“Because I thought that your foster brother might have contacted you.”
Obviously he’d seen the texts. I was pissed off that he didn’t trust me. And also a little nervous as to his reaction to them. When you feel guilty, you go on the defensive and I heard myself doing that before I could think about the consequences. “You could have just asked me. I would have been honest with you.”
“You could have told me without me having to ask.”
“He texted me last night when you were asleep already. Was I supposed to wake you up and tell you?” I went back to my salad, unable to look at him. There was nothing inappropriate about my responses to Heath the night before. Hadn’t I said I was with Ethan? I had.
“I’m sorry. I saw what you wrote, that you’re with me and are going to stay with me.” He looked ashamed and uncomfortable. “But he was obviously more than a brother.”
This was not a conversation I wanted to be having but I also didn’t want it between us, to repeatedly come up every time we had some sort of disagreement. I’d never known Ethan to be insecure and I didn’t like it. It drove people to do stupid shit like look in someone’s phone. I wanted trust between us. I didn’t want to have to put a lock on my phone just so he wouldn’t violate my privacy. I had nothing to hide, but he had no right to sneak around behind my back.
“You’re right. He was. And I told you we were close. He was very important to me. But I haven’t see him or spoken to him in four years. I think it’s natural that we might want to contact each other, just a little bit.”
“But why haven’t you spoken to each other?” He frowned, his brow furrowing. “That doesn’t make sense unless you had a fight.”
My throat felt tight. “We didn’t have a fight. But social services was planning to investigate him. Our relationship. I was sixteen most of the time he lived with us and he was eighteen.” I wasn’t going to spell it out for him. “So he left and joined the Marines.”
“But he’s still in love with you.” He stated it as fact.
I shrugged, though I felt anything but nonchalant. “I don’t know what he is. But seeing him brought back a lot of memories and I wanted to know he’s okay.” Answers to difficult questions. I wasn’t sure I had gotten those, but I did know without a doubt that Heath had loved me then. And still felt something for me.
It was helping to heal my heart. All the pain, all the hurt, years of wondering, worrying. All my fears had been assuaged and while I knew I couldn’t be with him, it was a gigantic emotional relief that I had just now realized listening to Ethan try to interpret my relationship.
There was no interpreting it.
It didn’t need to be dissected and explained. It just was.
Heath had made me who I was and I had made him who he was. We were indelibly entwined by the past forever regardless of what the future held. It was first love, true love, and it had changed everything.
But Ethan was still frowning. “I don’t want him stalking you and trying to interfere in our relationship.”
There was no preventing Heath if he wanted to be in Orono. There was no stopping him if he wanted to contact me, and I could tell him I was with Ethan, which I had, but I couldn’t tell him to go away and mean it. I wasn’t ready for that yet.
I knew what I needed to say though. I wasn’t going to give up what I had, and I wasn’t going to lose it because Heath walked back into my life as suddenly as he had walked back out.
I stared straight at Ethan and said, “How could he interfere in our relationship? Nothing he could ever do would matter.”
Unlike Ethan, I had always been a convincing liar.
He believed me.
Chapter Seven
I’d never owned a car. Had never been able to afford one. But Ethan had his father’s old Mercedes SUV with a hundred thousand miles on it. He said it would run for another hundred and he babied that car, doing all the proper maintenance and taking it in for car check ups. But his windshield had gotten dinged by a rock last August and Ethan, for once, had been too busy to deal with it. He had also resented having to spend the money on something that wasn’t his fault. It was uncharacteristic stubbornness on his part, but for some reason, he had dug his heels in.
So the bullet-sized crack had stayed for weeks and every time we’d get in the car, the crack was a little bigger, branching out in multiple directions, sprouting little tiny fissures. The more it splintered, the more stubborn Ethan was about it, studiously ignoring it. When I brought up the fact that it was getting a little hard to see between the lines of the cracks, he had gotten annoyed with me. There was nothing wrong with concentrating a little harder, he’d told me.
The Mainer outlook on life. Make it harder when it could be easier.
It was his car, so I shut my mouth even though he only half listened when we were driving anywhere because he had to put so much effort into visibility through the windshield. But I didn’t say anything again.
And one day, the entire window shattered and fell into our laps when we went over a speed bump.
Ethan had spent an hour apologizing and checking over and over to make sure there wasn’t glass clinging to me anywhere and that I hadn’t been cut. But it didn’t change the fact that the windshield had shattered, no matter how sorry he was.
It was just a windshield and I didn’t care, but one tiny crack leads to a million more, and as a few weeks passed by, Ethan’s perfection, all the things I loved about him as a person, as a boyfriend, started to crack, one small fissure at a time.
After he looked in my phone, he started to do weird, very un-Ethan-like things. He started spending a lot of time studying my social media, asking me who this person was and why did this guy comment on my picture of Aubrey and me in her room wearing tiaras. Things he said made it clear he had taken the time to scroll back through pictures that were two years old, before I had met him.
He insisted I take a key to his apartment, pressing it into my hand urgently. “At the end of the year you should move in with me.”
“Oh,” I said, caught off guard. “I hadn’t thought about moving in together. Is that what you want?”
We were on his couch and he had kissed the tip of all my fingers. “Yes. I want you to move in now actually.”
I laughed. “Geez. I feel very wanted.” But it felt like something else. Not Ethan wanting to be with me as much as possible. It felt darker, more sinister. Greedy. Possessive. Insecure. Unpleasant.