Out of Nowhere(70)

It’s like the anxiety and anger and uncertainty that have been hanging over us boil over, and I’m utterly furious with him. The kind of furious that usually ends with me punching the shit out of someone.

“Oh yeah, I know,” I spit out. “Saint Rafe would never do anything wrong. You just want to make the world a better place.”

Rafe’s expression is ice, his fists clenched.

“I have done things wrong. Things I can’t ever take back. Things I wake up with every day and go to sleep with every night. Don’t you dare judge me for what I do to try and live with them.”

“And you feel so fucking guilty that you’d do anything to atone for it,” I snarl at him. “All your projects and your soup kitchens! You work so hard to make the world a better place for everyone else but you don’t even care about living in it. And now you’re too scared to ever break the rules, even when it would help Anders.”

Fuck, where did that come from? Rafe’s mouth falls open and still I don’t stop. I’m all twisted up inside and I just want to hurt him.

“You don’t think you deserve to just be happy and you want me to—I don’t know—be your next cause. Well, I’m not one of your fucking projects, okay? So, don’t treat this”—I gesture between us—“whatever it is—like we’re going to have committee meetings or whatever the hell you guys spend your time doing.”

I’m shaky with the same poison I felt every time I hurt Daniel. I’d try to hold back the tide, but then I’d see a glimmer of something vulnerable—hope or faith that this time I’d do the right thing. And in that instant of knowing for a fact how truly misplaced that hope was, how it made me responsible for him when I didn’t want to be, I’d strike the killing blow and the poison would flow through me. I’d hate myself for hurting him, but more, I’d hate him for letting me do it. For making me into a monster who hurts everyone I come in contact with.

I want Rafe to take a swing at me so I’ll stop. Or so I can hit him back. But he just stands there glowering and vibrating with a punch he doesn’t throw.

I can’t stop. I never can.

“But, hell, maybe that’s why you’re here in the first place, huh? Right? You took one look at me and thought, ‘Hey, there’s my cause of the month. I guess I should hook up with him and fuck him happy!’”

Rafe’s face is completely shut down but his eyes burn with something I hardly recognize and I’m careening right toward it.

“Is that it, Rafe? You want to fix me? You always said you wanted to be like Javier. Is that what you’re doing? You want to be my sponsor? Turn me into someone you can point at and say, ‘I did that’?”

Rafe hisses and I know I’m so far over the line I can’t even see it. I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the window. I’m spitting mad but my face is white.

Rafe steps right up to me and he’s shaking, his quiet words cutting deeper than any yell.

“Don’t talk about him,” he says, and for the first time, I can see the man he might have been. Dangerous, menacing, cold. I can see him choose to control himself, but it’s clear he could’ve gone the other way.

I wish he would. I wish he would hit me, shove me, do anything to me. Anything would be better than this distance, this cold. He’s looking at me like we don’t even know each other.

“You,” he says, “are lying to yourself if you think you’re living in the world. You’re barely making it through. You know what you want but you’re too scared to go after it. You think being gay is what makes you weak?” He shakes his head, and there’s pity in his face. “Living a lie when you don’t have to. Acting like you’re the only one affected by your decisions. Those are the things that make you weak. It’s just fear.”

Something shifts in Rafe’s face. He lets go of something, or… or maybe he just doesn’t care anymore.

“You know what you’re really scared of, though? You’re afraid of what will happen once you don’t have a secret to hide behind anymore. Once you’re just you. Strip away your fear and what’s left? I don’t think you even know.”

My heart is beating so hard that I feel like I’m going to pass out. I know now that I’ve been waiting for this moment since I realized how much I wanted him. The moment when he figured out what a waste of time it is for him to be with me because I’m fucking nothing.

“Fuck you,” I bite out, the response automatic.

Rafe nods once, like he wasn’t expecting anything more, and it hits me like a sonic boom. His total dismissal. But when he walks out—when he leaves me standing in the middle of my immaculate living room feeling like the fucking walls are coming down and the blackness beyond them is swallowing me whole—the sound of the door shutting behind him is almost silent.