Darnell groaned again, although this time, it was directed at himself.
“Why are you groaning?”I asked.“That was so sweet.”
“I can’t believe how nervous I was.”
“You were super nervous.”
“And that was before I had that heart attack.”
I burst out laughing again, but it faded quickly.“That meant a lot to me.I don’t know if I ever said that.Nobody else cared, but you did.I’ve been thinking about that a lot.I’ve spent a lot of my life wanting…I don’t know.”I almost saidto be loved,but it was too much, so I said, “To feel like I mattered, I guess.Or that I was okay.Or enough.I wanted you to know you made me feel like I was loved.”
He blinked and scraped his knuckles under his chin and looked away.Back again.“Idolove you.”
“I know.”
“Gray, what are you doing?You’re moving out.Why are you saying this stuff?”
“Because I want you to know.”The birds were almost out of sight now, the last ragged ends of that dark thread being pulled through the edge of the sky.“I don’t know how to explain the last few months.Year, I guess.What it’s been like.For a long time, I thought I knew who I was.How to—how tobe, I guess.And then it was all gone, and it was like I didn’t know anything.My face was all fucked up.They put me on leave.Then on desk work.You were trying so hard, and I was so angry, and I took it out on you.”
Darnell wiped his eyes and shook his head.
“I started to realize,” I said, “that what I’d been doing, how I’d been acting, maybe it wasn’t me.Not the real me, anyway.But it was like I didn’t know how to do anything else.How tobeanyone else.”My throat was so tight that it was painful.“And I just wanted things to be normal again.”
“You don’t have to be anyone else.I don’t want you to be anyone else.”
“But I do.I mean, in some ways.”A grin cracked my expression.“I definitely want to be less of an asshole.”
“Gray—”
“Maybe it’s an opportunity, like John-Henry said.I don’t know.Maybe it’s just—you can see who you are, I mean, when you take all the shit away.I don’t like this person.Don’t like all the ways I avoided having to deal with the fact that I don’t like myself.Don’t like that I used people.Used you.Because I do love you, and I hate that I hurt you.”
He dragged one sleeve across his face, but it didn’t help; fresh tears spilled down his cheeks.When he tried to speak, nothing came out, so he cleared his throat and tried again.“We can work on that.We can work on all of this.We can figure it out.”
That’s what I’d been thinking about.I mean, obviously.I thought about telling him that I wanted whatever relationship I was in—with him, or with someone else—to be something I went into because I wanted to share my life with someone, and not because I wanted that person to make me feel better about myself.I wanted to be self-sufficient.Whole.Or as close to whole as I could get.I thought about telling him that I needed to fix a lot of stuff in my life.Stuff I’d left unresolved because it was too big and too scary and because it was easier not to deal with it, and in a lot of ways, I’d settled for the easy way out.I wanted to get rid of all the toxic patterns I’d had stamped on my brain—or at least figure out how to manage them better.I wanted to be with someone, I almost said, when I wasn’t so fucking afraid of being alone.
But I asked, “Is that really what you want?”
Darnell mopped his eyes again.He looked off, and the expression on his face was helpless as a weird, unhappy laugh escaped him.“I was at a call center.”
“What?”
“That’s where I went the night—when the police were asking.That’s where I was.And things didn’t go the way I planned, so that’s why I didn’t check into the hotel.You were right about me hoping I could use it as an alibi.”
“Okay,” I said slowly.“Why were you at a call center?”
“Because what they’re doing is totally illegal.They pretend to be from a bank, and they call people and scare them and harass them until they get their account numbers, their passwords, all that stuff.They say there’s a problem with their account.It works a lot of the time.Especially with older people.”
I had to take a moment to process that.“Why the fuck were you at an illegal call center in the middle of the night?”
“To record them doing it.I sent the video off anonymously.”A trace of satisfaction slid into his voice as he added, “They got raided by the Highway Patrol a couple of days later.”
“Are you out of your mind?”
“It’s a good email server, and I used a TOR browser—”
“Darnell, what the fuck were you thinking?They could arrest you too!”
“Gray, that doesn’t matter.”
