A week and a day... not a bad margin of error for me, eh?
Once again, huge thanks need to go out to Karen and Scotty T for reading over what is to come and letting me know where I needed to make some changes. Sometimes I'm just too close to the story, so it helps to have some objective eyes looking after me and it.
Thanks also to Drewbie, just for being you. You're an entertaining little bugger, and I'm very happy you're in my life, even if I don't get to see you as often as I used to or want to.
Last, but certainly not least, thank you to Matt. Thank you for being there to read when I need help with a story, and being there to just listen to me whine and complain when I don't. You help bring out the Nate in me. The good part of Nate, I mean. Not the stubborn, irritating part. That part's all me. :) SHMILY, boo.
Disclaimer is the same as it ever was. Nothing contained in this story is meant to in any way represent or depict real life. Well, except for the fact that apple butter and bacon sandwiches are the perfect breakfast food. That part is true, but that's it. The rest is all fiction. It is, however, fiction that has a decidedly adult slant to it. If you're not of age or shouldn't be reading this for some reason, please stop reading now. Otherwise, enjoy!
THE SUN FROM BOTH SIDES
PART 2
Andrea gave me a week. One full week without a phone call or a visit. Not that it seemed like that long. The days basically blurred together for me. The only time I ventured outside of my apartment was to get more vodka and cigarettes.
After my second trip out that week, I opened the apartment door and stepped inside. Going straight for the kitchen, I poured myself a drink and put the bottles in the freezer. It was warm, but with the pounding headache I had, I didn't much care. I dropped a couple of ice cubes into it and swished it around. Retrieving a cigarette from one of the packs that I had bought, I walked out into the living room while lighting it.
I almost dropped the lighter -- I had a deathgrip on the glass, so it wasn't going anywhere -- when I saw the people gathered in the room. "What the hell--" I started, then stopped when Andrea stood up.
"Nate--"
"How did you get in here?" I asked, immediately getting angry. This time, I was more prepared. I wasn't just getting out of bed, and I wasn't even drunk yet. I was relatively clear-headed, even with the headache.
"I let her in," Erron said quietly from the chair in the corner. I wondered briefly whether I had been able to get all of the glass out of that chair, then realised that I didn't much care.
"Why?" I looked around the room. Jeff and Cindy were sitting beside each other on the couch, Carrie was standing by the window looking at me in an almost serene way, and Andrea was standing in front of the chair that she had been sitting in. "What do you want?"
"We want to help you," Carrie answered, turning to face me fully.
"I'm fine." It was beginning to become my mantra, it seemed. "So if you don't mind--"
"What?" Jeff asked softly. They were all speaking in hushed tones, and it was creeping me out a little bit. "If we don't mind, what? You have some heavy drinking to do? You're anxious to waste another day?"
I rolled my eyes and tried not to meet any of their gazes. "If that's what you came here for, you can--"
"We came here because we love you," Erron cut in, still speaking quietly. There was also a forcefulness there though, underlying it. It wasn't something I'd heard from Erron before. "Whether you like it or not, we do, and we're tired of standing by and watching you destroy yourself."
"Could you put a bit more drama into it?" I asked sarcastically and ignored what I'd heard in his voice. I didn't like the implications it carried. "Maybe add a tear or two for effect?"
"I've already spent enough tears on you," Erron returned, finally managing to catch my eye and hold it. "I'm not going to do this anymore. You need help."
"This is getting old," I complained, leaning against the doorway and trying to look away.
"You're right," Cindy said tersely. "It is. It's about time you pulled yourself back together. I miss you."
"I'm not the one that stopped returning phone calls," I turned on her, happy to finally have somewhere else to focus for a moment.
"Do you think it was easy for me?" she asked, her voice wavering a little. "For us? We both love you, Nate. We want to help you, but you just kept pushing and pushing until we didn't have anything more to give to you."
"I'm going through hell, and you just cut off contact with me!" I shouted, surprising myself with it, but enjoying the way they all seemed to pull back a little bit. "Please don't tell me you did it for my own good, or I'm liable to be sick."
There was silence for a second or two, and then Jeff spoke up. "No, we didn't do it for your own good. We did it for our own good. And you're not going through hell. You're wallowing in it, and dragging everyone around you down with you."
"Fuck off," I sneered, hoping to push them back a bit more, and not getting the desired result. They were expecting it that time. "What would you know about it? You're sitting there with the person you love, going back to your nice little life and your little boy. You can move on."
"A little boy who misses his Uncle Nate," Cindy put in. She bit her lip for a moment, looking unsure about continuing, and then did anyway. "How do you explain to a little kid that his favourite uncle can't come over anymore because he's drunk and feeling sorry for himself?"
"That's low," I said, laughing derisively. There was a blush rising in my face, though, and I hated myself for letting it happen. "Using Norry against me. I can't believe you'd do that."
"I'll do anything if it will get through to you." Cindy leaned against the back of the couch. "There's got to be something that you still care about."
I rattled my glass back and forth in the hand that was holding the cigarette.
"Don't be an asshole," Andy said suddenly. I saw the muscles in her jaw set and start working. She was grinding her teeth, and that was never a good sign.
Of course, neither was walking in to find your apartment full of people wanting to fight with you. "Excuse me? You guys break into my house and ambush me like this. What do you expect? You want me to offer you tea and cookies?"
"I expect you not to be an asshole," she repeated. Her jaw bunched and moved then relaxed for a moment before starting again.
"Why are you even still in town?" I asked her. "I thought you would have left by now."
"I told you I don't give up easily." She kept her eyes on me as she sat back down again, as if to prove her point.
"So what is this? Some sort of intervention? Let me know when I get to the part where I'm supposed to break down and thank you guys for showing me the error of my ways."
"You've been drinking already today, haven't you?" Erron asked.
"I might have had one or two," I told him evenly. In truth, it had been three or four. "What of it?"
"It's only noon!" Erron exploded, though it was more in his manner than his voice. His voice barely rose in volume, but he seemed to grow as he spoke. "Can't you see how screwed-up that is? A year and a half ago you wouldn't have had more than two even if we had gone to a club!"
"Yeah, well a year and a half ago I wouldn't have done a lot of things," I told him, taking a drag off of the cigarette to make my point. "Things change."
"Oh, shut up!" It was Carrie, and she was scowling at me. Through me. She had been silent until now, and I had actually started to forget that she was in the room, even though she was standing right in front of me. I had had other things to concentrate on.
I looked at her, shocked.
"Just shut the hell up and listen for a change! I'm tired of hearing about how much things have changed. Do you know what changed? You changed! Just you. You brought all this on yourself!"
"Don't you think I know that? Jesus Christ! If there's one thing that I'm totally aware of, Carrie, it's that."
"Then suck it up!" she said through her teeth. "Do something about it."
I shook my head and sighed in frustration, then brought my glass to my lips, the ice clinking. Carrie stepped quickly to me and batted it out of my hand. It went flying into the wall, taking the side out of the glass and spilling all over my wall.
"What the fuck do you think you're doing?"
"Don't you think that if the answers were in that glass, you'd have found them by now?" she said, in a dead, deep calm.
"Back off," I said lowly, not liking the thoughts that were going through my head at the moment. "I've never hit a woman, and I don't want to start now. Just back the hell off."
Andrea saw the look in my eyes and grabbed Carrie's arm, pulling her back close to the window. I think it was the first time she actually started to think that maybe I was beyond whatever it was they'd come to do. That's what I read in her expression, at least.
"Will hitting me help?" Carrie asked me, pulling her arm away from Andrea. "It's time you step forward again, Nate. Quit your damned hiding!"
"I'm not hiding from anything."
"Bullshit," Carrie spat. "That's bullshit and you know it! It's all you've been doing since you left Brian!" I tensed at the mention of his name and felt her words hit home a little. God, I wanted my glass back. "First you hid behind your book, and then when that was finished, you climbed into a bottle of vodka!"
There had been a pretty good period of overlap between the two, but that wasn't something she needed to know. Assuming she hadn't figured it out already. "You got the book. What more do you want?" I asked her with a frown. "Your ass is covered."
"And yours is in the fire," she said, exasperated. "Dammit, Nate, I don't care about the book. I don't care that you haven't started another one. I don't care if you never write again, but you've got to do something."
"And what do you suggest? What's going to help me?"
"Well it's certainly not getting drunk and alienating yourself from everyone," Erron put in, getting up and walking over to stand in front of me. "Do you remember the last time we saw each other?"
"Of course I do," I said. And then I realised that I didn't.
It was apparently obvious. "I didn't think so," Erron said, nodding. "It's been four months, Nate. Four months! There was a time when we would rarely go a week without getting together or talking, and now I haven't seen you in four months! And the last time we did see each other you were pissed out of your gourd."
"It hasn't been that long," I said, knowing that he was right but needing to argue.
"No, of course not," Erron answered, shaking his head. "You can't tell me when it was, but it just couldn't have been that long. What's the matter, Nate? Days blurring into weeks?"
"Shut up, Erron," I sighed. Four months? "Just shut up."
"What? Are you going to hit me too?"
"Nate, can't you see how unlike you this is?" Cindy asked from the couch, her voice much softer now that Erron had managed to take a bit of the wind out of my sails. "You're not yourself."
"Maybe this is what I'm like now." I put my hand to my forehead. "I'm not the same guy I was. You're just going to have to accept that."
"No, we're not," Andrea spoke up, her voice level. It was the voice of a teacher dealing with a frustrating student. "I refuse to accept that the Nate I know has turned into the obnoxious little prick standing in front of me."
"That's not my problem."
"No," Andrea agreed. "You don't have any problems, right? Everyone else is messed up, but you're doing fine."
"I'm not the one breaking into people's apartments," I pointed out.
"We didn't break in," Erron said. "I have a key."
"Quit splitting hairs!" I screamed back at him, hoping to rattle him the way he had me. "It's the same thing! I didn't invite you!"
"Can you even hear yourself anymore?" Jeff asked.
"You want to know what I hear?" I asked, turning to look at him. "I hear a bunch of uninvited people butting in where they're not welcome, bitching at me for things that are none of their business."
"Nate, we wouldn't be here if--" Cindy began.
"If we didn't love you," I finished for her. I could feel the corner of my upper lip wanting to curl back in a sneer, and managed to keep it where it was. "Get a new line, people. You're starting to sound like a broken record."
"That's funny," Carrie said, but her expression clearly showed that she found it anything but. "You're calling us a broken record. Does this sound familiar? 'I'm fine. I need a drink. I'm fine. I need a drink. Leave me alone. I need a drink.'"
"You don't know what I'm going through," I said lowly. "Don't you dare judge me or how I get through it."
"Then tell us!" Andrea yelled, her reserve finally snapping. "Tell us what you're going through. Tell us what happened! Tell us why you left him! Let us help you!"
"You can't help me!" I shouted back at her, walking over to the bookshelf and snuffing my cigarette out in an ashtray that was sitting there. "No one can."
"You have to talk about it," Andrea pressed. "You haven't said a word to any of us about what happened."
"And don't you think there's probably a reason for that?" I asked her. "There's nothing that you can do to help me. I made my bed, and now I'm lying in it."
"There's got to be a way out of this," she said calmly after a brief internal struggle. "And if you weren't such a chickenshit, you'd find it."
"Excuse me?"
"I used to think that you were about the strongest person that I knew," she said. "After everything that you'd been through, you survived and became one of the sweetest men on the face of the earth. Your heart was your greatest strength, and now you've closed it off."
"It was my biggest weakness," I corrected her. "It was my heart that got me into this mess."
"Bull. Your head got you into this. Whatever happened, you didn't do it by following your heart."
"How do you know?"
"Because Brian had your heart," she said, reaching out and cupping my face with her hand. "And he was taking good care of it. You broke it when you did what you did."
I pulled my head away from her hand violently. "Don't talk about things you don't know anything about," I said. "And don't you dare use what I had to hurt me."
"Why not? You've been doing that since you left him. Crying and moaning about what you lost. Either get it back or move on!"
As if I could. After what I had done, and all that had happened since. "I think I want you all to leave now," I said, struggling to keep my voice clear and even. "You said what you came to say, now please just leave."
"No," Carrie answered, sitting down. "I'm not leaving until we get through to you."
"It wasn't a request," I said, glaring at her. "Get out."
"If you'd just let us help you--" Erron sighed.
"YOU CAN'T HELP ME!"
"Do you like this?" Cindy asked. "Do you like your life right now? Sitting around doing nothing but wasting away? Just getting drunk and smoking like a chimney? Is that what you want?"
"I want you to leave me alone." The word 'alone' came out in a whine that I didn't much like the sound of.
"Do you know what I want?" she continued, as though I hadn't spoken. "I want my friend Nate back. The guy who was sweet and wonderful, and never had a harsh word for anyone. The guy who used to go out of his way just to make someone else smile. That's what I want. What we all want. And I know he's in there somewhere, if you just look for him."
"Why?" I asked, feeling a tear fall from my eye against every mental order I sent it. "What good would it do? Where did being that way get me? Fine. I was sweet and wonderful. That's great, but what did I ever get by being that way?"
"You got me," Brian said from behind me, stopping me in my tracks.
I felt like someone had slapped me. I closed my eyes and took a deep breath, trying to work through the shock and trying to figure out if I'd really heard him or whether the voice had been in my head. "You can't be here," I whispered, more to myself than to anyone else.
"Why?" he asked. Definitely real that time. He had moved closer, and I felt his breath move across my arm as he spoke. "Are you going to throw me out, too?"
"Please, just go," I pleaded, afraid to turn around and see his face. "I can't do this."
"I'm not leaving, Nate. We have to talk."
"No, we don't," I argued weakly, still pleading. "Maybe we should have, then, but it's too late now. Please."
"Look at me."
"No. How did you get here?"
"I called him," Andrea said. "I thought he was the only one who might have a chance at getting through to you."
"You had no right."
"Maybe not, but I'm not going to apologise. Other than anger, you've already shown more emotion than I've seen out of you in months."
"Look at me, Nate," Brian repeated.
"No."
"I'm not leaving."
"Then I will," I said, turning away from his voice and moving toward the kitchen again. I wanted nothing more than to be away from them all. Away from the talking, the guilt, and the attempts to get me to hope that I might have even a tiny bit of what I had once had.
"No, you won't," Nick said, stepping out and blocking my way. "You're not leaving until we get things straightened out."
"Jesus, they brought you too?"
He nodded. "I was on the first plane when Andrea called. I had no idea that you were this bad."
"I'm fine."
"Liar," Brian said from behind me.
"Nick, please make him go away," I pleaded with him in a whisper. "I don't want to see him."
"I can't, Nate."
"Nathaniel," Brian said softly.
"Don't call me that."
"You used to like it when I called you that."
"That was before," I said, digging my lighter and cigarettes out of my pocket. "Things are different now."
"You're different now," Nick said.
"That's right," I agreed. "I am. You're apparently the only one that can see that."
"We see it. We just don't accept it," Andrea said.
"We won't accept it," Brian added.
"Look, Brian." Just saying his name broke my heart and brought the tears back to my eyes. "I'm sorry that they dragged you up here for nothing, but--"
"No, you fucking don't!" Brian shouted at me suddenly. He grabbed my shoulder and spun me around to face him, pushing me back against the wall. "You're not just going to dismiss me like you did before! You're going to tell me what the hell is going on in your head!"
Brian's face was wet and his eyes were red. He was crying freely as he spoke, his hand resting on my chest and holding me against the wall.
"Why do you care?" I asked him, crying myself now. "After what I did, why would you care? Just get away from me. Cut your losses and forget about me."
"That's not how love works, Nate. The Nate I fell in love with knew that."
"You don't love me."
"You may not love yourself," he said, shaking his head. "But everyone else in this room loves you. That's why we're here."
"Let us help," Nick said, putting his hand on my shoulder.
"You can't," I said again. "I did this to myself, and I have to live with it."
"Then explain it to me," Brian said quietly. "You didn't just do this to yourself. You did it to me. You did it to us. You owe me an explanation."
"I don't know how to explain it now any more than I did then. I just can't."
"You're damned well going to try," Brian insisted.
"Why can't you all just leave me alone?" I asked, sitting down on the floor. Falling is probably more accurate. It was either sit of have my knees do it for me. "I just want you to leave me alone." I put my forehead against my knees and sobbed. Seeing Brian was the last straw, and I could feel myself coming unwound.
"Could you guys maybe give us some time?" Brian asked the room. "We're going to talk about this." This last part was as much for me as it was for them.
"Okay," Andrea said, and I heard her stand. "Why don't you come with me, Nick? We'll get something to eat."
"I don't know," Nick said hesitantly.
"We'll be okay," Brian told him. "I'll call you in a while."
Only Nick spoke as they filed past us. Kneeling down beside me, he ran his hand down the back of my head and brought it to rest on my neck. "Help him," he whispered directly into my ear, "and let him help you." He kissed the side of my head gently, then stood up and joined the others.
I didn't look up, just sat there and sobbed and hoped that Brian had gone with them. When I heard the door close, I looked up and found him watching me.
"Start talking," he said simply.
"What do you want to hear?" I asked him.
"Whatever it is that turned you into this. You're stronger than that."
The idea that he still had faith in me hurt more than anything I could have done to myself. "Even the strongest of us have to break some time," I said, wiping my eyes. "I broke."
"No, you didn't."
"How would you know?" I asked him. "I haven't seen you in a year."
"Because the passion's still there," he said softly. "I can see it in you the same as I always could. You're just using it against yourself now.
"I need a drink," I muttered, standing up.
"Please don't," he said as I turned for the kitchen. "For me?"
I sighed and continued on my way. "That was a long time ago, too, and this isn't broccoli."
"Fine, then I'm having one too." Brian followed me into the kitchen and took down a glass for each of us.
"You swore you'd never drink with me again."
"Well, that was a long time ago, too."
"Suit yourself," I answered, pulling a bottle out of the freezer and deciding that I didn't really care if Brian chose to drink or not. "Ice?"
"Yeah, please."
I dropped a couple of cubes in each glass and poured, handing him his. Putting the bottle back, I pulled out my cigarettes and offered him one, figuring that if he wanted to mirror me, I'd see how far he wanted to take it. He hesitated for a moment, then took it.
I lit mine, flicked the lighter closed and handed it to him, then took my glass and brushed past him on the way back to the living room. Sitting down in the chair Erron had been in -- and still not caring if I'd gotten all of the glass out of it -- I took a drink and closed my eyes.
Brian sat on the couch. I could feel his eyes on me, so I opened mine again. I watched as he took a drink and began coughing and sputtering.
"Why are you here?" I asked him when he could talk again. I carefully kept the emotion out of my voice that was raging in my head.
"I told you. Andrea called and said that you needed us. And don't tell me you're fine. We both know that you're not."
"So what? You thought that you'd show up and I'd just turn everything around? I'd suddenly see the light and instantly turn back into the guy that you knew?"
"The guy that I loved," he corrected. "And no, that's not what I expected. I wanted to talk with you again, and find out why you've let yourself fall apart like this. This isn't you."
"It is now," I sighed. "This is what I left for myself, Brian. This is it. Might I remind you that the guy you loved, the guy that everyone wants back, was the same guy that broke both of our hearts? The same one that just left you without an explanation?"
"You don't have to remind me," Brian said. "And if we're being completely honest, I also came here hoping that you might finally be able to explain it to me." He looked at the cigarette in his hand like it was completely foreign, then put it to his lips. Inhaling, he again started to cough.
I knew that both the smoking and the drinking were probably not good for a singer, but it wasn't my place to get involved. Not anymore. "Then you're going to be disappointed on both counts," I told him. "I can't explain it any more than I could then, and I'm not the man you knew." Even now, he had power over me. I was speaking to him more than I had anyone in months.
"You could be."
"I don't want to be."
"I don't believe you," he said softly.
"That's your prerogative. You're wrong, though."
Brian took another drink, being careful to sip it this time. He grimaced slightly, but struggled to keep a straight face. "I don't think so."
"If you don't want those, why did you take them?" I asked.
"I thought that, since you've managed to find so many answers with them, I should give them a try. They seem to help you keep the pain away, right?"
"One glass isn't going to do it," I said, ignoring the sarcasm in his voice.
"Then I'll have more," he insisted, taking another sip.
"I might have some Coke in the fridge if you want something to mix it with," I said, waving toward the kitchen, but making no attempt to go and check.
"No, this is fine. I just have to acquire a taste for it."
"Again, it's going to take more than one glass."
"I don't have anywhere to go."
I closed my eyes again. "Why do you care? Why can't you just leave me alone?"
"Like you did to me? Just toss you aside and forget about what we had together? I can't do that, and neither can you."
"What makes you so sure?"
"Because if you had, you wouldn't be doing what you're doing. If you had forgotten about me, you'd be working on another book and hanging out with your friends right now, instead of getting plastered by yourself and letting your career go down the tubes."
"I'm never going to be that man again, Brian. You all might as well -- all of you -- stop hoping for that right now. Too much has happened."
"I suppose it has," he agreed, making me open my eyes again. "I suppose that this last year and a bit has changed you in some fundamental way, but there's a lot of that man still left in you somewhere. You may not be the same, but even a hint of him right now would be a huge improvement."
"I don't want to be him again," I repeated, feeling the tears coming again. Brian's calmness was starting to wear me down. It was getting harder and harder to ignore what he was saying.
"I think you do."
"You're wrong."
"No, I don't think so. I think you want to be like you were, but you're afraid to be. You wound up getting hurt, and it scared you. You know what? Everyone else got hurt too, Nate. Andy, Erron, Jeff and Cindy, Nick, Kevin, AJ, Howie, Carrie..."
"You."
"Yeah, me too. And we still want you back. Why don't you?"
I sighed and put my head in my hands, leaning forward in the chair. "Maybe I am scared a little bit," I conceded, shocking myself with the confession. "Maybe I am, but I think I'm right to be. You guys got hurt just as much, or more, than I did, and I'm sorry about that. But you don't have to live with the knowledge that you did all the hurting."
"We don't blame you for that," he said. "None of us is holding it against you. You've got to stop doing this to yourself."
"How can you not blame me? You, especially?"
"I'm not going to lie to you, Nate. I did blame you for a long time. But then I realised that I shared some of the blame."
I looked up sharply at that, and saw two more tear streaks on his face. His calm was breaking again. "Don't say that."
"Come on, Nate. One day you were totally happy with me, and the next you were leaving. I must have done something to make you doubt us. There's no other explanation."
"You didn't do anything," I said. "It was all my fault."
"I must have," he repeated, shaking his head. "I don't know what it was, but I must have done something."
I just shook my head and took another drink, feeling the warmth all the way down. "You didn't."
"Then what happened?"
"I can't tell you," I insisted.
"Nate."
"I can't tell you, Brian. Don't push me."
"Then stop this! If you can't give me the explanation that you owe me, then do this for me. Pull yourself together."
I shook my head. "It's not that easy."
"Yes, it is," he said. "This is what you can do for me."
"I can't," I answered, pleading with my eyes. "I can't."
"Why not?" he pressed. "There's more to it than being scared, isn't there?"
"I don't want to talk about this anymore," I said, draining my glass. Brian took another drink as well. He still had half of a glass, but he followed me into the kitchen for a refill.
"Well, I don't particularly want to see you drink yourself into oblivion, but it looks like we're going to do that."
"Don't you ever give up?"
"You know me better than that," he said, getting some more ice. "I thought we knew each other better than that."
"We used to."
"I still know when you're holding out on me," he said softly. "Tell me why you refuse to move on with things."
"I don't deserve it!" I cried, sitting up on the counter and letting the tears come again. "There. Are you happy now? I don't deserve to move on. Not after everything that's happened."
"Of course you do," Brian said, putting his hand on my knee.
It was completely innocent, merely a gesture of comfort, but I jerked my leg away. "Don't."
"Do you hate me that much?"
I raised my eyes to look at him. "I don't hate you. I could never hate you."
"You left me."
"I had to," I whispered, taking another drink. "I had to leave."
"For my own good."
I nodded. "Yes, for your own good. Being with me would only have gotten you hurt. I didn't want to see that happen."
"And what a good job you did of it," he said sarcastically. "I don't know when I've had more fun than watching the man I love walk out of my hotel room and my life without any sort of explanation. Yes sir, good times."
"Better I do it," I mumbled.
"What else could have?" Brian asked loudly. "No one could have hurt me like you did that day, Nate."
"That's not true. I was only one part of your life, Brian. There were a lot of other things that you loved, and being with me put all of them in jeopardy."
"There was nothing I loved as much as you," he insisted. "Being with you was a risk I was willing to take."
"Well, I wasn't!" I wailed. "I couldn't live with being the person who took your career away from you."
"Why are you inventing trouble? My career wasn't in trouble when you left. No one outside of our friends knew about us. There wasn't any reason to think that we were going to get caught. Things were perfect."
"Nothing's ever perfect," I said. "You know that."
"You were perfect," Brian countered.
"Apparently not," I pointed out. "Or we wouldn't be here."
"Why are we here?"
"I live here," I said, resting my head against the cupboards and closing my eyes. "And you're here chasing something that doesn't exist anymore."
"Because you don't deserve it."
"That's right."
"Why not?" Brian asked. "You give me a satisfactory explanation to that, and I'll leave you alone."
"Why would I deserve it?"
"I asked you first."
I sighed and took a deep breath. "Look what I did, Brian. I left you, I left us. I didn't give you any sort of reason for breaking both of our hearts like that. I left the rest of the guys hanging, and made them worry about us both. And now I've hurt every single person that ever gave a damn about me."
"That's exactly what you did. Now tell me why you don't deserve to have those things back."
"Are you not listening?" I asked him, raising my voice. "Someone who would do all of that deserves exactly what I have. I don't deserve to have friends like I did. I don't deserve to have someone love me like you did. I don't deserve to be able to do what I love to do for a living. I deserve me. That's it. At least this way I can't hurt anyone else."
"You're still hurting all of us."
"Then you should leave me alone."
"We love you."
"Stop saying that!"
"Stop saying that you're fine."
"I am fine."
"And we do love you."
I got down off of the counter and walked away from him, heading down the hall. When I got to my room, I closed the door behind me. It took all of two seconds for Brian to open it again.
"You said you'd leave me alone. You said that if I told you, you'd leave me alone."
"No," Brian said. "I said that if you gave me a satisfactory answer, I'd leave you alone. I'm not satisfied. Let me tell you what I think."
"Please don't."
"I think that you have a bunch of friends around you who miss you, and want you back. I think you have a career that you have to go back to because it's the only thing other than me that I ever saw light up your eyes." He smiled, obviously hoping to get me to as well. Seeing that it hadn't worked, his grin faded. "And I think you have a man who loves you and doesn't like to see you like this."
"You can't love me after all this."
"That's not true. Just because you don't love me anymore-"
"I never said that," I mumbled.
"What?"
"I never said I didn't love you. I said you can't love me."
"You still love me?" he asked, his eyes wide with surprise.
I looked into my glass without answering.
"Nate," Brian said. "Do you still love me? Do you?"
"Of course I do!" I muttered through the tears, sitting down on the bed. "Jesus! That's why I left!"
"Do you know how sickeningly old that's getting?" Brian asked, raising his voice. "'I left you because I love you. It was for your own good,'" he recited back to me. "When do I get to decide what's for my own good? You were for my own good, Nate! I loved you! If you thought you were endangering me, why didn't you talk to me about it? We could have worked something out."
"Brian--" His cell phone started ringing. Talk about being saved by the bell. "You better get that. It might be important."
"Not this important," he said, taking the phone out and motioning to turn it off.
I stopped him by putting my hand on his arm. "Answer it."
He looked at me and saw how serious I was. He nodded slightly and flipped the phone open instead. "We're not done." He turned away from me before he started to talk, and I took the opportunity to lie down and close my eyes. I was exhausted, but I also knew that sleep was about the only place that he wouldn't follow me.
"Hello?... Oh, yeah dad. I meant to call you... No, I'm not. I'm actually in Toronto... She's at home... Well, I'm at Nate's apartment right now... No, we aren't. Nate's having a rough time, and Andrea thought I might be able to help him out... No, I don't think there's anything you can do. I'm starting to wonder if there's anything that I can do, actually... Pretty bad, yeah... I don't know... Okay, I'll call you back when I get to the hotel... yeah, me too. Bye."
I heard him flip the phone closed and tried to even out my breathing so that he would think I was asleep. I heard him walk around to the other side of the bed and watch me, looking for signs of consciousness. There was an itch on my nose that I was dying to scratch, but I didn't dare move.
Brian sighed and moved to look out the window. "What's going on with you, Nate?" he asked. From the tone of his voice, I knew that he believed I was asleep. "And what in the world made you leave, if you didn't stop loving me?"
He came back over to me and spread a blanket over me - the quilt I kept on my reading chair - and smoothed the hair away from my forehead. The gentleness in his touch almost brought a tear to my eye again, but I maintained the act until I heard him leave the room. A few minutes later, I heard him close the apartment door behind him as well.
Sitting up, I scratched my nose and spent a long time looking at the picture of us on the nightstand. I couldn't believe that he still cared enough to come all this way to make sure that I was okay. I would have expected it of Nick, but I hadn't hurt him the way I had Brian.
Sighing to myself, I tried to clear my head of thoughts of Brian, got up again, and headed for the kitchen with my empty glass.
...TBC