“But I’m not just anyone.” So why was he acting like I was?
“I know that.” He pushed off the cabinet and came over to me, circling me with his arms and pulling me into his chest. “It was just a reflex. It’s how I escape.”
“You need to escape me?”
“No. Not you. Never you.” He kissed my forehead. “I just use it as an escape so often with what I do, that sometimes my body doesn’t remember that I don’t need to run.”
“Why do you need to escape? Don’t you like what you’re doing?”
He rested his chin on top of my head. “Parts of it.”
“Do you want to quit?”
A long pause. “Sometimes.”
“Then why don’t you?” As much as that idea hurt, I also knew it would be a relief for him to step out of the limelight.
I felt him shrug. “What else would I do? This is what I know. This is what I’m good at.”
“But if you’re not happy—”
He pushed away from me. “I’m not going to quit, Libby.”
And just like that, my hope died. The hope that we could break this routine of him spiraling down and me having to drag him back up. My muscles ached from the effort it took. I could almost feel them trembling with the exertion, ready to give out.
I would always hate myself for pushing him into this life.
♪♫♪
We ended up watching Netflix and not talking much at all. It broke my heart because even though I wanted to talk, I couldn’t think of anything to say. I kept thinking of Serena, of the way she had grounded Sean and kept him humble. If I was his cheerleader, she had been his critic. A loving and supportive critic, yes, but a critic nonetheless. She didn’t tell him he was great. She told him he was normal; she told him he could do better. Sean’s fame had given me starry eyes, but she tended to brush it off like glitter. She treated it as if it were a necessary evil to be tolerated instead of it being a prize. It wasn’t until after her death that I realized she was right. Then the fame started to chafe. It became an irritant instead of a high.
Now I had come to view it as the price we paid. And yes, we both paid it. Throughout the evening, there were a few times where Sean would get up to get snacks or a drink and I would see him drifting automatically to the liquor cabinet, but he managed to steer clear of it all night.
It made me wonder what would have happened if I wasn’t there. Would he be drowning in drinks? Would this day—this dark day that marked the anniversary of his sister’s death—have driven him even deeper into the bottle? Was I the only thing keeping him sober tonight?
Or was I the one making him want to escape?
I hoped that wasn’t the case, but I couldn’t ignore the possibility that whatever nerves or shame or embarrassment he felt around me could be pushing him toward drinking. After all, he’d first gone for it right after his botched attempt to kiss me.
That was another reason we weren’t talking. In the many years we had been in each other’s lives, Sean had never kissed me. Never tried. Never looked like he wanted to try. Never said he wanted to kiss me. Up until the jerk move the other night where he tried to hit on me and ended up on the floor for his efforts, the idea that he would think of me in any way other than platonic had been laughable. So I was at a loss to explain away his behavior tonight. If he had been drunk, sure, I could blame it on that—just another jerk move. But he’d been lucid—sad, but perfectly sober—and it had taken more than one attempt to convince him that it was a bad idea.
And it was a bad idea. A very, very bad idea. Because I was barely able to navigate the tangled web of loyalty, guilt, and resentment that existed between us now. If I added any more complicated emotions…
I just hoped that whatever awkwardness sat between us now would quickly dissipate and that I wouldn’t lose more of my friend than I’d already lost. Sometimes it seemed like I could almost see through him. He was missing so many pieces of himself that he was worn in places, threadbare in others,