Random Acts of Love (Random #5) (16 page)

I could feel Joe stiffen next to me.

“You’re mad,” he said simply. It was an observation. There was a blankness to his voice, as if he were carefully gathering evidence to determine how to shape a case.

Except if he was doing that, I’d be fine with it. He wasn’t, because I knew Joe.

He was judging.

Judging me.

These two little fuckers were so worried about how everyone else would judge them that they’d decided it was easier to judge me.

Me.

The so-called love of their life.

I said nothing as I got to the car and put the key in the lock, turning it open, and creaking open the door to the old Honda.

“Darla,” Trevor said in a quiet voice. He came up on the other side of me, Joe silently slipping in, too. Their joint heat filled me, made me hotter and madder.

Made something in me start to cry, a low sob that just went on and on and on for what might have been.

But I didn’t let it rise to the surface.

With great deliberation and the kind of superhuman strength you call on when you just don’t think you can live one more second (and yet you can), I forced myself to look Trevor in the eye.

“I’m done.”

He sighed. “Yeah, I know. That was rough in there, and Joe’s mom is just a total bitch.”

“She really is,” Joe agreed.

“We’ll finish up here and meet you at the—” I cut Trevor off with a palm and looked at those eyes, so conflicted and yet clear, like the ocean on the Island of Eden at sunset.

“I’m
done
.”

Then I looked at Joe, who still looked blank.

“I loved you. That means more to me than it does to both of you. I still love you, and it’ll take time for that to drain out of me. It might not ever leave, not every drop. But I can’t let that love linger inside me like a poison, eating away at my soul.”

My heart stopped. Just...stopped. My words felt like they were coming out of a slab of granite.

“Darla,” Trevor said, suddenly as cold and silent as my chest felt.

Joe didn’t move a muscle, his eyes on me.

“Your mother is a bitch,” I said calmly. Reasonably, even, to Joe. “And Trevor’s mom is a pushover for letting your mom be a bitch in her home.”

I kept my hand on the car door, hip brushed up against it, deeply aware of where every part of me was in time and space. My heart shattered into a thousand tiny pieces and carried on out of my chest, a bloody swarm like a bunch of bees all swept off my the wind.

“But you two are the worst.”

They exchanged a brief glance. Joe opened his mouth as if to say something, then closed it. 

“Because you two ain’t got my back. And when a man don’t got his woman’s back, he don’t deserve the woman.” I affixed them both with a look that felt like I was pulling the drain plug on the ocean. “I’m not your quiet little fucktoy any more.”

Their voices rose in protest and I answered them with twin middle fingers, one for each of them.

“You’re both number one, guys. Too bad you couldn’t make me number one.”

And with that, I climbed in Josie’s car, turned it on, and drove away.

Joe

Becoming the existential equivalent of a human robot has been drilled into me so thoroughly that it was no problem making it through the rest of the dinner party at the Connor’s house.

My mom was my mom, and Dad just tolerated her, enjoying his conversation with Trevor’s dad. Trev’s mom talked mostly with me, while my mom grilled Trevor on his plans for the summer, whether he’d made Law Review editor at Harvard, and all the ways he’d allegedly fucked up his entire career path because he didn’t telepathically listen to her.

I was going out of my God-damned mind.

That human robot thing worked really well when it came to being crushed by my mother’s forked tongue.

Not so well when Darla crushed my heart.

Had she just broken up with us? We’d had fights before, but she was always the one who chased us down. Made us talk. Forced us to sit face to face and deal with whatever petty issue made us feel torn in thirds.

This was different.

Bone rattlingly different.

This was like opposing counsel walking away from a plea deal. There’s that moment when your gut turns inside out and you realize there’s nothing you can do to stop the runaway train of losing control of your case.

Your life.

Your heart.

Everyone around me at the table turned into a talking fleshblob. Except for Rick, who was sitting on the piano bench playing a beautiful, classical version of some Spongebob Squarepants song. Rick was good at taking cartoon music and turning it into a masterpiece.

Wagner would have been a good choice, too.

“Joey,” Mom asked, turning to me with a genuine smile that defied plastic surgeon’s needles, “You’re done!” She gave her hands two quick claps.

“What?”

“Done with the year. Year two. You’re two thirds there.”

“Done?” I repeated stupidly.

“Your paper. You turned it in.” She played with the stem of her wineglass, then picked it up and took a sip. “You wouldn’t be here if you hadn’t.”

Paper. Law school. Oh, fuck. I’d abandoned my paper back at home, just coming downstairs for a quick cup of coffee, running into Gene, learning Mom and Dad were here, with—

Darla.

Why did my heart feel a sharp pain? I put my hand on it.

Mom freaked. “Something wrong with your heart?” she said in a clipped voice. That whole robot thing under strong emotions might be genetic, after all.

“No,” I said, rubbing my chest. “Just a twinge.”

“A twinge? You don’t get twinges!”

“How would you know? I haven’t lived at home for six years. Maybe I get twinges sometimes. I’m human,” I snapped.

“You need to see your cardiologist,” she answered, reaching below the table, grabbing her purse. She snagged her phone and slid it open, then went to Contacts.

“You have my
pediatric cardiologist
on speed dial?”

She made a sour face and said nothing. I grabbed the phone out of her hand and shut it off.

Mom looked at me, stunned.

“My heart is fine,” I declared. That was a lie.

Everything about my life was a lie.

“You have a delicate heart condition—”

“Had. I
had
a delicate heart condition. And I know you went through an ordeal when I was a baby—” 

Cutting each other off was genetic, too. “An ordeal. Did you hear that, Herb? An ordeal. That’s like calling a groupie a band manager.” 

Trevor shot to his feet. I didn’t get the joke, but he sure as hell did, and whatever it was left a bad taste in my mouth as he stormed out of the room without saying a word.

“Mom, I’m nearly twenty-five. If I need medical assistance, I’ll call for it. I can manage my own life.”

“You can’t manage your way out of a paper bag,” she snorted, looking to Trevor’s mom for support. Connection. Confirmation.

An audience.

The queen expects one, right?

Except Trevor’s mom didn’t react at all. Instead, her eyes flicked over to watch me.

This was some kind of rite of passage I didn’t have a blueprint for. Trevor’s exit emboldened me.

Darla’s departure cracked my world in half, leaving a sinkhole the size of...

My mother.

“If that’s true,” I said calmly, all the eyes in the room on me, “then you are a failure.”

I might as well have just slapped her.

“WHAT?”

“You.Are.A.Failure.As.A.Parent,” I said slowly, “if I am a twenty-four-year-old man who is incapable of handling his own life independently of you. Your job as a mother is to raise me with the skills to be as independent and self-sufficient as possible.” 

I stood and made eye contact with Dad, Doug and Susan, clearly ignoring my mom as she writhed in pain, struggling to cough out the next barb.

“And with that, I’ll take my grown-up, self-directed body out of here because that is what’s best for me.”

And I did.

Trevor was nowhere to be seen outside, so I climbed in my car and took off, wondering how long it would take before Mom reported it stolen.

In one, single hour every part of my life had fallen to pieces.

I was so dependent on my parents. Even this car—a 2015 version of the one I’d driven to rescue Trevor from Ohio in—was theirs. My law school tuition, my clothes, my Starbucks card, my Visa and American Express—all from them.

They gave me everything. I’d always thought it was just what parents do, but now...

What if it wasn’t generosity?

What if it was shackles?

Darla

You know what I’ve learned these past two years? That Alex is the only damn man on the planet you can turn to in a crisis and he’ll always be there for you. I like to imagine my daddy was like that. Uncle Mike is, but I can’t very well call him up right now and ask him to pull his semi on the streets of Boston and Cambridge to help me move my shit out of Trevor’s apartment.

That’s right.

I’m moving out.

It’s not like I had a lot of crap to begin with. Josie had all the furniture I needed when I moved in with her. Trevor had all the furniture, too. I have books and clothes and paperwork for the band and all the sweepstakes winnings Mama keeps sending me. A lot of that I handed out to the homeless people on the street when I saw them, or gave away in the building at Good Things Come in Threes.

Otherwise, I was pretty light.

Light as a feather.

And gone with the fucking wind.

That was my goal as I shoved random shit into boxes and big industrial-strength trash bags. I needed two cars to move it all. A call to Josie and her own call to Alex and within an hour I had them both here in Alex’s little car that matched Josie’s.

It should be enough.

Sam wasn’t at the apartment, thank God, and I knew Amy was at her college, studying for her final papers and exams. So give me two hours and I could be done. Gone. Cleaned out. 

Good thing only Josie and Alex were here, too, because I was a wreck.

“I’ll drive the car back to our place,” Alex said gently as I started emptying the end table drawer into a box. He blanched visibly when I pulled out my prized double-headed dildo. The seventeen inch one with the clit tickler. Shaped like a tongue.

“Thanks,” I sniffed. I held it up. “These all have memories.”

“I’ll bet.”

“I can’t—maybe I should just give them away. They remind me of Joe’s O face.”

Alex’s palms went up flat, as if warding off Joe’s O face. “Um, no thanks. We’re good. Josie has her own electronic torture devices. We don’t need more.”

“Torture devices?” Josie shouted from the next room. “Darla, are you showing him your sex toys?”

“Not on purpose.”

“Oops!” she called back. “I didn’t mean to show you that pussy pocket! C’mon, Darla. Don’t traumatize my fiancé!”

“I think you just did it for me,” I muttered. 

Alex wouldn’t meet my eyes, but instead walked over and grabbed two big black trash bags. “These yours?” he asked, holding them up.

“Yeah. They come with me.” I looked at my tiny little bullet and slipped it in my pocket. “So does this.” I snagged the Fifty Shades of Grey cock ring we’d just bought at Target the other day. It was, oddly enough, right next to the children’s toothbrush section.

“But I won’t be needing this,” I added. “You want it?” I held it up for him to see. “Never been used.” It was out of the package and hung off my finger like a limp teething ring.

“Um, no.” Alex looked like he was starting to gag a little.

I shrugged. “Suits you.” And threw it in the trash can.

Sorting through my (rather large) sex toy collection was not part of what I had to do when I moved from Ohio to Massachusetts two years ago. I’d never touched a sex toy before I moved here. Charlotte was a sex toy party hostess and had rocked everyone’s world. Amy was a fucking expert in electronic devices.

Seriously. The two of them could start their own toy company or, failing that, head up the robotics lab at MIT. They had dreams of grad school and academia and working in universities but if that shit fell through they could make steady bank designing new products that drove people to new sensual heights.

And besides, these toys were my only form of solace, comfort, and orgasms now.

Joe and Trevor were out of the picture.

Kicked out.

By me.

A wave of cold nausea and hot rage whipped through me. I just grabbed the drawer out of its slots and dumped the whole thing in the box.

Move first. 

Sort later.

I didn’t want to be here when they came back. When Trevor and Joe wised up and finally came after me. I knew they’d try, at least once.

They would, right? Because if they didn’t, then the last two years of my life were a worse lie, like poor Mrs. Mitchell back home who married a gay man and didn’t know it until he died and she found his diaries and went to Vegas with her friends and learned there were men who
like
having sex with women. And who don’t require a Xanax and four beers to go down on you.

I just didn’t want them to come here now. And I needed to clean myself out of their life. I needed to show them I was serious. I couldn’t keep living like this. Whatever benefit Trevor and Joe got from keeping the true nature of our relationship a secret—and there was a benefit. People don’t do something unless there is.

Whatever benefit they got was now sorely outweighed by the negative. Hiding wasn’t cutting it anymore, because they were hiding from a sense of shame. A fear of shame.

And I was the target of that shame. The lightning rod.

The Ring.

Fuck all y’all, motherfuckers. Peace out. I’m gone.

Josie came into the bedroom and silently pulled the bags and boxes I’d set near the door out into the hall, where Alex grabbed them with ease, those biceps strong and big. He was a tall guy, bigger than either Trevor or Joe, and had the easy stance of a secure man.

A secure, confident
man
.

I was dealing with boys in Trevor and Joe, and my mind flashed back to that day at Jeddy’s a while back, when Mike and Dylan sat down with Trevor and Joe and they talked about what it’s like to be in a permanent threesome.