The Book of Matthew (The Alex Chronicles Book 1)

by Doyle, K. T.

  Our body language was ironic. I was ready to confront our issues, yet there I was huddled up like a wounded, helpless child. And there Matt was, vague and uncommunicative, yet sprawled out on the floor with his legs outstretched as if he was ready to lay it all on the line.

  “Fine, you guess? Haven’t you talked to her lately?”

  “I talked to her last week. Do we have to talk about her? Why do you always ask about her?”

  “Why not talk about her?”

  Matt snapped back to attention and looked up at me. “Well, duh. Why do you think?”

  I played dumb. “I don’t know. You tell me.”

  I looked out the window at the second-story view of the campus. Another month in spring had just turned over. The moon was high and bright, the sky was clear and cloudless, and in a few minutes it would be my nineteenth birthday.

  My relationship with Matt was far from cloudless—and far from happy. I had thought that a relationship based on sex was for the best. Our “friends with benefits” status was ideal. Since there was no commitment to deal with, he could continue to be with the woman he loved, I could be free from all love whatsoever, and no one would need to know.

  Neither of us was supposed to get hurt.

  But as time went on, it started to hurt. I started resenting Christine—a girl I didn’t even know—and Matt, for his inability to leave her. Not that I loved Matt. I didn’t. I just wanted to be the only girl in his life. I started hating the fact that I wasn’t…and hating myself for allowing the relationship to continue anyway.

  It was okay at first that I was the other woman because the fact that Matt saw Christine so infrequently made her the other woman. She only saw him over the Christmas and Easter breaks; I was seeing him several times a week. I had a larger piece of him than she did. That was enough to sustain me for awhile.

  But sometime around mid-April the sex got stale. And since our friendship wasn’t based on much else, so did the relationship itself. I was no longer excited at the thought of an evening alone. The tingle I once felt from his kiss now stung like a slap to the face.

  I was once satisfied with the notion that what we were doing was wrong, and I felt remorseless glee that our actions felt forbidden. That had all but disappeared. It was replaced with the notion that the sex Matt and I had meant nothing to him; it served only to hold him over until he got home to Christine.

  I didn’t love him, but I was hooked on him—too hooked to walk away.

  There was something similar stirring within Matt. Occasionally I’d see a twinkle of passion in his green eyes, but it was joined by a hint of resentment. It reminded me of a quote from the gospel of Matthew: “No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other.”

  Maybe Matt secretly despised me because my presence served as a constant reminder that he was cheating on the woman he loved. Maybe he hated himself because he was just as hooked on me as I was on him, and he wasn’t able to walk away either.

  Our relationship was a vicious cycle we didn’t know how to deal with and couldn’t begin to break.

  “I don’t know why you want to know about her so much,” Matt said.

  He pulled me away from my thoughts and I turned to look at him. Dark circles ringed the flesh under his lower lids and his green eyes seemed to have sunk into his skull.

  “Other than her first name, I don’t know anything about her,” I said.

  “Are you trying to torture yourself?”

  “No, that’s your job,” I joked.

  He didn’t smile. “Isn’t it easier that you don’t know anything about her?”

  “Easier than what, Matt?”

  He shrugged. “I don’t know. I thought it might make you jealous.”

  “You could tell me her whole life story or tell me nothing at all. It doesn’t matter. Anything you say or don’t say won’t change the fact that I’m having sex with a guy who’s in love with someone else.”

  He slouched down so that his head rested on the edge of the bed. “I didn’t ask you to come here tonight so we could fight—or talk about Christine.”

  “Fine.”

  “I wanted to see you and be the first to wish you a happy birthday.”

  “Liar. You wanted this.” I picked up his take-home final exam paper I had spent the previous night editing and winged it across the room at him. It landed at his feet with a slap.

  He smiled, his eyes showing their first sign of life. “Well, yeah. That too.”

  I looked for something else to throw at him. He curled up into a ball and covered his head in anticipation. Finding nothing, I threw more words at him.

  “Do you really think talking about Christine will make me jealous?”

  His shoulders sank when he realized our moment of frivolity was over. “I guess so. I wouldn’t like it if you went on and on about your boyfriend.”

  “I don’t have a boyfriend. All I have is you. And I don’t even have you, really—Christine does. Why? Would you be jealous if I did have a boyfriend?”

  He stared at me a minute without answering and then said, “Are we going to do something for your birthday or not?”

  I looked at the clock that sat on Ted’s desk. It was 11:30 p.m. “Like what?” I asked. “Everything will be closed this time of night.”

  Matt looked at his watch, the one with the black leather band and silver faceplate—the one I had bought him for Christmas. “It’s not that late.” He paused to think a moment. “You hungry? We could take my car a mile into town to the diner.”

  “Sure, why not,” I said.

  “Great,” he said, smirking. “I’ve been wanting to give you a ride all night.”

  …

  Ten minutes later Matt and I were cruising down Main Street in his new Honda Civic, leaving the campus behind en route to the diner.

  But we never quite made it there.

  Kilmore Diner was about a mile outside of campus, nearly smack in the center of town. I attempted several times to explore the town itself on foot, but I never made it past the used bookstore on the corner of Main and Oak Streets, five blocks past the northern edge of campus.

  About a quarter-mile into our journey, I saw a sign for Kilmore Park. The sign was square and white and had a hand-painted black arrow pointing straight ahead. I had overheard conversations about the park, students bragging about smoking pot there after dark and never getting caught. The park was posted with signs stating the hours were dawn to dusk, but without a gate or fence to prevent after-dark entrance, the signs did little to deter late-night mischief.

  “Kilmore Park…” I whispered as we whizzed past the sign.

  “Ever been there?” Matt asked.

  “No.”

  “Let’s check it out.”

  “What about the diner?”

  Matt smirked. “You weren’t hungry anyway, were you?”

  “Maybe a little…”

  I didn’t have a chance to object. We arrived at the entrance to the park and Matt turned left into the gravel parking lot. He drove straight ahead to the furthest end of the lot. Once we were out of sight of the main road and out of reach of streetlights, we were almost entirely encased in darkness.

  Matt put the car into park, turned out the lights, and shut down the engine. He kept the keys in the ignition so we could listen to the radio. He reached over and switched it on.

  I cracked the window a little bit for air and stared through the glass at the stars. “Have you ever been here before?” I asked.

  “Once or twice.”

  “With Christine?”

  “No, not with Christine.”

  “Some other girl?”

  He sighed. “No, Alex. Ted and I brought our guitars out here once or twice early last semester to practice,” he said. “That was before I knew you. You’re the first girl I’ve been here with.”

  “I’m honored.”

  He smirked. “You should be.”
<
br />   I looked out the windshield at the park grounds in front of us. To the left was a cluster of black shadows, what looked like people crouching in the grass. After staring awhile I realized the shadows were picnic tables.

  Off to the right in the distance were several swing sets. I squinted until all three of them came into focus. Their long chains and bowed seats hung as still as soldiers at attention.

  And I had no problem seeing the pine trees—some of them no farther than ten feet away—that ringed the perimeter of the rectangular parking lot, or the tired boy beside me with dark hair and eyes and skin that shone pale in the moonlight.

  “How come you and Ted stopped coming here?” I asked.

  “Because it got cold. And because Ted turned into an asshole.”

  “He seems okay to me,” I said. “But then again, you think everyone is an asshole. Ever stop to consider that maybe it’s you who’s the asshole?”

  His eyebrows furrowed and he leaned over the center gearshift console. “You’re a bitch sometimes, you know that?”

  In the darkness I could see the whites of Matt’s eyes and his enlarged pupils, sucking me in like gaping black holes. I gazed at them for a second and then they were gone. He turned away from me and stared out the driver’s side window.

  Tears sprung to my eyes for the first time in months. It was the first time I cried since I stood sobbing in the kitchen at Kentmore, begging myself to just walk away. Those tears were tiny realizations that the relationship would never work. If only I had listened to myself way back then.

  Matt turned to me and saw me crying. “Oh, God. Don’t cry,” he said. “I didn’t mean it. Honest.”

  “Funny thing about your honesty,” I said, dabbing my eyes with my coat sleeve. “I always have to pry it from you forcefully. In fact, you haven’t been honest with me about anything since day one.”

  His lips parted slightly as if to speak, but he said nothing. He hadn’t a reply or a comeback because he had to have known I was right.

  Instead, he squinted his eyes at me, his anger suddenly replaced with mischievous desire. Finally, he said, “Ever have sex in a car?”

  He didn’t let go of my gaze. We stared at each other intently.

  “As a matter of fact…no,” I said.

  “Wanna give it a shot?”

  He didn’t wait for my answer. He unbuckled his belt, pulled it from his jeans, and threw it in the back seat. The car shook as he stripped off his shoes, his jeans and his t-shirt, bunched them all in a pile, and threw them behind him.

  I sat and stared at him as he disrobed, amazed at what I was about to do. The thought of having sex in a car, filling it with the sounds of lovemaking, was exhilarating. It made the ever-familiar tingle arise in my lower abdomen.

  Matt was naked. He gazed at me, desire in his eyes. It was my turn to get naked.

  What I had done so many times willingly before out of lust, I did then out of an erotic union of lust and rage.

  I stripped and Matt climbed over the seat on top of me. He positioned himself between my legs. “And for your information,” he said, “I would be jealous if you had a boyfriend.”

  “Good, because you—”

  “Stop,” he interjected. He closed his eyes and sighed calmly. “Just stop talking. Happy birthday, Alex.”

  With one thrust he was inside. It wasn’t pretty or particularly big, but what Matt gave me that night was a gift nonetheless. As his gift unwrapped itself inside me, I realized it was the only thing he was ever able to give me: his manhood. I experienced it many times before, but on this night, it felt brand new. I felt like a child on Christmas morning—impatient for the gift to be revealed, and hopeful that it would satisfy me.

  It may not have been what I had asked for, it certainly wasn’t what I was expecting, but it was exactly what Matt wanted me to have. Some gifts are just like that.

  As it turned out, it was the best sex I ever had with Matt. Good thing too, because it would also be the last time. I told myself it had to be. Our night in the park on my nineteenth birthday would be our last night of intimacy ever.

  II.

  She gently ran the rag over the banister to clear the surface of dust. I could see my mother doing this from the corner of my eye as I lay on my bed, the door open.

  Her movements were slow and precise as she walked the entire length of the banister. She started at the far end of the hallway near the bathroom, and worked her way past the master bedroom, past the spare bedroom, and ended just short of my door several paces away. The rag in her right hand looked brand new, white as if she had just bought it.

  She pivoted and walked slowly back down the hallway to spot-check her work with a few swipes of her finger. It was like torture for me, watching her meticulously waste her time on something as unimportant as dust. She took her house chores as seriously as a guard protecting the grave of an Unknown Soldier.

  Her actions were distracting enough that I flipped over on my stomach to resume reading. Not that I was remembering much of the book. What was it called again? I flipped the book over. The Stranger by Albert Camus. Something about existentialism and individual freedom and choice. At the moment I wasn’t quite grasping the point the book was trying to make. What I did understand were the feelings of the main character, Meursault. He was emotionally detached from everyone around him, and acted like he didn’t give a shit about any of them. Oh, and he didn’t believe in God.

  I remembered one sentence in particular, one in which he described the recent death of his mother: "It occurred to me that anyway, one more Sunday was over, that Maman was buried now, that I was going back to work, and that, really, nothing had changed."

  That’s how I had felt about everything in my own life: my father’s affair, my parent’s marital problems, the breakup with Bobby, anxiety about going to college... I had pretended not to care, kept it all bottled up, detached myself.

  But inside I was a mess. I had gone through the five stages of grief with my father and bobby and was still dealing with college anxiety, but let me tell you, that last stage? Acceptance? It’s a fucking blessing. When you get there, when you get to the point where you can finally accept and move on, and then you do move on, things seem to magically go back to normal. It’s like nothing changed.

  Okay, so I didn’t have everything in common with Meursault. I’m obviously not French, my mother isn’t dead, and I didn’t kill anyone with a gun on a beach. And unlike him, I’m scared to death of dying.

  I’ll tell you a little secret though: If I had been forced to read one more book by Dickens, I think I could’ve killed somebody. Pretending to give a shit about A Tale of Two Cities is a fate worse than death by guillotine.

  Admittedly, my distraction was caused less by the words of a Frenchman than by the snow that was falling outside. It stuck to every surface and sidewalk so late in the cold winter season. There was no doubt it would hang around well through the month of March.

  I wanted to be outside sledding in it, rushing around like a child building a snowman, collapsing in the fine powder to make angels. That would be enough to make me temporarily forget that high school graduation was three months away and that college was as close as six.

  The thought of reverting to childhood for several hours outside in the snow was what ultimately distracted me. But I blamed it on my mother and her dust rag.

  “Alex?”

  I looked over my shoulder. My mother was standing in the doorway, a laundry hamper in both hands.

  I returned to my book, seeing nothing but black words on gray pages. “What?”

  “Do you have any dirty laundry?”

  I thought for a minute and then got up from the bed to retrieve the pile of clothes that lay in a heap on my closet floor.

  “Don’t get up,” my mother said, making her way towards my closet. “I don’t want to distract your studies.”

  “No, it’s fine,” I said. “I’ll get it.”

  I slid the closet door open far enou
gh for me to squeeze in. I scooped up the pile of dirty clothes in my arms and then backed out slowly, still hunched, so as to not get entangled in the row of clothes or hit my head on the metal bar.

  When I emerged, the hamper sat at my mother’s feet and she was craning her neck to look inside my closet. “What’s that?” she asked, pointing.

  “What’s what?”

  “Is that the red dress you wore to the Spring Formal last year?”

  “Yeah, so?” I tossed the pile of clothes at her feet next to the hamper. I didn’t like where the conversation was headed.

  She bent over to pick up my clothes. “What’s it doing on the floor?”

  “It must have fallen,” I lied.

  After the Spring Formal I had retreated to my room, locked the door, and immediately stripped off the dress. The fabric cracked as I yanked it over my head. I didn’t feel the need to be gentle with it because I swore I’d never wear it again, so I didn’t care whether it stayed in tact or was torn to shreds. I balled up the dress and threw it in the closet where it landed with a quiet thump on the floor.

  When my mother came knocking to inquire how the dance went, I lied and said I had a good time. Then, to prevent her from opening the door and seeing my red, puffy eyes, I told her I was tired and wanted to go to sleep. I switched off the light and crawled into bed, but I didn’t sleep a wink.

  Every day thereafter when I slid the closet door open, there was the dress. Bad memories lashed out at me every time I opened the closet and tore at my skin like paper cuts. But I hadn’t the heart to throw the dress away.

  My mother put my clothes in the hamper and closed the lid. “You should hang the dress up,” she said.

  “I will,” I lied again.

  “Let me get you a good dress hanger.” She picked up the hamper and turned to leave the room.

  “No!” I said. “I have a wooden hanger. I’ll use that.”

  She peered again into my closet. “I don’t see…”

  “Mom, I have a wooden hanger somewhere. I just have to find it.”

  She put the hamper back down at her feet and clasped her hands together down in front of her. “It’s okay, dear. I understand,” she said.