Losing Bea’s friendship meant losing a big part of myself. She hadn’t even been my friend for long, it couldn’t have been much more than two years since I first met her. I became friends with her through Priscilla. When Pri and I broke up, she was the only one who stayed. Even though Pri and I had never told Bea and the others about our relationship, she still proved to be a very trustworthy friend whom I’d managed to forge a friendship bond with. And now I had just broken that very bond.
The result was that I was down in the dumps for all of the following week. I tried calling her countless times, but she must have blocked my number out of anger. Texting her got me nowhere either. And I couldn’t call Priscilla or her friends and ask them to contact Bea, because one: that would be suspicious as hell; and two: I was keeping my distance from Pri and her folks and I wanted it to remain that way, at least for the time being.
Along with my bad mood came a complete ineptitude for training. No matter how much I knew I needed to train, that still wasn’t enough to get me out the house, or to pursue some sort of goal. I was even falling back on work, and had a client cancel at me last minute, which always sucks. In essence, I had lost some of my motivation.
As it turns out, that was a terrible moment for something like that to happen. My next competition was just a few weeks away. If I didn’t work hard into practicing now, all my work for an entire year would have been in vain.
So after the seventh day in a row trying to contact Bea to apologize to her, I decided that more drastic measures were in need. It was Saturday morning when I just rode down to her apartment building and parked outside, before calling her apartment on the intercom.
“Hello?” I heard Bea’s familiar voice once she picked up the receiver. My heart almost stopped.
“Bea, we need to talk.”
There was silence. After a long while, came the reply.
“No we don’t,” she told me. “And I think I’ve made that clear enough when I blocked your numbers.”
“Please just give me a chance. I just wanna talk.”
“Okay then. Talk.”
Huh? Really?
“I… I’m sorry, Beatrice. I messed up. I know I hid something from you that I shouldn’t have, and you have every right in the world to be mad at me for that. I just don’t want us to be over as friends because I made a mistake.”
Bea waited for a moment before talking. She was probably waiting to see if I had anything else to tell her.
“Well,” her voice spoke to me through the device. “You’re right about one thing. You made a mistake. But you know what? You did more than that. Just a couple of weeks ago you promised me, remember? When I found out you were gay from Priscilla’s call, you promised me there would be no more secrets. But obviously promises don’t mean anything to you, do they, Giulia?”
“It was… it was just that one night. Honest. I wasn’t sleeping with her before. That just happened once.”
“Shit, Giu, you know there’s so much that’s fucked up about this whole situation, I can’t even decide on what to start with. Am I to believe that Val Sunset just showed up out of the blue and decided that she wanted to get in your pants?” I chuckled when she said that. Of course there had been a context, but when you put it in perspective, that’s kinda what happened that day at the arena.
I shook the thought from my head.
“Well… no,” I admitted.
“Have you met her before?”
“Bea, please let me in so we can talk about this in person.”
“Have you, or have you not met Val Sunset before that day I walked in on you? I’ll let you in depending on your answer. And you’d better not even think about lying to me about this again, Giu!”
There was silence, while she waited for my response. I gathered my wits to tell her.
“Yes. I have.”
“When?”
“That day I picked you up at the arena. I met her in the afternoon, before the concert.”
“Fuck it, Giulia! You had a whole week to tell me about it before I walked in on you. A week. And you didn’t even mention it? Shit. It was when you were going to get ZAK’s autograph, wasn’t it? You even asked me who she was. God I’m such an idiot.”
I said nothing. Beatrice already knew the truth. And there was no use trying to hide any more of it from her.
“Giulia, are you still there?”
“I’m here,” I said, feeling miserable.
“At least tell me that you hadn’t kissed before that night in your place.”
I said nothing, embarrassed. Now that I thought about it, it really had been a mediocre idea to conceal that whole story from my best friend.
Silence.
“I’m waiting,” said Beatrice.
Well, here goes nothing.
“She… um… she kissed me. Once. When I was trying for the autograph. At the arena.”
“Giulia?”
“Yeah?”
“Get the hell out of my front gate before I call the police on you.”
She shut off the receiver, which made the line go mute. I tried calling her name a couple of times, to see if she for some reason was still listening, but there was no response. It took me a minute or two of silence to pick up the pieces of my shattered self and walk down to where I had parked my bike.
Somehow, even though I knew there was no way we could work this out if I wasn’t completely honest with Bea, the feeling I got was that telling her the whole truth had actually made things worse. Going to her place had been the last thing I could try. Anything else now — like stalking her or breaking into her place — could legally get me into jail.
I didn’t know what to think on my way back. I had already felt scared, miserable and desperate, in different moments, now that it was all gone the only remaining feeling was emptiness. I felt empty. Lacking. Because I betrayed the trust of someone I cared about.
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