How did I get here, was the only thought that ran through my mind as I made the trek through the all-too-familiar suburbia, adorned with matching houses, fresh-cut lawns, and abnormally happy families. Their happiness wasn’t real—it was all a façade they were putting up because pretending to be happy was much better than dealing with the reality of life.
Because the reality of life was that it sucked, hard.
In reality, the loyal wife was cheating on her husband, the hard-working father was in debt and gambling his life away, and the smart kids were cheating their way into college, but as long as it looked like a happy family, it was.
But I wasn’t like them. I was practical—logical, even. I didn’t fawn over the impossible idea of a happy life because my childhood taught me better. I had a happy life, and it was taken away from me. The good times rarely outweighed the bad, this I knew, so why had I tricked myself into thinking that caring about someone other than myself would do me any good? My attachment to Scar was my own fault, so I had no one else to blame for the weird feeling that pounded in my chest every time I envisioned the hurt in Scar’s eyes when he found out the truth.
It was the middle of the night when I leapt into Max’s bedroom window unannounced. He always kept his window open at night for this very purpose since his parents weren’t too fond of us spending time together. They had some preconceived notion that I had turned him into a flamboyant gay, when in reality, I was the one fighting off the ignorant assholes who bulled him at school. Sex for protection sounded like a pretty fair trade if you asked me.
“Max,” I shouted in a bare whisper to alert him of my presence.
He shot out of bed, eyes searching the room in despair until they finally landed on me, which seemed to calm him down. He dragged a lazy hand down his face and let out a relieved sigh. “Fuck, Jamie, why do you always do this?”
“I get horny at night,” I said for lack of anything better. The real reason was because I didn’t want to go home to face Jillian. She wasn’t completely wrong for calling me out for the asshole I was, but it resulted in me losing the one thing I actually cared about in a long while.
So, I decided it would be better for the both of us if we let each other calm down.
“What’s wrong?” Max asked, pulling me out of my thoughts. He had gotten out of bed now, allowing me to get a good view of the slight bulge in his white briefs.
“Nothing,” I lied.
“Ah, come on. Something’s up.”
“Yeah…” I gave him one of my famous cheeky grins to get him off my tail and approached him slowly, “…me.” That was all it took for Max to drop the subject and return the smile. He was a smart boy, but rarely did he ever question anything when sex was on the table and tonight, it was going to be on the table.
Not a second later passed before I closed whatever space was left between us and pinned Max against the wall, right onto a poster of one of his favorite bands. I pressed my lips to his neck, breathing heavily, as I trailed my hands down the length of his arms to grab his arms and pin them against the wall. He writhed beneath me, attempting to turn around to face me, but I wouldn’t let him, and this made him even hornier.
“So,” Max breathed out in a desperate whisper, “I was thinking maybe I can be—” I whipped him around and slammed his back against the wall—he smiled, “—top, this time?”
And just like that, I was soft. “What?”
“Well, it’s just that—I don’t know—we don’t really do anything different. It’s always what you wanna do, and don’t get me wrong, I love it, but maybe we can do something I want.”
I didn’t sulk all the way over here for Max to get what he wanted. “Max, I don’t really have the patience for this right now. Let’s just fuck.” I dipped my head for a kiss, but he turned his head to the side and pushed me away. “Fuck, seriously!”
I didn’t notice I was yelling until Max grew silent and stared back at me with scared, beady eyes. What did this boy turn me into?
My eyes fluttered shut to allow me to focus on my breathing. “Sorry,” I said, and I meant it. “Sorry for yelling. I don’t really want to think or talk right now.”
I was slightly surprised when Max grabbed my hand and led me to the edge of his bed, motioning me to sit. And so I did.
“Jamie, you know you can talk to me about anything, right?”
I clamped down my bottom lip, for fear that I couldn’t actually tell him that I didn’t believe that. Max liked me, way more than I liked him, and telling him about my feelings for Scar would be insensitive. If I wanted to change the way Scar and my sister thought about me, it wasn’t going to be by continuing my asshole streak.
“Seriously.” He gave me a hand a squeeze and I realized he was still holding it.
I took a deep breath. “I like someone.” There was a glimmer of something strange in Max’s deep-colored eyes, but he seemed committed to being an active listener because he nodded for me to continue. “And he’s, well, straight. And even if he was gay, I don’t typically like people and people don’t typically like me, but he likes me. As a friend. And I don’t have friends, either. But now, I guess I ruined my chances of being friends with him by being me—I ruin things.” Admitting to myself that I liked how Scar chose to be vulnerable with me, to trust me wholeheartedly, was definitely a revelation for me, and it scared the hell out of me. For fuck’s sake, I was in deep water with my sister because I chose to be with him over her.
There was an odd intensity in the way he looked at me, like he was actually absorbing the information, but the more he looked at me the more I realized how stupid I must’ve sounded. “Shit, I probably don’t make any sense.”
“No…” Max rubbed my back and gave me a small smile. Even in the moonlight, I could see that he was really struggling to remain impartial, until he said, “…I know exactly how you feel.”
Was this karma?
“I don’t want to hurt you.”
“It’s okay,” he reassured me as he reached out to twirl a lock of my tousled hair around his finger. “I don’t know anything about Scar, but he seems like your stereotypical jock with pretty eyes.”
“He is, but at the same time, he isn’t and—wait, how did you know it was Scar?”
“The whole school’s been talking about him being gay ever since you kissed him at the carnival. Kinda assumed.”
Max’s words succeeded in making me feel even worse. I tarnished his reputation, made him become the laughingstock of the school because of a stupid dare, and liked it without even thinking about the consequences of my actions. He didn’t have anyone because of me. Jillian was right—I deserved to be punished, not her.
It was uncomfortably silent between us for a while. Max’s eyes were sad and not the usual cheery brown ones I had known them to be. It was safe to say that my talking ruined the mood and neither of us knew how to continue after such a revelation, but suddenly my phone chimed in my back pocket, and I had never been more grateful to feel that cheap little thing vibrate—anything that could take me out of the current headspace I was in. But I was genuinely surprised by the voice I heard on the other side.
“Jamie,” Scar’s voice was deep, distressed, and uneasy.
I gulped. “Scar, why are you calling me?”
“Trust me, I wouldn’t be calling if I had other option, but…” he sucked in a shaky breath followed by a brief sniffle. Was he crying? “…look, I need your help.”
“My help,” I parroted, slightly amused. “Thought you wanted nothing to do with me.”
He sighed. “I don’t care that right now. This is important. I wouldn’t be calling if it wasn’t.”
“Okay.” I gave in much faster that I thought I would. “What do you need me to do?”
The important problem at hand was Scar’s little sister, Amy, who I didn’t know much about other than the very few altercations I had seen between her and her brother. He wasn’t the nicest of siblings (but neither was I), but here in this moment I knew that Scar cared a lot for his sister. His silence was telling. Even in the eerie moonlight, I could still see the pain etched onto Scar’s face as he sat there in the passenger seat of his yellow Jeep.
I felt the need to console him with something I wished someone would’ve told me. “She’s going to be okay.”
Scar grunted, unconvinced. I watched as he looked into the back seat to check on Amy’s still frame sprawled across the torn leather. “This must be my karma.”
“How?”
“I was mean to her, and now she’s…” He turned his head to gaze out the window.
“Scar.”
“Everything’s my fault, you know? I was the one who wanted to go to that stupid baseball practice and my dad’s dead because of it. My mom’s a fucking drunk because of it! I was a dick to my sister and look what happened!” He threw his hands up in the hair in exasperation and slumped backward in his seat, seemingly burrowing himself in his sorrows. “Hell, I couldn’t even keep my girlfriend because I couldn’t get fucking hard and now, well, now the entire school thinks I’m gay. I’m just an epic failure.”
At first, I was confused as to why Scar sought out my help, but the reason was becoming increasingly clear. Scar didn’t need my help because he valued me. He needed my help because there was no one else who would. “It’s not your fault, any of it. Your mom, your dad, Amy … and we all know the reason the school thinks you’re gay is because of me, and I’m sorry.”
Scar turned his head to look at me and I gazed into his turquoise eyes, oddly finding peace in the kaleidoscopic color of them. “It’s whatever … you didn’t do anything but reveal how many fake friends I had.” He looked away from me to play with his fingers, and then without returning his eyes to me, he muttered. “I’m sorry, too.”
“For?”
“The name-calling and the fighting.”
I frowned. “The fighting?”
“Yeah, for accusing you of seducing me.”
And with those words, I felt the hairs on my skin stand up as shivers coursed through my body. He was alluding to the night that he kissed me, the night that I had pushed him into a wall out of anger, the night that put him in the hospital, the night he wasn’t supposed to remember.
“It came back to me not too long ago,” he added as though he sensed my sudden anxiety. “I didn’t believe what Amy said about me falling down the stairs—I’m not that stupid.”
“Do you hate me?”
“Hate you? Why would I hate you?”
“We kissed.”
He stifled a laugh. “Yeah?”
“And you’re not into that.”
“I don’t know, wasn’t too bad. At least, not from what I remember.” And there it was—that same feeling in my chest that I hated so much. I could feel my cheeks burning and I wanted nothing more than to rip my heart out and throw it away. I shouldn’t have been feeling this way over a dumb, stupid kiss. “Well, I’d say it was much better than our first kiss. That one, was, yeah—no.”
I decided to mask my embarrassment with a nervous laugh. “So you, uh, liked it?”
Scar shot me a look. “Didn’t say that. I just said it wasn’t bad.”
“Oh, would you guys please just kiss already!” Amy’s high-pitched voice exclaimed throughout the car, alarming us both and causing me to slam my foot on the brakes and turn around to face the girl who was supposed to be severely injured and not sitting there smiling back at us.
“Amy! What the fuck? I thought you were—”
“Taking a nap?” she questioned with a lifted brow as she leaned back into the bench seat and propped her feet up on the center console. “I don’t really know what happened, actually. Just know that I was really upset that Mom was having another episode, and then I woke up with you two talking about kissing instead of actually kissing.”
Scar was fuming with anger. It couldn’t quite decipher what he was thinking about, but whatever it was, he seemed to think better of it and decided to take a deep breath instead. “Amy,” he said in an oddly leveled tone. “I thought something happened to you. This isn’t funny.”
“Oh, but it is!” She brought her full lips into a coy smile, milking this moment for what is worth. “I know why you didn’t want me hanging out with him. It’s because you wanted him all to yourself!”
“God, Amy,” Scar groaned. “It’s way too late for this.”
“It’s never too late to—”
“AMY!”
She pressed her lips together and folded her arms against her chest in defeat. “Fine.”
The car was pretty much silent on the drive back to Scar’s house. Scar was thoroughly annoyed by Amy eavesdropping on our conversation, but I could tell he was also relieved that she was okay.
The silence ensued until we were standing on the front porch of Scar’s house. Amy rushed into the house immediately, but Scar still lingered around the front door until he was certain that Amy wouldn’t be listening in on our conversation this time. “Hey, you can, uh, stay over if you’d like. I know it’s late,” he said, softly.
And I wanted to.
But this entire fiasco made me realize that I could lose my sister any day now, and I might not be so lucky as Scar was tonight.
“I gotta take care of some things,” I said with a small smile. “Next time, though.”
He studied me for a moment, his bright green eyes shifting back and forth between mine, and then he nodded. “Sure.”
That strange feeling in the pit of my stomach returned as we stared at each other in tense, awkward silence. I was too caught up in my own emotions to notice the moment when Scar stormed towards me and grabbed onto the sides of my face with his strong hands, pressing his lips against mine. The contact was enough to make the feeling in my stomach intensify by tenfold, and I reluctantly snaked my arms around his neck to tug us closer. I kissed him back, slow, letting our lips mold together in perfect harmony like this was destined to be.
I wanted to give Scar all I had. I wanted him to feel what I felt. I wanted to kiss him until the world stopped turning. I wanted him.
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