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“I don’t know, it just…felt apart from everything and everyone else.” My hands grow clammy and I curl them into fists on my knees. “Not that we didn’t try to include him. He just preferred to keep to himself. He was always a bit of a loner. Shy. Izzy was the complete opposite, and…and I loved that about her, I did. It was…infectious. But sometimes…”
More memories fly through my head. All the times I’d find myself closing Jeremy’s door behind me, flopping onto his bed…
The rush of…relief that would go through me.
Like I could finally shrug off a mask, and just lay there, stare up at the stars and planets stuck to his ceiling, without feeling like I needed to be doing something. Saying something. Being something…
I swallow thickly. “Sometimes…” I whisper. “Sometimes I just felt like I had more in common with him. Like I could be the real me with him.” My neck prickles. My heart pumps faster. “I really liked comic books as a kid. I mean, I guess I still do, though I don’t really read them anymore. There’s a lot of things I used to like that I got away from after Izzy…died.”
“Except music.”
“Except music.” I pause. “But that took a while to get back. It’s less of a…passion, and more of a need at this point.”
Cleo hums. “Makes sense. It’s your outlet.”
I nod, lick my lips, and say, “Yeah.” A beat passes, then. “Jeremy just… He always seems to get me in a way that…that she didn’t.” I shake my head, brows furrowing. “In a way no one else did.” My knees bobs furiously, and my hands are balled up so tight, I feel my nails digging into my skin.
“And sometimes I feel like…like it went both ways. His sister included. She could be—she was pushy at times with him. And not in a good way. It was like…like she thought she knew what was best for him.” I wince and quickly shake my head. “That sounds bad. She wasn’t like…cruel, or malicious, or?—”
“She loved him. Deeply. That’s what it sounds like to me.”
Throat tight, I nod. A hitched gasp bursts out of me. “She did.” My eyes well with tears. “She loved him so much.” Sniffing, I shake my head, feeling the first tear streak down my cheek. I roughly wipe it away. “It fucking kills me when I try to imagine what he must be going through. I can’t even…I don’t know how he’s?—”
“Mason,” Cleo murmurs.
“I know, I know. This is about me.” I rub my sleeve over my face, soaking up the wetness.
“Yeah, well, that was before.”
I frown. “Before what?”
Her mouth tips up in a gentle smile. “Before you told me any of this.”
My frown only deepens.
“I thought you two had simply bonded in the shared grief and trauma over losing someone you both cared deeply about,” she explains in that clinical, matter-of-fact tone of hers. “Loss will either drive a wedge between those who are closest, or it’ll bring people closer together than ever before.”
My heart pounds as I stare at her. “Does it matter? That I didn’t mention all that before.”
“I don’t know, Mason. You tell me.”
My throat swells even more—my swallow going down forcefully, heavily. In my head, fuzzy flashes of what happened in the cemetery a few weeks ago flicker to life, and my gut roils. My chest tightens. I can feel my pulse speeding up, and my mouth drying.
I didn’t tell Cleo about that.
Haven’t told a goddamn soul.
I kissed Jeremy…
I kissed Jeremy in a goddamn cemetery, drunk off my ass, in direct line of sight of his sister’s—my girlfriend’s—grave.
Talk about fucked up.
Not to mention anyone could’ve seen us. What would people say if they saw me kissing Izzy’s brother of all people?
When I open my mouth to tell this to Cleo though, something stops me.
“I don’t know,” I tell her carefully instead. And it’s the truth. I don’t know shit about anything these days.
