“But is this all supposed to be okay now? What are we supposed to do?”
“I don’t know…I don’t know I don’t know I don’t know…”
“Besides the lies, besides the deception, besides the fucking emails behind my back—what is it that made you not tell me? Why couldn’t you tell me? Why couldn’t you just say it and then move on from it?”
He drank again. He was asking the essential questions but he was sublimely still. It terrified her. She shook her head slowly again.
“This all makes sense when you start to think about it, right?” Will said. “Why you wanted the break in the first place, I mean. Why you wanted 1-2-3, why you were resisting everything, why you couldn’t imagine being engaged. What you needed in the meantime…I just wish you’d—”
“That’s not true,” she said, grabbing hold of him again, searching his face for his eyes. “That’s just not true at all. Please don’t make me feel worse about this than I already do. It’s not like I’ve been living with this desire for years, or something…it’s something that just happened.”
“I don’t believe that. I just don’t anymore. I read those fucking emails. Did you forget that again? The lying’s over, okay?” he said, and she pulled away from him slowly. He understood so much more than she probably even understood herself. “How long have you been feeling this way? Just tell me. Please. Whitney. There’s nothing else to hide anymore. There’s just two people left.”
“But there’s one person who’s the same and one person who’s fucking changed. And I don’t know what to say to you about it. I don’t know what this was about—or why.”
Will finished his drink. “You’re telling me all it takes is one hot fuck to turn you inside out like this? You’re saying that’s all this is. That there’s nothing else going on…I just don’t buy it anymore! I’m sorry. I love you. But I’m getting sick of you bullshitting me like this. I just don’t believe that there’s not something bigger going on.”
He was talking so much. She was getting fed up. “What do you want me to say?! That I’ve known all my life that I wasn’t pegged at one hundred on the spectrum or whatever? Nobody is!”
“I think some people are, actually? I fucking am!”
“Well, that’s fitting, right? Reliable, dependable, conventional Will.”
“Are you suggesting my heterosexuality is too boring for you? Are you saying—”
“I’m saying you’re lucky, okay? But this actually isn’t about you for once. Not everything’s about how fucking glorious your gloriously uninteresting life is.”
He chuckled darkly and shook his head. “You and I used to sit around talking about how nice it was to just know. To just know that you were the one for me, and I was the one for you, and that we didn’t have to worry about that stuff, because only movie stars like Adrien Fucking Green could come between us. About how lucky we were to have survived growing up and figuring ourselves out, unlike so many other people we know. But now you’re saying, what—that that wasn’t the case, after all?”
“I don’t have the answers for you. Or for me. I’m sorry. I just can’t explain any of this right now…I’m saying it’s never been one hundred percent for me, things were never quite the way you had it for yourself. It’s never been all the way, and lately it’s been harder…different…shifting. It’s been louder.”
“Lately.”
“These last few months. These last couple…years.”
“Years?”
“I don’t know what to tell you. I don’t know why and I don’t know how. Growing up, I mean, obviously it wasn’t a possibility. There was nothing to do but shove it down into the deepest drawer, and never acknowledge its existence. But then in—”
“You’re saying you’ve felt this way since you were a kid?”
“I don’t know what I’m saying! Okay? I’m saying there have been things at times that don’t feel like I feel with you, or with the other boys I dated, or the—”
“The other three boys you dated,” he said.
“I don’t know what you want me to do with that fact. What you intend for it to mean.”
“I just mean you weren’t exactly serially out there, boy crazy, even in…so it actually makes sense when you think about it, if you’ve just been—”
“Please don’t start turning over every rock to find convenient explanations. Connecting everything to this one fucking thing.”
“I can’t tell whether you’re saying that this is the smallest thing or the biggest thing in the world. If this is nothing or if it’s everything. If it wasn’t a big deal, you just wouldn’t have kept it concealed like this. And there wouldn’t be 73 emails with you and this woman drooling over the prospect of fucking each other again.”
“I just don’t know.”
“She’s quite striking. Not what I would’ve expected. But it’s interesting to see where you went when you had the opportunity.”
Her nails were making the soft sensitive flesh in her webs turn red.
“And that’s a hell of a deal she signed last year,” he said. “I guess I get it. But just know that it makes me fucking crazy, okay? That this epistolary romance was going on this whole fucking time…”
She was crying again.
“Every time you had to rush home for Wi-Fi,” he said, “or get up in the middle of the night to respond to ‘work emails’…”
She was heaving and her breath was skipping.
“See?” he said. “I knew it. I knew it was more than nothing. More than you just not wanting to be rude.”
She whispered it: “I just don’t know what to tell you.”
“Please do your fucking best.”
She pulled at her hair. She pulled it hard and Will could hear
