Page 13 of But For You

“I’m not a dog, Sam.”

He muttered something under his breath.

“I’m sorry?” I asked and realized my voice was much too sharp.

“I said,” he began, and when I glanced over at him, only then did I realize that his knuckles were white on the steering wheel. He was holding on tight. “I know you’re pissed, but I wish you would just talk to me already.”

“Why should I be pissed? It was a long time ago, right?”

“Yeah, it was a long time ago,” he growled, raking his fingers through his thick copper-colored hair. As he got older, it was getting darker, which I found interesting. “But you’re thinking about it, and you’re thinking really hard, and if you would just come out with whatever the hell is going on in your head, that would be good.”

I wasn’t ready to put my thoughts into words yet.

“Jory,” Sam said softly.

But anything I said or asked would sound like an accusation, and I needed it to not be. So, I stayed quiet.

“I lied, yeah?”

He had.

“Why would I do that?”

I could remember the discussion so clearly. I’d questioned him in a diner about how many guys he had slept with while we were apart. The inquiry began with me asking about women and then, when he replied that there had been none, moved on to men. That had been six years ago.

“Jory?”

I looked out the window instead of at him.

“What would you have done if I’d told you that night that I had slept with three guys, all completely forgettable, but the fourth guy … that one I’d liked, at least for a while?”

I closed my eyes. Hearing it now was painful. Hearing it then … I would have run.

“It only lasted three months, and we never lived together. That part is bullshit; I just stayed at his place a lot.”

Part of me really wanted to hear the whole story, and part of me didn’t.

“I was hurt, and he took a bullet out of me and stitched me up and gave me a shot. When I saw him in a bar a week later, I bought him a drink to say thank you.”

I could see how that would have progressed.

“I was really drunk, things weren’t going well … a year had rolled by already, and we weren’t any closer …” He trailed off.

The rain was sluicing down the glass in rivulets.

“It got late, and he offered to let me sleep it off at his place because it was close by.”

My body flushed hot and then went cold.

“When we got there, when the door closed, he wanted something more, and I … you get it. I don’t need to tell you.”

I did.

“It was nice to have the normalcy in the middle of all the crazy, to have a small place where I could go to just breathe.”

“It was a sanctuary,” I said, holding my breath.

“No,” he said, his voice low and gravelly. “It was just not blood on the pavement, and ten-year-old boys killing each other in the streets, and girls who should have been planning sleepovers instead turning tricks and shooting up … it was just not horrible.”