Page 71 of Colt
“You’re not the boss of me,” I say, the incredibly inelegant playground retort about the only thing that’s rolling effortlessly off my tongue right now.
The bar has more or less emptied out, and most people are a little bit too lost in the sauce to see me storm heavily through the building on my crutches and out the front door.
Once I’m on the sidewalk, I sincerely regret my choices, but still make my way down the block toward the cross street that’ll take me back to my house.
My whole head feels too hot. My body feels like it’s on fire. I don’t like anything about what happened in there. About how it made me feel. About how I showed my hands to other people there. I just don’t like it. That’s not who I am. I’m not jealous. I have no right to be jealous of some guy with her. If I can’t control myself even in that environment…
I hear the sound of a truck on the road behind me, and I turn. It’s Allison, in the driver’s seat, moving slowly behind me in the street.
Then she pulls up beside me and rolls down the window. “What are you doing?”
“Getting some air.”
“You’re being stupid,” she says. “Get in the truck. Don’t overtax yourself. You already drank too much, and you’re honestly just being an asshole.”
“I’m not an asshole,” I say. “Everybody likes me.”
“I don’t like you very much right now.”
“I don’t care.”
“Fine. You don’t care what I think. Just what everybody else thinks. That’s great, Colt. Just get in the truck.”
I just want to push back against everything and everyone. I hate this. Because everything is bad. Absolutely everything. And things were better a year ago. I’ve never felt that way before inmy life. I always felt like I was making progress. I always felt like life got better, like I got better the older I got, the closer I got to the championship, the further away I got from the little boy who was abandoned by his father. Everything got better. Now it’s all crashed down around me. Nothing is better. Nothing.
I look at her. Her face.
And something moves in my chest. I don’t like that either. Because it’s dark and intense, and it is whispering things to me that I don’t want to deal with. I don’t want to translate them. I don’t want to dig deep.
I didn’t use to have to do that.
“I want to deal with it,” I say. And I realize she’s not in my head, and that she has no idea what I’m talking about, but it’s what I say out loud anyway.
“And I don’t want to babysit you. I don’t want to deal with the questions that I’m going to get from Sarah after tonight. You know exactly what you look like, don’t you?”
“Like a jealous guy who’s fucking you,” I growl.
“Get in the car, Colt Campbell, you are standing in the street yelling about… Get in the car.”
Finally, that’s the one thing that gets me to do it. Also, I’m tired.
I’m miserable. I think I might be crashing out. How have I made it this long without totally crashing out?
Maybe because I can almost see the light at the end of the tunnel. Maybe because I was somewhere normal, getting treated like I was me, and I just still don’t feel like me.
All the coping strategies that have carried me through my life don’t seem to be working right now. Which just really sucks.
I close the passenger door, and then she drives away from the curb, the trip home taking two minutes. She doesn’t say anything to me.
“Sober up. We’ll deal with each other later.”
“There’s nothing to deal with. I could tell you didn’t want him to talk to you, so I don’t know why you’re pissed I stopped it from happening.”
“I didn’t especially want to talk to him, no. I wasn’t exactly open to flirting tonight. But I can also handle myself, and I don’t need you running around acting like you’re jealous when we both know you’re not. You were happy to ignore me for most of the evening. You only know how to have sex with me, or treat me like you used to. This is why I was smart to… I knew the picnic was weird. An anomaly. It felt kind of romantic. But we are not that. I see that. I get it. We are not romantic. But that means that it’s just sex, and it’s just more of the same when we’re out in public, and I don’t like that. It made me feel gross. Especially when you acted possessive, when we both know that’s about my body and not about anything else. I just don’t need this.”
I know that I should say something. Something to make her feel better, but I don’t know what to say. She’s not wrong. It is the only thing I know how to do. I know how to be with her when we’re by ourselves. I know how to strip her naked, how to make her scream my name. I even know how to hold her afterward. But I didn’t know how to be anywhere near her tonight without touching her. So maybe that’s on me. Maybe this is something messed up inside of me.
Something broken. But what other option is there? We are stepsiblings. We’ve addressed this. We can’t take it out of that private space. She knows that, so do I. But I get that it feels bad. Because I feel bad.
