Page 133 of My Unfinished Heart

“Connor—”

“Fuck you, Tristan, get out of my house.”

Now Tristan looks like he might start crying. His body has a fine tremor from head to toe. He’s vibrating. I rest my hand on the small of his back, and his body presses into it. I feel like an interloper, seeing things I have no business seeing. The inner-workings of their friendship has always been a mystery to me, and now it’s turning itself inside out before my eyes. I want to look away, but I can’t. I’m in it now.

Tristan tries again. “Connor, I'm sorry. I should have told you⁠—”

“I don't want to hear it!” he screams. “GET OUT!”

Tristan jumps at the sudden volume and menace in my brother’s voice. “Fine.” He stalks across the living room and disappears into a hall.

I step toward my unraveling brother, but I maintain a healthy distance. “Don’t do this, Connor. He’s your best friend. He⁠—”

“You think you're winning? You haven't won. He’ll hate you for this. Maybe even more than I do.”

“I'm not the one he's running from.”

“You will be,” he says, his hard gaze pushing into mine.

“Archer?” Tristan asks from the hallway.

“Mark my words, brother. He'll run.”

That clown in It has nothing on my brother right now, but I’ve reached my horror quota for the night, so I turn to leave with Tristan. He has clothes and shoes on, a backpack slung over his shoulder, and a face wet with tears, but he’s ready to go. I’ve never been so grateful to see him wearing pants.

I don’t waste another second. I hold out my hand for his. He crosses the room and takes it, casting a final glance at Connor on the way out. It’s anyone’s guess what he sees when he looks back, but I feel him shudder.

He finally wipes away the rest of his tears when I turn onto my street and sniffs loudly. An oppressive silence descends, and I reach over to take his hand.

He allows it, gripping mine tightly. “Sorry about that.”

“Whatever that was, hopefully he’ll sleep it off.”

“Yeah,” Tristan says, but it sounds more like he’s trying to shut me up than agree with me.

“I can take you back in the morning,” I offer.

“No. No. Fuck him. I am so fucking tired. It didn’t have to be like this, but he went there, and so here we are. He made his bed. I’m done.”

That’s hard to believe. I turn into my driveway and shut off the car. Tristan lets go of my hand, and we both get out.

“You want a drink?” I ask as we come in through the kitchen door.

He takes my keys from me and tosses them onto the table. The too loud sound startles me, but Tristan has hold of me now, his hands moving up my arms to my shoulders and eventually grasping my face. He pulls me in for a kiss. “No. I want you to remind me why I chose you.”

During the first seven days Tristan stays with me, he mostly acts like nothing ever happened. Like he never had a friend, and even if he had, I never knew him. Is it unsettling? A little. Am I mad about the fact that he’s entirely focused on us? Fuck no.

For two people who rarely saw each other and spent years apart, we slide into a live-in relationship without blinking. He more or less glues himself to me, and I don’t mind it. For as much as I’m not a huge fan of being alone, Tristan’s never been alone, and from what I’ve gathered about his relationship with my brother, they were highly codependent.

He apologizes when he sometimes follows me from the living room to the kitchen for no reason, but he doesn’t apologize for climbing into the shower with me for very specific reasons.

I understand he’s got a lot on his mind, and so do I, so the arrangement works and keeps us both distracted. I learn every inch of his body, and he seems just as obsessed with mine. We’re each other’s riptides, each of us caught up in the fast moving current of the other’s needs and desires. It’s an obsession. An addiction. I remain utterly fixated. Consumed by him.

It’s one of those things I can’t believe is happening to me. All that lust and wanting and motherfucking yearning I did for him for so long was worth it because he is the perfect person for me in bed and out of it. Or I just like him so much that I wouldn’t change a thing about him, and I’m adapting accordingly.

We have a fight on the eighth day. It’s the day after he decides to reach out to Connor. After several hours of my brother not answering or returning any of Tristan’s texts or calls, he throws his phone onto the hardwood floor in the bedroom, then stomps on it until the screen shatters, and it’s useless.

The next day I buy him a new one when I’m on my way to grab the deposit from the bar. When I give it to him that night, he’s pissed. He says if he wanted a new phone he could buy one himself, and I need to mind my own fucking business.