“Through the window,” I add, because I can’t handle not being blamed.
Everything is always my fault. The broken vases at home. Muddy footprints on the tile floors. The missing bottles of liquor from the cabinet. Caleb’s missing underwear. The fact that he ran off to college a month early and won’t even visit home. The fact that I shoplifted, drank and drove numerous times, crashed parties, broke my mom’s ice sculpture.
It’s all my fault. It’s just like me to do those things. I want Thomas’ accusation too.
“I saw how lonely you were. I saw the anger on your face, the way you…the way you paced around the room, like you were trapped.” The scene plays in my head: his frantic steps, his hands tugging at his hair.
Then the scene changes and I’m outside his bedroom window. “And-And then you were with her—Hadley. I… You were talking and you looked so sad and angry, and then she left. I kept watching your back and your shoulders. They were so tight and I could see the effort it took you to keep yourself together. Then you picked up a vase and I thought you’d throw it against the wall, break it, because I know your heart was breaking, but you held on to it. You set it down gently. You were better than me. I-I could never have done that.”
Nothing moves on his body. I don’t know if he’s breathing, if he’s even seeing me.
“Thomas, I-I’m sorry. I didn’t mean to see it. I…”
Then he shifts on his feet and the overhead light slashes his face into two halves of shadow and light. He appears beastly, like an animal with bright eyes and hard face. For the first time since I began my confession, I feel a tinge of true fear.
I can see he wants to do something, maybe harm me physically. His body is taut with violence. He looks bigger, enlarged with the barely leashed control. For a second, I think he does lose control. His hands jerk and ball into fists, but then he takes a shallow, choppy breath.
“Stay the fuck away from me,” he says softly, deadly.
With that, he marches out of the storage room.
The Bard
My father was a man in love. He’s been dead for ten years now, and the only thing I can say for sure about him is that he was in love with my mother.
I never knew my mother. I never heard her voice, never touched her. She died the day I was born. I have seen pictures of her, of course. I have seen her smile, her warm, blue eyes that resemble mine. She was a beautiful woman with dark brown hair and a wide smile.
Other than that, my knowledge about her is fairly limited. I don’t know what kind of woman would inspire such devotion from a man who never understood how to love his own son. Whatever I know about her came from my father’s poems, which I didn’t know existed until I was old enough to understand that my dad was unlike other dads.
He was busy. He was silent. A hunched, unkempt man who stumbled more than he walked.
My father was a poet.
His desk was always covered by a mountain of papers. Many of them had trails of blue ink webbed across them, as if words had dissolved and run down.
He wrote and wrote but never published anything.
That’s because he wasn’t writing for anyone else but himself. He was resurrecting his dead wife through his words. He wrote about her and only her, and most of his poems were unfinished and rough. They were ramblings about silk-spun hair, a blue-green scarf, a mole on her shoulder, peanut butter cookies.
And I realized this was love—brutal, dark, and never-ending. It’s madness.
When I left this town, I knew I’d never come back. All I’ve ever known here is loneliness and a role model who wouldn’t even look at me. This town isn’t my home. My father wasn’t my father, even though he gave me the gift of poetry—or maybe the burden of it. I am where I am because of it. If I hadn’t found the magic of words, maybe my life would be different right now.
But tonight, the kind of madness that has gripped me is different. It has nothing to do with love, and everything to do with a violet-eyed girl who refuses to leave my thoughts.
My fingers splay wide on the tiled wall as the cold water sluices down my body. The air around me is chilly and abrasive but my body remembers Layla’s heat.
I shift on my feet and a current zaps through me as my cock touches the cold tile. It’s hard and swollen and angry. It’s wild like me, like the things inside me, things that feel both novel and primitive, as if they’ve been in hiding, programmed in my genes, and I’m only discovering them now. The absolute need to possess someone, to be the air they breathe and the universe they live in—I feel both powerful and powerless at once.
My eyes scrunch closed and all I see is her, wrapped around my body, moving, bucking. Like she’d die if she didn’t touch me. Like she’d lose her mind. My arousal spikes up and like a reel I can’t stop from rolling, I see Layla behind my closed eyelids. But it isn’t her face or blush-stained cheeks that I see. It’s her spirit. It’s the fact that she stood up in a class full of people and read her shitty poem out loud. It’s the fact that she had the courage to expose her ugliness to me, to cry in front of me, to be vulnerable. It’s the fact that she threw herself at me, knowing I might reject her.
Could I be that vital to someone?
It makes me want to hold her close even as I want to push her away. How dare she spy on me? How dare she make judgments about my life? What does she know about it anyway?
I shouldn’t have followed her. I shouldn’t have lost control and kissed her back. I’ve been good at ignoring her all week.
But she licked me. In a classroom. In broad daylight. Who does something so crazy? So fucking…erotic?
A sound brings me out of my thoughts. It’s a soft thud of footsteps. I know it’s her; I’d recognize those light, airy footsteps anywhere.
But how do I face Hadley now?
How do I tell her about yet another mistake I made when I promised to put her first? Like a coward, I want to hide out in here, but we have a pull that’s magnetic. If she’s around, I can’t be far away from her. It’s a fucked-up kind of physics.
I shut off the water, dry off, and with the towel wrapped around my waist, come out of the guest bathroom.
As I walk down the hallway, I rush through a hundred different scenarios for how to tell her, whether to tell her or not. I cringe at the idea of hiding this, though I’m left wondering why that is. Is it because I want to be honest with my wife, or is it because that kiss meant more than a slip of judgment and deserves acknowledgment?
Before I can dissect this absurd thought, I see her. Hadley is at the front door with a small bag in her hand.
At the sight of her, I’m back in this world, in my reality. It makes Layla feel like a creature from a distant, alternate universe.