CHAPTER EIGHT
Finding an Always
Chris has worked some sort of magic with my playlist. Minute eighteen is not so awful. Running is not so awful. This is my second full week of going out every day, and even though it’s still impossibly hard, I’m not giving up. I feel a little bit stronger every day.
It’s just pain.
I crank up the volume. Chris is right. Competing with music does nothing to help speed or endurance. It would never have occurred to me to run to the slow rhythms he’s provided, but it is working. Granted, the lyrics and mood of half the songs are killing me: love, lust, angsty yearning, rage, desire, sadness. But the truth is that I can relate to all of these feelings. It is surprisingly comforting to know that other people in the world suffer like I do. It’s a stupidly obvious realization, but I’m starting to understand that it’s been hard to see outside of my own pain. Chris and his siblings have survived their mother’s death, and that was surely incredibly difficult. Is it harder to lose a parent when you’re a little kid or when you’re a teenager? I feel a stab of sympathy for Chris. He was so little. His father must have had so much to deal with, not just his own grief, but that of four young children. I wonder if he ever remarried. Maybe I’ll ask Chris. Or Sabin, since things are less awkward with him because I have not sexually assaulted him in his own dorm room.
But the point here is that other people have problems and haunted pasts, just as I do. I am not alone. Yes, I have lost both of my parents in a pretty dramatic way, which I generally consider a pretty damn good excuse for total devastation, but … Maybe Chris nailed it by saying that I am holding on to the past because I think it’s all that I have. And by clinging to my guilt, I get nowhere.
He managed to find something besides pain, and I can, too.
The music in my ears changes, and I feel the urge to walk for a few minutes.
No, no, no! You are not walking! I yell at myself. Listen to the music. Toughen up. There are people who have it much worse than you do. Stop being so selfish and … and … narcissistic. F*ck, the world doesn’t revolve around you and your grandiose sense of pain.
My phone chimes and I look down. A rush of feeling rips through me: it’s Chris. He has just sent me more music. Another thirty songs, maybe more. The first new song starts and while the first line of lyrics nearly breaks my heart—my energy, or at least my motivation, is renewed.
It’s just pain.
I am not going to quit. I focus on the music and the lyrics and ignore my body’s protests.
I want to fantasize about Chris to distract myself, but since we haven’t exactly been cozy since our ill-fated encounter on his bed, I try not to. He’s clearly not fantasizing about me. When he’s seen me on campus, he hasn’t obviously bolted in the other direction, but he hasn’t gone out of his way to talk to me, either. It is entirely possible that the connection I felt between us simply doesn’t exist. Maybe my reaction to him just stems from not having touched someone or been touched in years. Honestly, the last time I probably had a lot of physical contact with anyone was when I got a whole lot of hugs at my parents’ funeral—and that kind of touching is not anything like a horny, dorm room make-out session. So maybe it made sense that I was freaking out.
What I do remember during the first few weeks after my parents died was the near-constant hugs, arm squeezes, and head pats I got from concerned family and friends. It wasn’t what I wanted at the time. I remember wanting to swat away everyone who came close to me. I started associating touch with death and grief. I don’t know if I actually started rejecting people or if they just stopped trying to console me, but eventually the unwanted affection just petered out. James and I never hug, not anymore, and my aunt has always been so uptight that I’m quite sure she’s as frigid as I am. Well, or as I was—these days, things seem to be looking up for me in that department. So I have spent four years without touch and affection and without wanting any.
But now there is Christopher Shepherd, the boy who has changed all the rules.
Not that he seems to want me the way that I want him. I’ve accepted that he probably let us mess around in his room out of pity. Of course, just because he felt sorry for me did not mean that he had to touch me like he did or lie down on top of me with a hard-on. At least fooling around with me hadn’t sent him into a completely flaccid state. Another small victory.
Whatever. I am trying to look at it as a fun, meaningless make-out session with some pleasant additional groping. Even though it didn’t feel meaningless to me. At all. It felt like everything.
F*ck.
I look down at my phone and eye Chris’s new playlist. Handpicked songs. I don’t know how much to read into what he’s chosen to send me, but it’s hard not to see it as some kind of affection.
And another big question looms over me: Why hadn’t he reacted in the least to my scar? He hadn’t hesitated at all when he touched it, and he didn’t ask about it, either.
I run harder. My breathing is not as uneven as it was on that first run. On today’s run, my body is starting to feel smoother and more natural. My dorm comes into view, and I check the time. Huh. I have reached the end of my normal route six minutes earlier than I did yesterday, and I’m not ready to keel over. I start to cross the street.
Damn.
I turn around. I have it in me to run for another ten minutes. And the playlist is calling my name. Chris is calling my name. Ten more minutes of running will give me ten more minutes to play in my private fantasy world where Chris doesn’t pull his body away from mine, and he doesn’t stop kissing me, touching my hair, or moving his hand under my shirt. He goes further, feeling every inch of my body.