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“Do I…?” I hesitated. Talking about it with Erin wasn’t easy, but it was more abstract. Saying it out loud to Tria made it real.
“Do you what?” Tria asked. She shifted around and lifted her shoulder slightly so I had to look up at her.
I glanced at her face once and then dropped my eyes. I dropped my hand as well and covered the slightly rounded bump at her abdomen. Sighing again, I glanced around the room and wondered why it didn’t occur to me to go with all the stall tactics before I opened my mouth instead of afterwards.
Tria poked me until I started talking again.
“Do you think I…?” More hesitation. I smashed my lips together, furrowed my brow, and tried to find the perfect phrasing. There wasn’t any, of course, so I chose the worst and blurted it out. “Just how big of an asshole am I?”
“What kind of question is that?”
I shrugged.
“I am an ass,” I stated.
“Sometimes.” She narrowed her eyes at me. “Why are you asking this?”
“Something Erin and I talked about,” I said. More hesitation from me caused Tria to give me a bit of a shove.
“Erin called you an asshole?” Disbelief colored Tria’s words.
“Not exactly.”
“What is this all about?” she asked as she turned a little to get me to look at her.
“Do you…do you think I…you know…hide from shit?”
“
What do you mean, ‘hide from shit’? Hide from what?”
“The truth,” I said with a shrug. I couldn’t look at her anymore, so I pressed my face into the side of her neck and looked out over her collarbones.
Tria trailed her index finger up the center of my back, across my neck, and up to my temple. She shifted a little, sighed, and turned her head toward mine.
“When someone says something you don’t want to hear, you like to avoid it, yes. When it’s something…big…and you can’t hit it, you run from it.”
“Like when you told me…told me about...about being pregnant?”
“Exactly like that.” I could hear the tension in her voice.
“I’m sorry,” I told her. I knew I had said it before, but I had the feeling in some ways, it would never be enough. There weren’t enough sorrys for what I did.
Hearing Erin say it was one thing, but having Tria confirm it had my head spinning to pinpoint times when I had avoided what was going on around me because of my own inability to cope. Avoidance started with Aimee’s death and resulted in turning straight to drugs. Heroin was the obvious and easy escape, but running from Tria on more than one occasion was another. Even telling Tria to think of me as her brother had been a way of avoiding how I was feeling about her early on.
I hid inside of a cage for a good chunk of my life to avoid the reality of what was outside of it. The type of hurt and pain inside the cage was one I knew how to handle, but the emotions I experienced outside the cage were too much.
So what was I supposed to do now?
“I don’t want to do that anymore,” I told Tria, “but I’m not really sure how.”
She tightened her grip on me.
“I’m glad to hear that,” she said. “The hows will come to you. I think it’s probably more important you realize you are doing it right now, and we’ll figure out the other shit as we get there.”
I chuckled softly and hugged her close.
“I love you,” I said.
