Page 63 of The Problem with Perfect

“I’m not sure it’s better. I think it’s just about how you view sex and what the function of it is.”

“What do you mean?”

“Well, some people think sex is only for marriage, and others think it’s simply to express love. Some consider it a form of exercise or stress relief. I tend to be in the latter camp. It’s primarily because of the enjoyment I get out of it.”

“So it’s never been about love for you?”

Rusty pauses, seeming to consider my answer before he eventually replies.

“It was once. With one person.”

“What happened?”

Again, there’s a beat that passes, and I get the feeling Rusty either doesn’t want to tell me this story or is trying to figure out what parts to share.

“I had a girlfriend in college. Hailey Melbrook.”

I’m glad he isn’t looking at my face because my surprise at that bit of information is surely evident in the way my mouth opens.

“We met during orientation as freshmen, and we were together for almost three years. With her, the sex was about love…or at least what I thought was love.”

I turn my head and look at him, but he continues staring straight up.

“What changed?” I ask.

His jaw flexes.

“My parents died. I made the decision to drop out of college and move home to take care of Abby. Hailey told me she didn’t want to be a 21-year-old mother of a teenager and wife to a college dropout. ‘That isn’t the life I signed up for,’ she told me.”

Something twists in my chest. I can tell Rusty’s trying to not be emotional about it, but the pain I hear in his voice is still there.

“I was…well, it really fucked me up. To lose my parents and drop out of college and have to move home with no job to take care of my sister was bad enough, but to add my girlfriend dropkicking me like a piece of trash was just…the fucking icing on the cake. I decided from then on out that sex was going to be the one thing that was for me. It would be the one thing I really gave to myself, and it would just be for fun and to feel good.”

I want to hug him. I want to snuggle up next to him and hug all that pain away, because damn. I can’t imagine.

“Did they really die on your birthday?”

I whisper the question, because I can’t believe I’m asking it, but part of me has to know. Rusty nods, and when he speaks, it’s with the kind of clinical distance you can only achieve after a decade of dealing with your grief.

“They came to visit me at campus. We’d originally planned to celebrate me turning 21 when I got home for the summer, but they surprised me. Took me and Hailey out to a fancy steak dinner before I went out to get wasted with all my friends. When I woke up with a hangover, it was because a university administrator was at my apartment door. They’d died while I was out partying.”

I’ve always felt like I know Rusty. I mean, he’s Boyd’s best friend. The two of them and Andy spent their entire childhood running around together, and I always felt like I got a good picture of who he was when I was a kid looking up to them.

But I guess it really is true: you never actually know someone until you hear the deepest, darkest parts of their lives. There’s something about hearing the quiet shame in his voice when he talks about his college girlfriend and his parents dying that gives so much more weight to his fears of letting everyone down. It feels so much more understandable.

I shift closer to Rusty, pressing the side of my face to the side of his and closing my eyes, hoping he can feel my sorrow on his behalf. The life he has faced has been so incredibly unfair and has left him facing so much alone. No wonder he’s considered such a grump by most of the town; I’d be fucking grumpy too if I were him.

“Why did you ask?” Rusty says, his voice still calm and quiet. “About the sex, I mean. That was the original question, right?”

“Oh, yeah,” I reply, having completely forgotten about the initial purpose of what we were talking about. “Yeah, I, um…I was just thinking about my own sex life, I guess. In comparison.”

“You mean sex with Connor.”

There’s something kind of terse about his voice when he says it, but I figure the guy has had to travel a depressing path down memory lane to answer my questions, so I try not to take it too personally.

“Yeah, I mean sex with Connor. And I think…that’s my point—that I’ve pretty much never had a sex life, and I’m just wondering if that might have been a mistake.”

This time, I can feel Rusty turning his head to look at me, and I keep my eyes trained up at the sky, not wanting to see his expression. Part of me thinks maybe I’ve already said too much, but then I consider how Rusty basically just shared the most depressing, shitty things that have ever happened to him, and I decide if he can be vulnerable, I can too.

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