Page 56 of The Handoff

Chapter 29

Dane

It’d been five days since Lisa left, her phone was still turned off and we were back to pretending that we were all me again. There was no bitching about it, guilt had made us naturally take on our roles. I would graduate and everything would go back to the way it was before I let Lisa enter our lives. I should be relieved, but I felt like crap.

Shit would be a better way to describe how I was feeling at the moment and I knew that both David and Daxon felt the same.

“I tried, calling and nothing,” David said as he returned to the apartment after class.

“Do you think she’ll tell everyone?” Daxon asked, the question which was on my mind from time-to-time.

We both ignored him. It wasn’t the first time that he’d asked the question. He seemed more worried about her exposing our secret rather than her. Unlike David and I.

“I just hope that she’s okay,” I said.

“Me too.”

David agreed as we both slouched on the sofa, and that was when it hit me. For the first time in a long time, we actually agreed on something. Usually, Daxon was the one in the middle, the one that would calm us down, but he was more anxious about us being exposed and for the first time since we started this whole charade, I didn’t care.

I used to worry about it all the time, not when we were younger, but when we first started college. We were older, and at times I would look at my brother and see something different about us. Like maybe Daxon when we hit eighteen was an inch taller than both David and I. Or when David cut himself shaving, whereas Daxon and I didn’t really need to shave, but when David’s hair grew, it was like the next day he would have stubble.

It was crazy, because we could get sued, or kicked out of college for sure, but my only worry was that Lisa wasn’t okay. We’d gone one step too far. Or rather I had gone one step too far.

“Mom’s calling,” David said as he lifted his phone and put it back down again. We weren’t nice to Mom when she was here, and since she’d been gone we ignored her. There was so much shit in the air. We had to get to the bottom of it all. We were going to sit down and talk like me. Clear the air, because we weren’t fighting for sure, but we weren’t talking neither. Things were not great between us. We would all discuss the issues that had led to us falling apart. We had to be better, not only for our sakes, but Mom’s too.

It was dinner time, and the best time for us to discuss anything was when we were full and not grouchy. We weren’t going to enter let alone win Masterchef in a hurry and without mom around, our cooking skills consisted of shoving burgers in the oven and frying fries. Oh and Daxon was the King of making sandwiches. Something that he’d done the night that he had sex with Lisa.

I took my last bite of my burger, and noticed that both David and Daxon had finished before me. They were sipping on their beer in silence, which meant that they were ready to talk. And somehow one of us had to start the conversation, and I knew that someone was me. I took a sip and decided to get the ball rolling.

“Okay. Let’s just get it out there, so what or rather why are we in this fucked up situation? We agreed right. Pretend to be me. I get into a team. You guys do whatever you want afterwards. So, why did it get so complicated?”

David pipped in, “Because we agreed to this at sixteen. We’ve had this conversation before. It’s been getting harder every year. The only thing that made it easier this year was the idea that it was all going to come to an end.”

Daxon sighed. “Not exactly, well not for me. It didn’t make it easier. If anything, it made it harder. If I didn’t play at the club and have something that was me. I would fucking go insane.”

I didn’t have a clue what he was talking about, so I motioned for him to continue.

“Dane, you have football. David has books. He loves to study. My passion is music. I cannot be Dane and go join a band or sing in a group. No, I have to keep my passion suppressed, which I said was fine at first, because we were all playing you. But now it’s all coming to an end. I’ve forgotten who I am. My friends are your friends. My words, are your words. I’m fucking twenty-one and I don’t even know what my favorite meal is anymore, because I have to pretend to be you and do everything that you like. Which is why I fucked Fiona. I knew that you hated her, well you both do and part of me in some twisted sort of way did it to spite you. That’s fucking nuts. I fucked a girl to spite me.”

He choked and stood up and then the reality of what he was saying really did hit home.

“I didn’t even think that Lisa could bring us together, but in some fucked up way…”

David agreed. “She has. But what we did to her was cruel. Even if it wasn’t on purpose, it still wasn’t right.”

Daxon nodded. “It was fucked up, because we’re fucked up.”

My head spun to David, who had stood up and turned to leave. “I’m ringing Mom so that we can say that we’re sorry and then after we’ll leave a message to do the same with Lisa. It isn’t much.”

Daxon said, “But it’s a start.”

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