it will make a difference.”
He glanced over at me as if I was going to stop him. “I agree,” I said. “Go on. Start at the beginning.” Sometimes it was easier to speak in a car. No one had to make eye contact.
His foot pressed down on the accelerator, the lines of the road compressing into dots as we flew down the highway. Long elegant hands moving like the breeze through the long grasses as he did. “After your father caught us, after he decided to kick me out. You never stuck up for me or yourself. Not once.”
“I was scared, Jake. I was a kid.”
“What were you afraid of? Standing up to your father? Being gay?”
He hurled those accusations at me as if I would be ashamed to admit it. I wasn’t. “Yes,” I said. “All of that. I was sixteen.”
“So was I. And I was scared, too. Terrified. But I didn’t have a choice. I had to leave.”
“I’m sorry. I wrote to you. I called the school.”
“I know. But I was too angry to read them. Too scared of what you’d say.”
“I thought we would talk when you came home,” I said, “but you wouldn’t even look at me.”
“Oh, I looked,” he said. “I saw you, you know.”
“Saw me what?”
“Making out with Ryan.”
Impossible. I hadn’t given in to Ryan’s relentless flirting until later that spring, when I’d been scared about going off to college alone. He said he was going to the same one. “You didn’t see that, because it didn’t happen.”
Jake didn’t look convinced. “I saw someone who looked like you making out with Ryan. When I confronted him, he told me you were—” He cut himself off with a curse. “Son of a bitch. He played me.”
“I promise, it wasn’t me. Just because you thought you saw something—”
“Doesn’t mean it happened. Yeah. I know that.”
“You saw what you wanted to see,” I said. “You didn’t even ask me. So you took his word for it instead of asking me? Him, you trusted. You didn’t trust me.”
“I did,” he protested.
“No, you didn’t. If you had, you would have asked me to my face.”
“And if you’d said yes?”
Finally, I snapped. I was tired of apologizing for being a normal scared kid. For being blamed for something I had no control over. “You’re like a fucking dog with a bone man, let it go. It was fifteen years ago. I’m sorry I wasn’t stronger. I’m sorry I didn’t stand up to my father when I was sixteen. But Jake, you have to let it go. If you’d asked, I wouldn’t have said yes because it wasn’t true. I told you I wouldn’t date anyone else while you were gone. But you didn’t trust me, so it wouldn’t have mattered what I said, would it?”
Jake shot me a look I couldn’t interpret and then stared fixedly out the window.
“Jake?”
He held up a finger to stop me, the covered his mouth with his hand. The car slowed, and he drove one-handed. His free hand switched between gripping his hair and waving in the air as he argued silently with himself.
“Talking to your imaginary friends again?”
“I’m having an epiphany,” he said.
“It looks painful.”
“It really is.”
I made a futile attempt to fix his hair. “Want to share with the class?”
“You’re right. You’re a hundred percent right.”
I gave his hair one last tug. “I usually am. About what this time?”
“I put you in an impossible situation. If you’d said yes, I would have been right not to trust you. If you said no, I wouldn’t have believed you because I already didn’t trust you.”
“You didn’t trust me?” It hurt, even all these years later.
He grabbed my arm, fingers digging into my biceps, shaking me. “No. It’s not about you. It was all about me. Fear. I always knew in the back of my mind you would leave me.”
“Jake, I wouldn’t have.”
The road had turned to the west, and the sun glare was blinding. Jake pulled down the sunshade and reached for his sunglasses. “First of all, you don’t know that. We can never know that. But think of it, think of me, then. Why in the world would Eric Smallman, perfect All-American Boy stay with me? The scrawny emo kid with a head full of dreams and schemes but no idea how to make them come true and no special skills or talents? So I’d assumed the worst and made it a self-fulfilling prophecy.”
“I told you I loved you.” And I had.
“I know. And