Page 76 of Drowning Erin

He shakes his head. “Your dad?” he mouths, and Inod.

He gets his phone, directs Uber to the address my father gives me, and the two of us sit there, me with my head on Brendan’s chest, watching the car’s progress on his phone while I listen to my father cry on the otherone.

“Your dad needs help,” he says after we finally hangup.

“He refuses to get any. I tried, and he and my mother both went nuts. It was the summer after my junior year, and my mom threw meout.”

His fingers tighten around mine. “I don’t know how you did this in high school. You ran track, and you were valedictorian, and then you dealt with this bullshit atnight.”

I shrug. “Between Sean going to juvie and my dad’s stuff, it just felt like someone in the family had to prove to the world we weren’t a lostcause.”

I still felt like a fraud, though, delivering my speech at graduation. No matter what I persuaded the audience to believe, I knew I was every bit as sick as the rest of myfamily.

“It’s just a lot of pressure. I don’t know why you never gaveup.”

“I can’t just walk away,” I reply. “This is a problem I helpedcreate.”

“How can you say that?” he asks. “You’re not holding a bottle to your father’s mouth every night. You’re not buying Seancoke.”

“I’ve spent my entire life covering for my dad and rescuing him, doing the same thing for Sean. I should have been helping them, but I was no better than my mom. All I did was make it easy for them to get worse. Hell, I’m still helping both of them. My brother and my father are sick, but my mom and I…we’re sicktoo.”

“That’s why you hid it all from Rob,” he says after a moment. “Not because your family is such a disaster but because you think you’re just as bad. You think he’d like you less if heknew.”

“He would. Anyonewould.”

“I don’t,” he says, pulling me closer. “I think maybe I like you better forit.”

Eventually he leads me back to bed, and as he pulls me against him, I feel something changing inside me. I don’t understand him. I don’t understand how he can act like he doesn’t know me when we’re out and take calls from some other girl while I’m here, yet be so perfect at times likethis.

Either way, I’m glad I told him. A secret you keep to yourself festers and grows until it begins to seem monstrous in your eyes. But now, in one fell swoop, it isn’t something quite so poisonous, something I can barely stand to acknowledge. Instead, it becomes a part of my history, what led me to where I am. It isn’t pretty, and it isn’t admirable, but it isn’t quite as ugly as it seemed when I kept it tomyself.

That night Brendan sleeps closer to me than he ever has, his fingers tracing some secret pattern over my skin as I fallasleep.

52

Brendan

Three YearsEarlier

“Do you love me?”Gabi asks everymorning.

There are no words for how uncomfortable this question makes me. Because I said it once, I can’t exactly stop saying it now. So she asks every morning, looking up at me with that mixture of expectation and unrest in her face, and I tell her I do. She asks every afternoon. She asks when we go to bed. She asks and asks, and I have to wonder if the reason she keeps asking is because she knows, like I do, that what I say isn’ttrue.

Her need for constant reassurance begins to wear on me. It’s not enough that we’re in the same place. She has to be right beside me with her fingers wound through mine. She’s jealous of Erin. She’s also jealous of the book in my hand, the television show I’m watching, phone calls to my mother. She’s jealous of anything that directs my attention away from her. She seems to sense, though, when she’s pushed me too far—just when I get to the point that I’m wondering if I can deal with this shit for even a few more weeks, she starts taking off herclothes.

I fall for it every fuckingtime.

* * *

On a rare afternoonwithout her around, I go online and look at pictures from the wedding. It’s an exercise in masochism, but I can’t seem to stop. I remember watching Erin walk down the aisle. It was the moment I finally knew I could commit. God, I wish things had happened differently. I wish she’d been willing to hear me out. Mostly, I wish I’d been worthy of her in the firstplace.

When Gabi gets home from her tour, I don’t really feel like having sex. That makes her cry, of course.Everythingseems to make her cry thesedays.

She asks if I’m cheating. Is jerking off to thoughts of your best friend’s girlfriend cheating? I doubt it. I tell her I’mnot.

She isn’t reassured because she knows Ineverturn her down. It even surprises me a little, the fact that I don’t want to. I guess maybe I’m kind of bored with our wholething.

Or maybe it’s that I know it would be better with someoneelse.

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