“When I first met you, you didn’t do it much. You were that kid who was a mix of helping out some fumbling teacher and beating the crap out of a guy in an alley.”
“And now?”
“You’re a strange mix of that guy I can crack up with on a roof, or talk about serious things, and the one who totally shut down on me.”
His expression turned serious.
“Kyle, talk to me. No matter what you say, I know that response you wrote wasn’t nothing. What’s going on?”
“I could ask you the same thing.”
“What?”
“Your wife, who clearly hurt you so much, whom you haven’t quite divorced yet. Every time you mention her name, you get this look on your face like a dog waiting to get smacked.”
Hearing him say the words, I felt ashamed, yet I wasn’t surprised that’s how I’d come across to him. “It’s not appropriate to discuss things like that.”
“Well, there’s your answer.”
“My answer?”
“To why I have to stop this.”
“Stop what? Kyle, what are you dancing around?”
“Stop coming to builds to see you and talk to you. Because there’s always going to be this line. At the end of the day, I’m your student and you’re my teacher.”
Again, it reminded me of the comment he’d made the other day.
“Yes, that’s true.” My answer only seemed to frustrate him more.
“So you just gotta treat me like any other student.”
“I’m trying to do that.”
His face flushed red, in a way that made me wonder if he was about to hit me.
“James, no one can be this oblivious. Do you not get it? I don’t want you to treat me like any other student. I’ve been really getting along with you, and then there’s this thing that’s fucking it all up. You think it’s easy to meet people who actually get you? You know how long I’ve lived with no one understanding me? And then you come along, and there’s just barrier after barrier. All these things we have to fucking walk on eggshells around.”
I could feel the hate and rage emanating from him.
“God, I hate this. It burns in my fucking chest.” He took a breath, panting. “Mr. Warner, I should go.”
“Kyle, wait—” He was already at the entrance to the library by this time, so out of desperation, I called out, “She cheated on me.”
He froze.
It was painful to say, but I knew it was the only thing that could keep him there. To let him know he wasn’t just any student to me anymore. And it wasn’t that I wanted to tell just anyone what happened. I wanted to tell him.
“I tell everyone we grew apart,” I confessed, offering that phrase I’d practiced telling myself so that when we broke the news to everyone, it would be that much easier. “It started as one guy—I thought it was a one-time thing, learned it was so much more. Then the next. And the next. The professor, the colleague, the counselor, the client. She was prolific. And I was…so forgiving. Embarrassingly forgiving.”
He turned back, and I wanted to look away, feeling as humiliated as I had when it all happened, but I made myself look at him.
As he headed back to me, sympathy in his expression, I was relieved, not only because he was back, but because it felt good to finally tell someone my truth.
I snickered bitterly. “Even as I say that, I can hear the excuses playing through my head. Every time I caught her. Every time I found out… You know, looking back, I can’t even remember an apology. Just half-apologies that I considered had to be good enough to make it work. I don’t think anything like that is all that tragic or can’t be recovered from. I’d say the worst of it was the control. Sheila always had to have control of every situation. Now that we’re not living together, I realize how much it affected me on a day-to-day basis, and put me on edge, always accusing me of the very things she was doing if I so much as hit the gym. I was walking on eggshells around her all the time. Stuff like that weighs on you a lot more than infidelity.”
His face had softened, but perhaps from keeping whatever secrets he felt lingered in his mind. He was good at disguising whatever he was feeling, basically the complete opposite of my expression, which was apparently totally readable for him.