“Just drink your water,” he mumbles under his breath, and he gets to his feet. His face is dark, a shadow cast over it.
I do as he commands, finishing up the remainder of the water in my hand, and then I set the glass down on the bedside table. I push the sheets off me and shift my body off the bed, getting to my feet and edging my way toward him. My legs feel stiff. “Why do you do it?”
Out of nowhere, he throws his hands up in despair, and I quickly take a step back, wary that I’ll end up angering him. “Why are you asking me about this again?”
“Because I want the truth.”
“I already gave you the goddamn truth,” he snaps. His cheeks are tinted with a red hue as fury builds up inside him. Tyler hates the truth; Tyler hides the truth. “I do what I do to distract myself.”
“From what?” I almost scream the words at him, because I just want to uncover the truth about him already, because I’m fed up knowing absolutely nothing about him. “That’s what I want to know, Tyler. I want to know why you need all these bullshit distractions.”
People like Tyler have a reason. No one ever acts the way he does simply to distract themselves. No one. I need to know what it is that makes him act the way he does and what makes him say the things he says.
“Distractions make everything easier,” he eventually hisses. His eyes are sharp, eyebrows so furrowed that lines appear across his forehead.
“Makes what easier?”
He grits his teeth together and balls his hands into fists by his sides, the veins under his skin straining from the pressure. I can almost see the gears in his mind shifting as he falls silent for the longest of moments. His voice is quiet yet threatening when he speaks again. “Stop, Eden.”
“Stop what?” I take a step closer to him, and I try to stare back evenly, willing myself not to back down like I have before. This time I’m determined to get the truth, and no amount of glaring on his part will throw me off.
“Stop trying to figure me out.” He says each word so slowly, so firmly, that I can hear each syllable as they roll off his tongue. Because he’s taller than me, he’s glowering down into my face with a sort of heavy look in his eyes, and it suddenly reminds me of the photograph in Dean’s garage. The photograph of him before the 49ers game. The one with his dad at the opposite end.
“Tyler,” I say. I think of him like a puzzle with a million pieces that gradually need to be pieced together to get the full image. One piece of the truth at a time, that’s all it takes. “49ers or Chargers?”
“What kind of a dumb question is that?” he retorts, clearly agitated. He scrunches his face up as though he can’t believe I’ve changed the subject so easily. It’s almost like he’s thinking, Did she really just go from a pain in the butt to a football fanatic? “49ers,” he says.
My lips part as I stare at him, my face blank. Inside, my mind is swirling as I try to comprehend his answer. It’s inconsistent with the photograph in the garage.
“I saw a photo in Dean’s house,” I tell him as I cautiously approach the subject, “of you and him and your dad before a 49ers game. If you’re a fan, how come you looked like you didn’t want to be there?”
He just stares at me and blinks a few times. “Dean was supposed to take that down.”
“Answer the question,” I demand. I’m growing impatient, and everything feels so peculiar all of a sudden. I’m overwhelmed with nerves as I find myself gradually figuring everything thing out. “What was wrong that day?”
Tyler walks away from me then. Reaching out, he scoops up my glass from the bedside table and his hand tightens around it, his knuckles paling from the pressure he’s applying. I think the glass might shatter beneath his touch, but it doesn’t. He moves over to the window and just stands there, the only sound the faint lull of the music and his heavy breathing.
The pier lights are on now and they glow from behind the palm trees that line the avenue, the Pacific Wheel going around and around and around. I don’t know why. It’s the middle of the night. Tyler’s head lowers.
“What is it with you, Eden?” he asks quietly, but his back is turned and he’s staring out the window at the ground below. “You’re not supposed to figure me out. No one is.”
The atmosphere has shifted, and I can sense his mood in the stillness of the moment. His shoulders are dropped low as he traces the rim of the glass with his middle finger. I don’t want to speak again. I want silence so that I can just study him and all his features and all his flaws. I want to look at his face again and I want to catch his gaze and I want to smile and for him to mirror it. I want to see him clench his jaw as he thinks; I want him to trust me enough to tell me what his thoughts are. I want to see through him, to understand him, to accept him.
I want him.