For a fleeting moment, I think she’s going to answer. Her eyelashes flutter and her breathing catches and her face is all delicate longing and hope and pain.
But then it shuts down, snuffed out like a candle. She pushes past me without answering, and I’m left in the kitchen, naked and alone and—for the first time in my life—utterly heartbroken.
Chapter 28
Aiden’s farmhouse is mostly dark when I pull up, with only a single bedroom window upstairs glowing faintly against the night. Everywhere else there are stars. Stars and stars and stars, and as I park my car and climb out into the warm summer air, I think I can almost understand why he likes it here. It’s like another world, and right now, another world is exactly what I need.
My hands are shaking as I try to hit the lock button on my key fob, and I make myself stop, take a moment to drag in a long breath of air. It smells like grass and wind and Kansas.
No city.
No roses.
No Zenny.
I finally succeed in locking my car and make it onto the porch, letting myself inside with the key Aiden keeps under a planter filled with dead plants. It might be ridiculous that I’ve driven almost an hour outside the city just to use my brother’s shower and steal some of his clothes, but Zenny asked me not to be at the apartment, and Sean Bell that I am, I still don’t feel comfortable sitting in my mother’s ICU room smelling of sex and used vegetable oil.
So shower and fresh clothes it is.
It is literally the only thought I’ve let myself have since Zenny left me naked in the shelter kitchen. The only decision I’ve allowed myself to make. I’m buried in the rubble of my own making, the destructive wall of my anger and love and need, and I can’t breathe. I can’t live.
Just get to the shower. Shower and then go to the hospital. Don’t think about her don’t think about her don’t think about her…
“Aiden?” I call out, tossing the key onto his coffee table. The man makes a lot of money but he’s too scattered to do things with it, like furnish his house properly. His coffee table is made from nailed together wood crates, and his couch is a stained lump from his college apartment. His walls are still the basic farmhouse white they were when he bought it.
“Aiden?” I call again, getting ready to go up the stairs. I saw his car in the driveway, but with Aiden those usual signs of human behavior are completely useless. He might have decided to Uber to Canada or go cow-tipping a mile down the road, there’s simply no way to tell. And just when I think for sure that he’s not here, a light flicks on and he comes skidding out of his doorway, still yanking up some pajama pants. A penis definitely flaps around in the process.
“Aw, Jesus,” I say, throwing my hand up over my eyes. “Why, man? Why?”
“What do you mean why, you—you cat burglar!” he splutters, stomping down the stairs to me. “Haven’t you heard of fucking knocking? I don’t know, calling maybe?”
I drop my hand, assuming it’s safe, and then Aiden pauses on the stairs, looking at me.
“Have you been crying?” Panic floods his face. “Is Mom okay?”
“She’s fine. I called Dad on my way here. They’re settling her into her room now.”
He visibly relaxes. Then grows suspicious. “So why are you here again?”
“I—I need your shower. And some clothes.”
He stares down at me, eyes narrowed. “But you have a shower at your house…” he says slowly, as if I’m trying to trick him somehow. “And clothes.”
“Zenny’s at my place right now. Getting her things. She doesn’t want me there. And I can’t go back to Mom and Dad like this.”
“Like what?”
I gesture impatiently at my rumpled clothes. “All post-fuck.”
“So wait, you fucked and then you broke up?”
“Goddammit, Aiden, can you just like—I don’t know, shut up for half a second and let me use your shower?”
“Ah,” Aiden says sagely, leaning against the staircase wall. “You’re hurting.” And then in the voice of someone in the throes of a dawning realization. “You’re in love with Zenny Iverson.”
The sudden, sharp urge to kill Aiden and bury him in his bucolic paradise outside nearly overwhelms me; I’m still fighting it off when a third voice comes from Aiden’s bedroom.
“Who’s in love with who now?”
“He’s in love with Zenny—oh shit—” Aiden’s face goes pale as Elijah comes out of Aiden’s bedroom, shirtless and very obviously in the throes of his own dawning realization once he sees me standing at the foot of the stairs. I am also being dawned upon. Because Elijah and Aiden may have been peripheral friends for a long time, but peripheral friends don’t wander out of each other’s bedrooms shirtless at night.
“What’s happening with Zenny?” Elijah asks.
Aiden looks nothing short of panicked, and I’m panicked too—but I’m also heartbroken and exhausted and too torn up to lie.
“Zenny and I have been…seeing each other,” I say. “And I love her,” I add, knowing this absolutely makes nothing better in Elijah’s eyes.
“You’ve been dating my sister?”
I’m too raw for this. “You’ve been fucking my brother?” I demand back.
Aiden flinches. “Guys, please.”
“No, no guys please,” Elijah says, livid. “I asked you to do one thing, Sean, one fucking thing, and that was to protect her. Not to fuck her! Obviously!”
“Well, apparently you’ve been fucking my little brother, so I guess we’re even now.”
Elijah clamps his jaw closed and I know he’s fighting off the urge to fling himself down the stairs and pluck out my eyeballs. “That’s different,” he says, with audible strain. “You know it is.”
“It doesn’t matter,” I say. Defeated. “She ended it.”
“I still don’t forgive you,” Elijah says. “Not even a little.”
What does it matter? Really? Zenny won’t love me, my best friend hates me, and my mother is about to be beyond the reach of love or hate. Why am I bothering to argue about any of it? I deserve the scorn, don’t I? Deserve the anger? And as good as it would feel to fight right now, to sweat and to bleed and to vent my anger at something instead of holding all this pain inside, I love Elijah too much to make him the target of it.
Elijah makes a noise of disdain at my silence and turns on his heel, back into Aiden’s bedroom.
Now it’s my turn to slump against the wall. I look up at my brother, young and bear-like in his broad body and shaggy hair. “Why didn’t you tell me?” I ask quietly. “I would have understood.”
Aiden sighs and comes down the stairs, sitting a few stairs up so he’s more or less eye-level with me. He braces his elbows on his thighs and puts his head in his hands, scrubbing at his hair. “It’s…I don’t know. Lots of reasons.”
I put my head against the wall. A failure as a lover and as a son and now—fourteen years after Lizzy—as a brother once again. “Fuck, Aiden. I feel like shit that I didn’t—that I wasn’t someone you could talk to about this.”