I stayed where I was on the bed, listening to his movements—the ruffle of his jeans falling to the ground, the creak of the shower curtain as he got in, how the rush of water dulled as James placed his body behind it.
All sounds were louder than they should’ve been, and I realized he’d left the bathroom door open.
I moved toward it, taking the damply ruined sheet with me.
Turning the corner into the bathroom, a thud punched at my chest—a punishing whack from my heart—as I spotted James inside the shower. Sadness bloomed a heavy waterfall through my chest and my feet pulled to a stop, the sheet dragging behind me bunching at my feet.
He stood in the shower, the curtain cracked just a few inches. His forearms held him up against the wall, dripping rows of muddy water down the shower wall. His head hung so low it was at a ninety degree angle with his mighty shoulders. The shower poured down around him and soaked his dark hair.
My eyes followed lines of water down his matted head of hair, tracking as it slid along his nose and fell off the tip.
He was so still. Painfully unmoving.
My weeping heart pushed me toward him, though James didn’t react at all to my presence in the bathroom with him. He just stood there, letting the shower drown away the evidence of tonight.
“Did you figure out what you would tell my dad?” A creak broke my voice in half, my vocal cords worn from too much crying and mindless screaming.
Rushing water filled the pause before James heaved a slow and heavy sigh.
“I’ll call him in the morning.”
Like me, James' voice gave way under the tension of tonight. His deep voice was a river of rolling rocks and twigs, all mangled together in an overpowering stream.
“I’ll tell him Derek left in the middle of the night and hasn’t come back. I’ll let your father fill in the blanks and jump on whatever theory he forms.”
Great. More lies.
Tonight was unwinding into a web of sticky lies where James and I were somehow both the deadly spiders and the prey caught in the trap. We were victims of ourselves, ensnared by circumstance and paralyzed by the poison of our actions.
The actions that I had caused.
I was a criminal before tonight, but never of this magnitude. I’d done lots of bad shit, and I never felt bad about any of it. Stealing, trespassing, driving drunk, setting fire to assholes’ houses. But killing someone…
That made me a monumental kind of criminal.
A real villain.
There was no lie you could tell that would be sweet enough to sugar-coat the fault that was owed to me for this crime. It was my hands on Derek that led to this. My feet that kicked him. My words that spiraled him to come after me. My fear that pushed me past the edge of a monster untamed.
I pushed and pushed until I pushed James too, and now we were both free-falling in every paradoxical sense of the word.
And maybe he didn’t need to know why. He didn’t deserve my sob story. My history. To know the cause of my defect.
But maybe I wanted him to know.
Maybe I wanted him to know why I was just a little bit too fucked up.
A little too wrong to ever be right again.
The shame James felt wasn’t subtle and it wasn’t light either. It smothered the small space of the bathroom like a monsoon, ravaging, tossing, suffocating. I could feel his remorse crushing down on my shoulders, trying to tear me down to my knees.
I wouldn’t bend and I wouldn’t crumble beneath the guilt because I’d already disintegrated years ago beneath it. The guilt of Johnny's death had gotten me long ago, and there just wasn’t enough of me left for Derek’s death to play with.
My skin was nothing more than a veil of strength with nothing to prove it beneath.
That was me though. That wasn’t James.
Good at heart, man-of-the-law James was already cracking. The fractures in his armor were widening bit by bit as the shame crunched down on his strapping shoulders that were proving to be no more than a show of muscle.