So Much to Learn (56 page)

"It's been on
the cards for a while." Matt drew patterns in the condensation on
his can and then shrugged. "I mean I never meant to make a go of it
what with her and Jack doing the on again, off again thing, but…"
He suddenly wiped the can clean of his designs and gulped down
another mouthful of the brew before finishing, "Sleeping with your
best friend's ex kind of pales in comparison to sleeping with your
best friend's little sister, don't you think?"

"Oh you can’t
be serious!" I slammed my drink down on the coffee table and looked
despairingly at my brother. "You're dating her to get back at Jack?
Grow up Matt!"

"Grow up
yourself!" Matt retorted and I was worried for a minute there that
the conversation was going to degenerate into a sibling argument. I
was bracing myself for a comment along the lines of 'you're a cow'
and getting ready to reply 'I know you are, you said you are, so
what am I?' But thankfully, despite all the evidence to the
contrary, we must have done some growing up recently because when
Matt spoke again it was in a more mature tone. "Look, I'm not
dating Kristin to get back at Jack. Not only would that be a pretty
incredibly shitty thing to do to Kristin, but it would fail in its
objective because Jack doesn't like her in that way."

Floating unspoken between us were the words: 'because
it's
you
he
likes.' Even unspoken it had a pretty profound effect on both of us
I think.

After a short
pause I felt compelled to ask, "So you and Kristin, it's good?"

Matt smiled in
a way that told me his answer even before he nodded and answered,
"Yeah, it's good."

Well, that was
a turn up for the books! There I was thinking Matt was off
somewhere sinking into the depths of misery and anger and in actual
fact he was creating a little love nest for himself! I was glad,
though, I didn't want Matt to ever be unhappy and if Kristin was
distracting him from what his best friend and sister had been up to
then I owed her one.

Thinking of
Kristin threw another issue to the forefront of my brain and I
leapt off the couch and gestured to Matt to follow me. Catching a
fleeting glimpse of his confused expression I vaulted over the back
of the couch and ran into my room. Once there I went down on all
fours and crawled underneath my bed.

"Uh, Talia?"
Matt's voice was muffled. "What exactly are you doing?"

"Just a sec," I
replied, my hands reaching into the furthest corner and snagging
around a scrap of electric blue lace. "Ta da!" I exclaimed,
emerging out from under the bed a little dust covered but
relatively unscathed. "If you're dating Kristin you can return this
to her."

Because, you
see, she is the only one I could think of who that blue bra I'd
found on Jack's floor might have belonged to. I believed Jack when
he said it wasn't Haley's and Matt had reminded me that Kristin was
the one that Jack had been hooking up with over the last couple of
years. It had to be hers.

My hopes at
finding out who Jack had slept with on the 19th were crushed,
however, as, taking a closer look at the bra, Matt smirked and
shook his head. "That's not Kristin's, it belongs to Jack."

"Oh for
heaven's sake!" I burst out, rocking back onto my heels and looking
up at him in disbelief. "Does Jack have some weird fetish that I
don't know about? How do you mean it's his?"

Matt offered me
a hand up and we both took a seat on my bed; well, I more like
perched awkwardly waiting for his answer.

"To all intents
and purposes the bra is his, right? He won it on the 19th." When I
continued to look at him in confusion Matt sighed and added, "First
one to correctly guess the barmaid's cup size got to keep her bra."
I made a little sound of disgust and Matt shrugged defensively.
"Hey, I never said it was a particularly classy bar."

We lapsed into
silence as I twisted my hands together in a kind of physical
representation of the knots my brain was tying itself into. He'd
won the bra; all the various scenarios I’d imagined with Haley or
Kristin or some random girl throwing the bra aside in some wild
passion evaporated and I was glad they were gone. Something was
still niggling at the back of my mind however…ah, the
scratches!

"So all this
time you thought," Matt was saying, "that Jack had had it off with
Kristin?"

I didn't tell
him that I'd originally thought it was Haley and just nodded.

"You should
know that there was no girl, Talia. For the first time in six years
Jack went to bed alone on the 19th."

"Oh don't give
me that!" I exclaimed. "I saw his chest the morning after, there
was either a girl or he wrestled with a possum and forgive me if I
think the former is more likely."

I didn't want
to look at Matt, but after a few seconds had passed with no answer,
I craned my head around and saw him looking pityingly at me.

"Twigs," he
said shortly.

"What?"

"One of the- ah-
activities
that night was to strip naked and run through a
hedge in the park." When I continued to stare at him in confusion
he blushed slightly. "What? You know me, I've done stupider things
in my time."

"Yes, but
Jack…?" I still wasn't convinced.

" I wouldn't be
in any hurry to hold him up as a stunning example of maturity on
certain nights, either."

Hmm, twigs. I
had real trouble grappling with this concept and a voice at the
back of my mind was demanding to know why I was more willing to
believe he'd slept with some random girl rather than that he'd run
through a hedge. The answer was, of course, completely obvious. If
Jack had resorted to meaningless sex I kind of had a right to be
angry with him, it was like my get out of gaol free card. I even
wondered fleetingly whether Matt might have been lying but then,
remembering his furious expression when I'd first mentioned Jack, I
realised he wasn't really in the mood to lie for his erstwhile
friend. I could feel my high horse shrinking away into nothingness
and I couldn't quite decide whether this was a good or bad
thing.

Pushing away my thoughts on my own relationship with Jack I
decided to seize this moment between my brother and me to patch
things up between
him
and Jack.

"Matt, I want
to tell you the truth about what happened between Jack and me."

His face shut
down immediately and he went to get off the bed. "I don't want to
hear it," he snapped, but I grabbed him and roughly pushed him back
down.

"Tough," I said
in a hard tone, "because I want to tell you and you need to hear
it." Our eyes locked for one long moment and then Matt sighed and
leant back on my bedspread.

"Fine," he
snapped, "but for God’s sake keep it PG, I don't need to hear the
gory details."

"Like I'd want
to tell you them," I retorted before taking a deep breath and
remembering my objective. I needed to get Matt to forgive Jack,
otherwise all the heartache and pain on both sides would have been
for nothing. "I need you to actually listen, Matt, and not just
jump to your own conclusions. I know what we did was beyond shitty
but you've got to understand how awful we feel."

"We?" Matt's
eyes sparked with anger once more. "You mean you and him have been
having little meetings to discuss how to get me to calm down? Well
forget it, I'm not going to just-"

"See, that’s exactly what I mean," I interrupted him. "Push
all that testosterone to one side for a moment and just
listen
!"

I waited for
him to capitulate and, although I could see that he hated to do it,
eventually he nodded and gestured for me to talk.

"Right so, you
remember when I told you what Brad had said to me when we broke up?
Stuff about me having something wrong with me? I kind of laughed it
off with you, but it cut close to home and I was in a pretty bad
way when I got back to the flat. I was so sure that there was
something wrong with me and I thought that if I just got someone I
trusted to sort of acclimatise me to touching then I could get over
it."

"Wait a minute!" I knew I wouldn't get very far without Matt
interrupting but I was still annoyed and I glared at him as he
said, "You
asked
Jack to have sex with you?"

"Not in so many words but, I guess, basically yes I did. In
the back of my mind I never really thought it would go as far as it
did. I mean at first it was exactly what I needed, Jack shook my
hand and put his arm around me once or twice, that kind of thing.
But then things kind of snowballed and weird stuff happened between
Simone, Micky and Sam," I was careful here not to mention
what
that weird stuff
actually was remembering my promise to Simone, "and it was like I
fell into this big pit and I couldn't get out again. But, and
here's the thing, if someone had offered me a ladder I don't know
if I would have taken it, I kind of started to like the pit, mainly
because Jack was in it with me. Does that make any
sense?"

Matt refused to
look at me but, after a moment, he said, "Kind of, but I'm a simple
guy, Talia, so let's try and keep the similes to a minimum."

I smiled
slightly and nodded. "Fine, I was in a big mess, but even if I
could’ve seen a way out of that mess I don't know if I would have
taken that road because I was enjoying being with Jack,
better?"

"Oh
so
much
better."

"Sarcasm is the
lowest form of wit," I said automatically and Matt gave a little,
bitter laugh.

"Just as well
I'm not trying to be witty then. So where exactly did I fit in with
all this? I was living with you, it's not as if you could just
forget I was there and you must have known what I would think of
your little arrangement."

"At first I
didn't think you needed to know because it was all so up in the air
and kind of innocent, I didn't want to get you all riled up over
nothing. But then, when there actually was pretty major stuff going
on, I didn't want to hurt you or make you mad at Jack and me."

"So how did you
think you were going to get out of it?" Matt finally looked at me,
but I wished he hadn't because the tight set to his mouth showed me
that he wasn't in a peace-making mood.

"I didn't think, that's kind of the point. Everything got
really confusing and every day it got harder to tell you and then
there was the scholarship thing." Thinking back to the last couple
of weeks I realised that, Jack's attitude towards me excluded,
things were actually better now that the truth was out. My head was
certainly less fuzzy. "Look, cards on the table time, it was
never,
ever
my
intention to hurt you and for screwing things up so badly I am so,
so sorry. There is nothing going on between us now, I've told Jack
that and he's had enough of it too. I'm not just trying to worm my
out of blame here, I am fully guilty and I accept that."

Far from
calming Matt down my last words seemed to increase his fury and he
almost yelled when he spoke next. "What about Jack? I think he's
been the most used in this. Jesus, Talia, he loves you, did you
know that?"

I felt tears
sting my eyes as I nodded. People should have to give some kind of
warning before they say the 'L' word, he'd completely thrown me off
balance saying it out of the blue like that. And what was he doing
anyway? Was he sticking up for Jack?

"You know? You
know he loves you?" Matt's disbelief was almost palpable. "So why
isn't this little speech being delivered by the both of you?
Shouldn't the pair of you be trying to convince me that I should
stop being mad because love conquers all or some shit?"

I smiled feebly
and shook my head. "I told him that loving me was
inconvenient."

"You
what
?"

Oh, how to
explain this to someone who wasn't there! It’d made sense at the
time…hadn't it?

"Well it's
true!" I protested. "Our deal was supposed to be that he helped me
get over my phobia, nobody ever said anything about love. It's not
fair of him to tell me that he loves me now, there's you to think
of and he's going away to England in a few months…" I trailed off
as Matt gave my shoulder a hard shove.

"You bitch!" He
exclaimed. "So you didn't tell him you loved him back or anything?
You just told him that saying he loved you was inconvenient?"

"Oh what, as
opposed to punching him?" I retorted, thinking about his reaction
to Jack's words.

"He told me he
was sleeping with my little sister, he told you he loved you,
there's a bit of a bloody difference!"

We glared at
each other, both breathing slightly more heavily than usual and
refusing to back down.

"God dammit, Talia, you can't control everything!" Matt
exploded. "You can't force him to stop loving you any more than you
can force him and me to make up. You're so fiercely determined to
make sure that our lives go how you think they should go that you
forget that it doesn't work like that. For God’s sake, back off out
of our lives and think about your own for a change. What do
you
want?"

"I don't know,
OK?" My blood was boiling, my head was pounding and I couldn't
believe I was being lectured by my usually so laidback brother.

"Bullshit!" He
was properly yelling now. "Tell the truth, what do you want?"

"Don't make me
say it." I’d tried so hard to build up a reality for myself that
wouldn't break my heart and I hated that he was trying to destroy
that. He wouldn't back down, despite the pleading in my voice.