Together We Heal (24 page)

THE OTHER PRESENTS
were silly, and all had to do with the car. A tree air freshener, a pair of fuzzy dice, new floor mats, a blue fuzzy steering wheel cover and one of those things you put in your windshield in the summer to reflect the sun back so it’s not hotter than hell in your car when you get in it.

“I have a little something else for you,” Trish said, opening the glove box and pulling something out.

“This is just part of something I’ve been doing for you. I’m not sure I’m ready for you to have them all now, but here’s one.” She handed me an envelope with what turned out to be a letter written on it from pages torn from one of her notebooks. So that was what she’d be doing with all those notebook pages.

We’d parked back at the apartment, but hadn’t gone back to be with everyone else yet.

I looked up at her as I unfolded the letter and it was easy to see that she was freaking out. Her knees were both jiggling and she had her bottom lip clamped between her teeth.

“Do you want me to read it now, or do you want me to wait?” I asked.

“Now. No, wait. No, you can do it now,” she said. Clearly she wasn’t quite ready for this, but it meant a lot that she’d given this to me anyway.

“I’ll wait until we’re alone. We should probably get back, yeah?” She gave me a little smile of relief and I put the letter back in the glovebox.

“Okay,” she said.

“I love my gifts. Every single one of them,” I said, putting my hand under her chin and bringing her mouth to mine so I could kiss her.

“And I love you,” I said looking deep into her violet eyes before I kissed her lips.

I WAS FREAKING
the fuck out about the letter. Freaking. The. Fuck. Out. That was the letter that told him one of my biggest secrets. The one that contained something in it that might make him not want to be with me anymore. The one that would set of a bunch of dominoes falling that would change how some people in my life saw me.

I didn’t want the party to end because when it did we were going back to his dorm room and he was going to read the letter and then I would have to know.

Things were going to change after that. I kept running through our past few months together. Thinking about all the good moments. The kisses, the naked times, the laughs, the looks, the… everything. Everything with Max was special and it was going to be altered now. I just hoped he loved me as much as he said he did.

WE ALL ATE
a second round of cake, but had to call it a relatively early night because we all had to be up in the morning for class or work.

It was time to go and face the music.

Since Max wanted to drive his new car, I left mine at Stryker’s and we took his back to the dorm.

“Can I say something before we go in?” he asked as he killed the engine and turned toward me.

“Uh huh,” I said, barely able to keep still in my seat. I just wanted to get this over with. Right now. The suspense was literally going to kill me.

“Whatever is in that letter, it won’t change anything.” Yeah, he said that now. He hadn’t read it yet. I gave him a jerky nod but then he reached out and held my face with both hands and leaned close.

“I can see you thinking. Stop it. Nothing. Will. Change. How. I. Feel. About. You. Got it?” I wanted to believe him. So, so much.

“Okay,” I said, my voice rough. He gave me a kiss and then retrieved the letter from the glovebox. That fucking letter. I never should have given it to him.

As we walked into the building, he took my hand and wouldn’t let go. He unlocked the door and then shut it behind us. Had the room always been this small? It definitely hadn’t always been this small.

I couldn’t breathe. Stumbling a little, I made my way to the spare bed.

“Trish?” Max said as he sat on his own bed.

“Yup,” I said, not looking at him.

“Do you want me to read it somewhere else? Or…” I was about ready to burst. There was too much energy and stress building in my body and it needed to go somewhere. I stood up and started pacing around.

“Just fucking read it, already. I can’t handle this,” I said, chewing on my thumbnail.

“Okay,” Max said, pulling the pages out and unfolding them. I couldn’t watch him, so I turned my back and kept pacing. Max cleared his throat and then I hoped he was reading. I was waiting for gasps or some noise or something.

Nothing. The only sound was the slap of my sneakers against the linoleum floor and the squeak as I pivoted when I got to the end of the room.

There was finally a rustle of pages, as he turned one over. Why had I written on both sides? Why the fuck had I used so many damn words? I could have just told him most everything in one or two paragraphs. But noooo, I had to wax poetic about my secrets.

I finally turned around and found him with his head dipped over the pages, but I couldn’t read his expression. His eyes jerked across the paper, taking in the words. He was a relatively fast reader, so that was lucky for me. He flipped another page and coughed once. No reaction. He was definitely past the most dramatic part and… nothing. The tiniest flicker of hope came to life in my chest and the further he got, the more it started to grow.

Could this be happening? Could he really be okay with everything?

I REALLY DIDN’T
know what I was expecting. I’d thought of everything from a secret baby (hey, it had happened with Audrey) to that she was a secret agent to all kinds of crazy stuff. When I finally got to the thing she was so terrified to tell me, I had to admit, I had a moment of shock. But then I kept reading and that was it. That was the terrible secret.

Trish was bisexual. That was all. She’d had girlfriends and boyfriends before and the reason she’d been so upset about Ric was that they’d had a relationship.

No one knew about it, not even Stryker. Somehow she’d been able to hide it from him.

When I got to the end of the letter, I took a few moments to assemble my thoughts. She was opening herself up to me and I had to be so incredibly careful about what words I used.

She was still pacing, so I looked up and called her name.

“Trish?”

She had tears on her cheeks.

“Oh, hun,” I said, getting up and putting my arms around her. I hugged her so close she probably couldn’t breathe. “I love you. I still love you. This doesn’t change anything. You’re so brave for sharing this with me, and I’m honored.” I hoped those were the right words. They felt right.

She pulled back from me, searching my eyes.

“You don’t care?” Her voice was thick with emotion.

“No. You’re you. You’ll always be you. And you are perfect just the way you are.” I couldn’t stop myself from kissing her lips. They tasted a little bit like salt from her tears.

She started shaking and I moved us over to my bed so we could sit down together. Trish collapsed against me and I just held her for a while as she cried and let it all out.

“You’re so brave. I love you so much,” I kept saying as I stroked her hair and held her close.

This secret had eaten her up for years and I couldn’t imagine what was going on inside her right now that she’d shared it with me.

Her sobs slowed and then finally she pulled back from me and wiped her eyes.

“You don’t care that I like girls too? That doesn’t bother you?” I shook my head slowly.

“You don’t think that I’m going to go out and cheat on you?” What?

“Huh?”

She sighed.

“Well, I mean, that’s what people always think. Or that I’m just ‘confused.’” She put air quotes around the word confused.

“Neither of those things has crossed my mind. I guess I just never thought about it much. And I know you and I love you and I trust you, so what other people think and say just doesn’t matter.”

Now she was the one shaking her head.

“I just can’t believe it. I thought you were going to say I was disgusting and want to break up with me.” I pushed her hair back from her face.

“No way.” She started laughing. It sounded a little hysterical.

“I just can’t believe I was so worried and you don’t even give a shit.”

“Nope. Not at all. Now if you’d said you’d murdered someone and needed some help hiding the body, then maybe I might have a few reservations, but this? Psh, this is nothing.” She kept laughing and I couldn’t help but join her.

“I something you,” she said. “That’s two thirds.” I threw my head back and laughed.

“I something you too, Trish.”

HE DIDN’T FUCKING
care. How was that possible? I guess I’d underestimated him. Now I felt like a complete moron for making such a big deal out of it. If he didn’t care, then who else might not care? My brother? Lottie? All my other friends? Clearly none of them cared about Simon and Brady or Zoey in The Band, so why would they care about this? Stryker might be a little weird about the fact that both of us had slept with Ric, but it wasn’t that big of a deal, right? I mean, Zan and Stryker had both slept with Katie and they got over that, right?

After I got over my shock, I started telling him more things. About how I knew I was bisexual even before I knew that was a thing. I’d always felt different, that I didn’t fit into a box and then everything made sense when I was twelve and I had my first kiss at a sleepover with another girl on a dare. I liked it and then a few weeks later I’d kissed a boy as well and that had been great too.

For me, it was more about the person than their gender. If Max was a girl, I’d still be attracted to him. There was just… something about him. Something that went beyond the fact that he had a penis. He’d be a pretty girl, actually. I told him that and he roared with laughter.

“Well, I hate to break it to you, but I think I’m set with being a guy,” he said.

“Damn,” I said and we laughed some more. He didn’t pry, or interrupt, or judge me at all.

Max was a miracle. A miracle that had somehow fallen from the sky into my life and I’d never used the word “blessed” before, but I did feel that way.

“Do you think you’re going to tell your brother?” he asked me. I sighed.