The impulse to pick at a scab rises up in me, and I’m too worked up to ignore it.
“You never really explained why I shouldn’t want anything to do with you, as you said.” Is it because he thinks he would be a bad influence on me? I hope not, because that’s ridiculous. “We’re probably the same,” I tell him. “Both fucked up.”
“You’re not fucked up.” His mouth pulls into a bitter, almost humored twist.
So that’s what he thinks. He thinks I’m some upstanding, never-sexed, straight-laced girl from the suburbs. And that would be true. It might have been. In another universe, maybe that’s exactly who I am. (Minus the never-sexed. I’d totally be sexed in my alternate reality).
“You don’t think so?” I laugh dryly. I reach into my pocket and I stretch my fingers out and rub around the fabric. “Would it surprise you to know I’m an addict? Some people say ‘recovered’ addict, but seriously? That shit’s a lie. That night I saw you up on stage? I still had an emergency oxy I was keeping in my pocket. I swallowed it and threw it up. Then I flushed it, and then a second later, I went back to see if it was still there. You know why I started?”
I move my gaze from the road over to him, and find his eyes on me.
“I would lie awake at night and think about the hole in my wall. Like, really focus on it. And I would think about the door, if it was closed. Like if I was at a hotel or something. On a trip with a friend. If the door got shut somehow or even if it wasn’t shut, if it was open; I would look at it and try to see the hall or whatever was outside it. And then when I closed my eyes, I would picture the ceiling. I hate ceilings. Walls are even worse. So I would think about the ceiling, and the hole in my wall, and in case you couldn’t guess I had a bunch of trouble sleeping. One of my therapists gave me some Xanax, and that’s how it started. It got way out of hand, until I had to go to rehab.”
Another glance at him shows me he’s still flicking his gaze to me, in between watching the road. He’s still listening to me talk about how messed up the grown-up Leah is.
For a long moment, my breath feels like it’s caught inside my throat. I swallow the sensation away before I keep on talking.
“You want to know why I came to see you in a mask? That’s why. Because I’m trying to stay sober. Every little thing that happens…” I shake my head, feeling stupid. Feeling vulnerable. I let a little laugh slip out.
“This is embarrassing,” I say, meeting his eyes for a brief second. I look back at the road. “I don’t know why I thought it would be so easy to tell you things, but—” I exhale slowly. “But I had this whole thing pictured.”
It’s nothing like I thought—this meet-up with him. I can already feel the sadness creeping up on me, grabbing me by the hand and pinching my fingers with a death grip. Tomorrow, I’m going to be a mess. But I’ll be a mess at home, where I can call my AA counselor. Who would probably tell me…to be honest.
I swallow and regain my composure before I say another word. “I needed to talk to you. And now I’m with you. So I’m going to be honest, if it’s no skin off my back and it won’t hurt you: I was afraid of what I would do if I showed up and you didn’t want to see me. I needed to see you again. And before we get to the airport—” I’m already seeing signs letting us know it’s about ten miles away— “I want to know if you remembered last night. Like, this morning. Did you want to call me—Leah—even though you wanted to still pretend that I was Lauren? Or when you called this morning, were you calling Lauren?”
I hold my breath in anticipation of his answer.
“I was blackout drunk. You might remember,” he says. He’s got his eyes trained on the lanes spreading out in front of us. Because, again, he doesn’t want to look at me.
“So you’re saying that you don’t remember last night.”
“I know you shouldn’t have done that.”
“You don’t want anything to do with me, it seems, but you sure want to screw me. Am I like…your fetish? Some kind of re-do of Mother’s house where things are better because we’re having lots of sex? No peep hole? Maybe we’ve got a door, a little trap door we can go through when we’re extra horny? Or is it possible you actually remember being friends with me. You cared about me, too.”
Tears sting my eyes again. I blink, and let them roll down my cheeks. I smile a bitter smile. “I got told that you were fake. A lot. By lots of people. You were some kind of wish-fulfillment.” I say it with a question on the end, even though I’m not asking anything. “You just disappeared, you know. So people didn’t believe me when I told them about the guy who held my hand and told me stories through this little…mouse hole, peephole, and then that person superhero killed our captor with nothing but his bare hands. Yeah. That sounded like some kind of fantasy. But here you are, you’re real. Am I your fantasy? Maybe you spent a lot of time thinking about my body when we were on opposite sides of the damn wall?”