I stared at Joe intently for a few moments, trying to work out exactly what he wanted me to say about that. I didn’t even know how to process his apology, never mind respond to it. In all my fantasies about us being reunited, I never even considered him saying sorry to me for any of it. It honestly never occurred to me that he would.
Maybe it should have done, maybe that was where I was going wrong.
“I’m serious, Lotts,” he continued, lacing his fingers lightly through mine. “I never should have taken any of my grief out on you, that was so wrong. Looking back, I can see that you were the only one who was ever truly there for me.” His eyes meant business, I could see total honesty in his gaze, but that wasn’t enough for me. Not anymore.
I shook my head sadly, wishing I could think of any words to say, but my mind was frustratingly blank. Like a black abyss with no end. I couldn’t help but think he wanted me to pull him towards me, to embrace him once more, but I couldn’t quite do it. I wasn’t there yet. In that moment I really wasn’t sure I’d ever be there again. Ever since we’d started down this road, something fundamental had shifted within me.
Instead I kept my eyes fixed upon him as his hands fell away from me and he grabbed his drink to take a big swig. It was clear his mind was twisting and turning, that he was suffering emotionally, but it wasn’t my place to make him feel any better. I used to feel that way, but not anymore. It was becoming increasingly obvious to me that I only had to be responsible for how I was feeling.
“Look, Lotts.” Joe’s eyes were fixed on his drink. I couldn’t help but wonder if he could sense my gaze upon him, if I was giving him any goosebumps, or making the hairs on the back of his neck stand up. “I know we could have had something, if it wasn’t for me. I think about it all the time. I remember how great things were when we were engaged. I consider how it’d be now if we were married. Maybe we’d even have a child on the way by now.”
Why couldn’t he look at me? Why were all of these words falling into his glass? Deep down in the part of me where all my deepest, darkest secrets lay, I’d pictured him saying those words to me—although maybe not exactly like that—and I always assumed it’d make me feel something. Maybe it was the conversation surrounding it, the issues that I never thought we would get out, but all I felt was hollow and numb.
I cocked my head to one side, wondering how damaged Joe still was by losing his sister. I knew he wouldn’t get over it entirely, who could? Especially after learning that she was suffering a deep depression for years, questioning her sexuality, her identity, everything about herself. It must have been awful to learn she felt so alone, that she didn’t feel close enough to anyone to share her feelings. It made me feel terrible, and I wasn’t even officially family. The image of Marie sitting in her bedroom alone, writing that soul destroying suicide note before taking more sleeping pills than any human body could handle was terrible.
But maybe I felt a distance from it that Joe never could.
Although I blamed myself for my role in the whole thing, I always felt like it hadn’t really happened to someone I knew. Maybe that was cold and callous, but I couldn’t help the way my young, naïve mind dealt with things. It was just my coping mechanism.
Maybe Joe’s way of coping was to pile everything on the shoulders of someone else, to deflect the blame he felt inside. Maybe that was why he still seemed to be stuck in a rut, why he couldn’t move on. From what he’d told me about his life, it didn’t seem like he’d made any real effort to move on. Maybe it was because he’d never really gone back and dealt with things.
I felt bad for him, deep inside I felt pity, yet still I couldn’t speak.
“Say something, Lotts, I’m dying here,” he whined, reminding me I’d been silent for far too long. “I’m pouring out my heart here and you’re just looking at me.”
“What do you want me to say?” Oh God, why was my tone so cold? Couldn’t I just be kind, put everything behind me and just be nice? “What can I say?”
“I don’t know.” He bit down on his lip and looked up at me, giving me the sort of stare that would have had my heart melting way back when. “Tell me what we are. Tell me what we could be? I mean, do you ever think we could be what we were?”
“Friends?” I shrugged questioningly. “A couple? Engaged? Or maybe what came after…?” If we were really going to talk about it, then we had to cover it all. Even the real ugly bits that we probably both wanted to pretend never happened. I could see now that it wasn’t just Joe that was still affected by what had happened, I still had internal bruises too.
“You want me to say it aloud?” He shrugged, smiling with one side of his mouth. “Fine, I want us to be together. I feel like we’ve gone off course, and I want to get us back to where we used to be. We took a detour and now I want us to get back on the right path. I want us to have all those things we used to talk about.” Was that even possible anymore? Could we go back to that? It certainly wouldn’t be as simple as he seemed to be suggesting, there was a lot to deal with. “I know that might not be easy for you.” Oh, maybe he did get it after all. “I’m sure what Danny has done to you will bother you for a bit, but there has to be a way we can make it work, right?” Nope, maybe not. Maybe he was just going to be pig-headed about the whole thing.
My eyes widened in shock. I couldn’t actually believe he’d said those things to me. He’d brought Danny into this as if what he’d done was way worse. I didn’t even know the truth about Danny yet, which made the anger bubble even more intensely in my stomach. Danny was mine, any issues we had were ours, Joe had absolutely no right to bring them up now.
My teeth instantly gritted together and my fists balled up by my sides, as if my body was trying to keep my rage inside. There was something about Joe that always made me feel that way, I hadn’t ever felt like I could be totally honest with him. At least with Danny I could express my emotions, even the ones he didn’t like, even if it made absolutely no difference.
Nope, I couldn’t do it anymore. Too much had happened, too much had changed in my life. In me too. I couldn’t just sit here like a pressure cooker, bubbling over, waiting to explode. I needed to say it all now, as calmly as I could muster to make at least some of it sink in.
“Joe, whatever you think about Danny isn’t my business. You don’t know him, you don’t know our relationship, and to be quite frank, you don’t know me anymore.” He looked really stunned by my words, but that wasn’t going to be enough to stop me. “Even if I wasn’t with Danny, that doesn’t necessarily mean that I’d be with you. I’ve grown up over the last few years, and I assume that you have too. We can’t just jump back into something we had when we were teenagers, expecting it to be exactly the same. That would be the most stupid thing ever.” I threw my hands up in the air, all of the potential issues now coming back to me. “How do you think our families would react if they knew? Your mum didn’t like us before, what makes you think she’ll be okay now? Her and your dad might have decided to give it a go at the time, but you already admitted that things are falling apart now. It’ll absolutely kill her if you tell her that you’re with me.”
“So?” His eyes flashed amber at my words. “So what? I’m not living my life for anyone else, I’m living my life for me. Maybe you should do the same too.” I could see him gripping so tightly to the table that his knuckles were turning white under the pressure of it all. I wondered if the rest of the people in the pub could sense the tension swirling around our table, but I didn’t dare look. If they were staring, I’d have to just let them keep on at it. “So what if our parents don’t like it? Do you think they were ever thinking about us? Your mum and my dad, at it, not caring about the hurricane of destruction they were leaving behind. My mum, knowing about it and letting it carry on, she wasn’t thinking about anyone else either. They were all selfish…”
“What, so you want to be too?” What the hell was going on here? Why was Joe so mad? He’d turned this into some crazy argument, and I wasn’t even sure why. He knew he couldn’t win, so why was he continuing? It seemed like a massive waste of breath to me. “You want to act like them and be selfish? Really?” I almost said that it wasn’t like him, but I bit down on my tongue at the last moment. Actually, looking back, he was always pretty selfish.
“I don’t know,” he retorted angrily, trembling under the emotion of it all. “I just…I don’t know.”
Then I watched in horror as a fat, wet tear cascaded down his cheek, falling onto his lip. I couldn’t recall a time when I’d ever seen Joe cry, and the sight of it left me a little breathless. His entire face crumbled, and the angry façade simply fell away. It was as if he’d been transformed back into a little boy, one who had lost his way in the world and needed someone to guide him.
I had to gulp down my own emotions, I needed to control the years of bottled up frustration for now because my friend needed me. All the bullshit that had happened between us didn’t matter as much as that. I could be a big enough person to recognise that he had been very important to me for a long time, and because of that I could swallow my pride and move around to hug him once more.
As I struggled out from my seat, I finally worked up the courage to look about and instantly regretted it. I thought we’d been talking quite quietly to one another, that we’d been keeping things just between us, but it seemed that we’d managed to attract attention regardless.
I wrapped my arms around Joe from behind, my heart thundered noisily in my chest, causing a buzzing sensation in my ears. This was utterly insane, this whole evening had been a surprise, and I didn’t know how I felt anymore. It certainly wasn’t how I thought I would, which left me with only one question.
What did I do next?
It would have been easy to think that Joe would have gone back to the person he was before he lost Marie, but it would be naïve to forget the person he became afterwards. That version of him was still there, and I couldn’t be sure he wouldn’t come out. Would I ever be willing to go through all of that again?