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Leslie crossed her arms over her chest, anger flaring her nostrils. “You’re sorry? That’s all you have to say?”
“What else can I say?” My desperate breaths puffed between us. Hers puffed right back into the same space. “Nothing will make it right.”
“Why are you here?”
“Because I’m truly sorry, Leslie. I hurt you, and you never deserved that. It’s been over with Adam since…” I waved my hand. “Well, you know since when, but it never should have been the way it was. That was on me. Not just him.” I felt like I might puke. “I was part of that. I need you to know…I’m sorry.”
She laughed bitterly. “You think that’s enough? That I’ll forgive you?”
“No.” I shook my head. “I don’t think you’ll forgive me. I don’t even know if you should. But I can’t forgive myself if I don’t tell you that I know what I did was really fucking wrong, and tell you how sorry I am about it. Even if that makes me another kind of asshole, it’s at least the kind of asshole I can live with being.” My voice trembled. “The asshole I was last year? Being that guy? I can’t live with that anymore.”
Another hostile laugh escaped her lips. “Great, so you come here and say you’re sorry so you can go home with a clear conscience. You get to leave feeling so good about yourself, and I get what?” She tossed her hair, eyes hot with anger. “Nothing. I get to justlivewith the fact that my boyfriend, the guy I loved and thought I would marry, wassleeping withhis best friend the whole time—his bestguyfriend, mind you—and even when he wasn’t, even when you ended it, he still wanted to be withyou, or someone like you. I was never enough.”
“I’m sorry.”
“Do you know how humiliating this is?” Her eyes filled with tears. “How embarrassing it was for me when Adam’s lab partner, his new ‘best friend on campus,’ came to me and told me Adam was coming on to him? That he’d kissed him, and…” Her voice broke. “Howstupiddid he think I was? When I confronted him? He denied it. But I knew. Iknew. It all clicked into place in aninstantwhen Sammy told me what Adam had done.Everythingabout how his ‘friendship’ with you ended suddenly made sense.” Her lips twisted with pain. “Did you laugh at me? For being so stupid? Did you both laugh at me?”
“No. Never.”
“I don’t believe you.”
“I guess I haven’t given you a reason why you should, but I promise, Leslie, Ipromise, it was a lot of fucked-up things, but it was never like that.” My hands shook as I brushed them through my hair and tried to catch my breath. “Adam loved you. That’s part of why I ended it. Hedidlove you, I swear, but I couldn’t do it anymore. I didn’t want to. It was all too gross. I’m sorry.”
Tears fell from her eyes.
“What made it so confusing for me was that he loved us both.”
A sharp sound of hurt burst out from her.
“I’m truly so fucking sorry.” There was nothing I could do or say. Because Iwasthe asshole here. Whether I want that to be true or not. “We never laughed at you. And I loved you too, for what it’s worth. You were a wonderful friend to me. One of the first I’d ever had in my life. And I repaid you by lying to you and hurting you in the worst way. I’d hoped you’d never find out. I really thought that once I left him, he’d be happy with you.”
“He wasn’t,” she bit out. “Sammy came along.” Her lips twisted in a snarl. “Are you going to try to tell me he ‘loved’ Sammy too?”
“No,” I said. “I don’t think he did. But even if he had, it wouldn’t make it okay. Nothing about what happened was okay.”
“You think I don’t know that?”
“I just wanted to tell you that I know it too. And I’m sorry. I’m deeply, deeply sorry. I keep saying it, and I know it won’t change anything, but I am. I truly am. I’d go back and undo it if I could.”
She studied my face. “I believe you would.”
“Thank you.”
“But I fucking hate you, Peter,” she burst out. “So go now, okay?” She pointed at my car. “Go and never come back.”
The echo of the very words I’d said to Adam not too long ago slapped me in the face. But unlike Adam, I intended to obey her command.
“Bye, Leslie,” I said.
And that was that. I’d done what I needed to do, cut open the wound and sucked out the poison. I felt sick and dizzy as I climbed into my car. I probably shouldn’t have driven in that state, but I needed to get away from Leslie’s house, to grant her wish that I go.
I drove to Kingsley. The campus was eerily empty over the winter break. I got out and walked over the gray grass, stood in the place I’d been when I first saw Adam, relived that lurching, amazing moment when we’d met. I remembered the dazed infatuation, the thrill of his attention.
All the buildings on campus were locked up for the break, but I walked down to the flagpole and remembered Leslie and Adam striding toward me and the rest of our group, their hands clasped, and that horrible, sick feeling I’d had then—so close to what I felt now.
Leaving campus, I drove back to my neighborhood and walked to the pool. The place where Adam and I had first met up, where he’d readLolita, and I’d fallen straight into lust.
I wandered over to the playground and the industrial-sized tire where we’d had that intense confrontation—the one that’d made me just as guilty as him in everything that came after; the one where I’d told him I wasn’t giving him up, and if he wanted to end things with me, he had to do it himself.
