacky, I love you, but . . .”

  I knew she was only pausing to gather her words, yet I couldn’t help squeaking, “But?”

  “I love you. Never doubt that. But you know how you didn’t want to tell Mom and Dad about being gay because you knew that conversation was going to hurt?”

  I could have done without that reminder. “Yeah. And it did.”

  “I know. But you tend to avoid conversations that are awkward and possibly painful. I think maybe you’re avoiding a conversation with Logan because it might hurt. And maybe it will. Maybe it won’t. Sometimes the hurt is good.”

  “Good?” I scoffed. “Yeah, it was great losing Mom and Dad and getting hit with a chair.”

  “Sorry.” I heard her wince. “Yes, the chair hurt and is shit and I still can’t believe you didn’t report him, but I’m not talking physical pain. I’m not trying to wave away losing Mom and Dad, either. But maybe it’s healthier to lose them. Like . . . like when you have gangrene on a leg.”