She was an idiot to have ever let Gage touch her. No, she was more than an idiot. There was something wrong with her. As if the scars he had given her ran so deep, and were so pervasive that they had screwed up everything. Even her ability to be attracted to a normal, good man who hadn’t...hurt her.
It all involved him. Somehow, he was tangled up in all of it.
She couldn’t even tell Lane. Because she was too ashamed. Because she didn’t like telling people anything. That was his fault too. All of it, every last bit.
She wanted to cry and wail and scream a little bit too, but instead she kept it all bottled up. Kept her hand planted firmly over her mouth, and dashed each and every tear away as it fell.
Gage had messed up her life pretty bad seventeen years ago, but this part of it, all of this, was on her. She was the one who had gone after him. Well, then he had gone after her. After she had kissed him. She was the one who had made it like this. She had really, royally messed up her own life, and there was no one to cast aspersions on but herself.
She straightened, brushing her hands over the front of her clothes, then turning and looking in the mirror. Yeah, she looked like she had escaped into the bathroom to cry. There was no recovering from this. She might as well just go and brazen it out. Then there was a knock on the door.
“Rebecca?” She heard Lane’s voice through the door.
“I’m fine,” she said.
“I think when you storm into a bathroom and lock yourself in, you probably aren’t fine. Basing that hypothesis on most of the episodes that occurred during my teenage years.”
Rebecca let out a shuddering breath, then reached out and unlocked the door, turning the knob and pulling it open. “See?” she asked. “Fine.”
“You aren’t usually emotional,” Lane said, her voice muted.
The accurate and painfully honest assessment hung between them. Rebecca didn’t like it. She didn’t want it. Why did Lane have to be such a good friend? Why had she let her get this close? Surface stuff was so easy. A worse friend would have just said okay after Rebecca said fine.
Lane was not a worse friend, sadly.
“I’m a little bit messed up right now,” Rebecca admitted, her throat closing up.
Lane laughed, a leaden sound that did nothing to buoy the mood. “Who isn’t?”
“Nothing happened with Finn,” Rebecca offered.
Rebecca watched as Lane’s expression went through four seasons. From hot to cold and everywhere in between. “It wouldn’t matter if it had,” she said finally.
It was Rebecca’s turn to try and be a decent friend. To press instead of letting lies sit.
“It wouldn’t? Really? You can honestly say that you are completely okay with all of that?”
Lane let out a slow, unsteady breath. “Look, I would rather if you didn’t sleep with him, just because it would be weird.” She tucked a lock of dark hair behind her ear. “I don’t... I don’t really think of him as a man.”
Privately, Rebecca had to call bullshit on that, but she wasn’t going to say it out loud. She had a feeling she’d reached the end of where she could push. And anyway, she was too committed to hanging on to her own bullshit, hoping that Lane wouldn’t say anything to call her out directly.
But that didn’t mean she couldn’t push a little.
“Right,” Rebecca said. “So, it would be weird if someone that you were close to thought of him as one.”
A crease appeared between Lane’s eyebrows. “Do you? I mean, do you think of him as a man?”
“Yes,” Lane said, honestly. “He’s...he’s really good-looking.”
“But nothing happened,” Lane said again.
“Nothing. And, nothing is going to.”
“But...it was,” Lane insisted, her tone strangely flat. “It was going to happen, wasn’t it?”
“No,” Rebecca said, and the minute that she spoke the word, she knew it was true. She would never have been able to do with Finn what she had done with Gage. She would have gotten to his house and freaked out completely. Because for whatever reason a good portion of her issues seemed to need to be worked out on Gage. She had genuinely hoped that it wouldn’t have to be, that she could just forget he existed, but that didn’t seem to be happening so all she could really do was follow that particularly fucked-up arrow where it was pointing.