Page 9 of Chasing Chase London, Part 8: Valentines Day

Now Playing:

“Hold On”–Wilson Philips

Everything stops.

The air is sucked from the room.

The three of us sit frozen.

Daria and I stare at Lindsey, Daria with a hand over her mouth like she just realized what came out of it and wants to put it back in; me with my heart pounding so hard I can’t hear anything else in the silence. Lindsey stares back at Daria, her eyes wide with shock.

“You need to leave,” Lindsey says at last, her voice quiet and cold and final.

For one second, she looks like a stranger, her face as severe and cruel as her brother’s.

“I—I didn’t—” Daria starts, her face blanching.

“I said, get out of my house,” Lindsey yells, jumping up and pointing at the door. “Get out!”

Daria sighs and slips from the bed, then stops and turns back at the door. “Now you know how it feels to have Elaine’s knife in your back.”

She disappears through the door and is gone.

“Lindsey,” I say, about to tell her that was too harsh. Daria didn’t do anything except tell her the truth.

She wheels around to face me.

“Is it true?” she asks in her steely flat voice.

I shrink back from the cold fury in her eyes. I just witnessed her shooting the first messenger, and I’m not anxious to meet the same fate. Her gun is still smoking.

“Elaine doesn’t talk to me, you know that,” I hedge, trying to think of a way out that doesn’t end with my execution too.

“But Daria does,” she says, looking at me pleadingly now.

I know what she wants. She wants me to tell her it’s not true, that Daria just said that to hurt her. But she already knows. Daria would only have told me something if there was something to tell.

If I tell Lindsey what she wants to hear, I’ll stay in her good graces, but she’ll never forgive Daria. I can’t lie about Daria like that. I can’t let her take the fall for something Elaine did. I’m pretty sure there isn’t room for two knives in Daria’s back. This way there’s at least a chance.

“Maybe you were broken up,” I try. “She said you and Chase have been on and off for years.”

“Chase would never do that,” Lindsey says, disbelief filling her voice. “He can’t stand Elaine.”

“Would Elaine?”

“It can’t be true,” she says, but now her voice is tiny and weak and trembling.

I don’t answer that one. The only thing I can tell her is something she doesn’t want to hear.

Lindsey’s hand goes to her mouth, and her eyes fill with tears.

I’m not sure if she’s going to yell at me to leave, so I just sit there awkwardly again, not sure what to do, again.

Maybe I was born without the comfort-your-friends-when-they-cry gene, or maybe I just never learned because I never had friends.

Finally Lindsey sinks onto the bed, and I do what she did for Daria—rub her back while she cries.

Every sob slices my heart like a scalpel. Her pain washes over me, a ripple effect that crushes my heart along with hers. Seeing her in pain is torture, and I can’t make it better no matter what I say.

What would I say, anyway? That it’s all going to be okay?

What if it’s not? That she’ll get over it?

What if she doesn’t? That everything happens for a reason?

The only reason for this is that she chose the wrong best-friend-for-life.

Elaine said all was fair in love and war, and she meant it.

She just never told Lindsey that she was the enemy in this war.

*

Chase London

Now Playing:

“Forever”–Noah Kahan

I sit up and set my phone aside when Lindsey walks into my bedroom without bothering to knock.

“Hey, whoa,” I say. “Is everything okay?”

One look at her face says she’s not okay, if the lack of manners hadn’t already given it away.

“Who are you texting?” she demands.

“The team chat,” I say, frowning. “Why? What’s up?”

“Let me see.”

“Okay,” I say slowly, handing my phone to her.

“ Ball-Stars? ” she asks, looking up from the screen. “Is that like a porn thing?”

“No, Linds, it’s a basketball thing. Like all-stars? Read it if you want. It’s probably boring to you.”

She thumbs through for a minute, looking at the dumb memes, jokes, and clips of cool shots from online we’ve sent each other.

“Who else are you texting?” she asks.

I shrug. “I don’t know, everyone. What’s going on?”

She messes around on my phone for a few minutes. When she looks up, her eyes are pooling with tears.

“Whoa, hey,” I say. “Talk to me, Linds.”

“Did you sleep with Elaine?” she asks.

My jaw clenches, and my balls try to crawl back up into my body.

“Did you?” she demands. “Don’t lie to me, Chase! I know you did!”

I don’t say anything. It’s not something I think about, let alone talk about. Not even when the other guys brag about nailing Elaine.

It’s different when it’s a conquest. None of us brag about shitty first sexual encounters, though I’m sure lots of us have them.

I wouldn’t even know how to talk about it if I tried. I didn’t sleep with her, but I’m not sure what I would call it. A surprise gift wrapped in a hundred layers of conflict, shame, rage, guilt, doubt?

“Tell me the truth,” Lindsey begs, a tear spilling down her cheek. “I need to hear it from you.”

I wish I could tell her the truth, but even I don’t know. So I stay silent while she stares at me like a stranger who just shot her at point-blank range, and she’s trying to comprehend why before she bleeds out.

“At least have the decency to say it to my face,” she cries. “Tell me you didn’t have sex with her.”

I still don’t say anything.

“Oh my god, you did,” she whispers, a tear spilling down her cheek. “How could you? She’s my best friend.”

I reach for her, the instinct to comfort a girl, to comfort her , while she cries ingrained in me too deeply to ignore. It’s an empty gesture though, when I can’t do anything to make it better.

“Don’t touch me with your cheating hands,” she seethes. “All I want is the truth, Chase. Now be a man and say it to my face. Did you fuck her?”

I flinch. That’s probably the first time she’s ever used that word, and I know if she’s angry enough to say it, she won’t give up without the answer she came for.

“I don’t know,” I say quietly.

“What do mean, you don’t know?” she asks incredulously.

“I was drinking, and—”

“Oh, no you don’t,” she bursts out, interrupting me. “Don’t you dare use the excuse that you don’t remember!”

“I remember,” I say, unable to meet her gaze.

I remember, and maybe that means I wasn’t too drunk.

I performed, and maybe that does.

Did I like it? Did I want it? If I did, what does that say about me? If I didn’t, what does that say? And why does it matter, at this point? None of it changes anything.

“So you did it,” she says, staring at me in disbelief. “You admit it.”

My silence is an admission of guilt in both our eyes. I’ve carried the weight of this guilt for a long time. Maybe it’s for the best that she knows. I don’t blame her for being angry. I always knew she’d react this way if she found out.

That’s not why I didn’t tell her. I didn’t tell her because I knew she’d want an explanation, and I couldn’t give her one.

“You bastard,” she screams, hurling my phone. I duck by instinct, and the phone smashes into the wall behind me. “You cheating, piece of shit, lying, scumbag!”

Her palm blazes across my cheek, and damn, I didn’t know she had the strength. My eyes water from the sting, and my skin throbs like a thousand needles pierced it.

She raises her hand to strike the other cheek, but I grab her wrist out of the air and spin her around, holding it behind her back. “Do not hit me again.”

“Let go of me, you pig,” she shrieks, twisting until I release her. She stumbles back, her eyes full of tears, rubbing her wrist. “I’ll tell my daddy you hurt me.”

“I’m sorry.”

“Sorry I found out?” she demands. “If you were sorry for hurting me, you wouldn’t have done it. If you made a mistake, and you were really sorry for doing it, you would have admitted it and asked forgiveness from the start.”

She’s probably right. But to admit something, you need answers, and I’ve never had those.

There are no answers to the questions about that night, so I put it behind me and moved on.

I would have never told her, and that has to mean something.

That’s what implicates me, the cold hard proof of my guilt.

“It’s over,” Lindsay snarls. “We’re done. I can’t be with someone who would cheat on me with my best friend. How can I ever trust you again? For all I know, you’ve been sneaking around with her the whole time. Is that who you bought that present for on Valentines?”

I want to defend myself, but I don’t. Not when I can close my eyes and picture her friend the way I have a thousand times—those long legs, her curls, the blush in her cheeks. She’s not Elaine, but my desire for her is just as damning.

“You can’t even answer that?” she demands. “I guess I shouldn’t be surprised. Like my daddy always says, cheating shows a weakness of character. If you’re weak enough to do it once, you’ll do it again. And you always were a pathetic little mama’s boy.”

I grit my teeth. “Are you done?”

“Yes,” she says, drawing herself up. “I hope you’ll be happy with your skank. By the time you realize what you lost, I’ll have found a real man, and I won’t take you back.”

“Probably for the best.”

She huffs and spins on her heel, stomping to the door. When she reaches it, she turns back and gives me a haughty look. “Good thing your mother’s not here to find out about this,” she says. “She’d be ashamed of you.”

I listen to her footsteps retreating, down the hall, down the stairs, echoing across the empty foyer where sometimes I still start to turn, for half a second expecting Mom to step through and tell me to pick up my shoes or put my phone away and come sit down for dinner.

The front door slams behind Lindsey. I sit on my bed, waiting to feel something. I should be pissed or upset or even relieved, but I’m not.

I’m not anything. There’s just a big blank inside me, like there has been since Mom died.

Taking hits on the field was the only thing that reminded me I’m still alive even if she isn’t.

Sky is the only person that reminds me there’s a reason to be alive.

Ever since that day on the shore of Firefly Lake, when she didn’t know who I was or what I did, and I could just be a regular guy, she’s been the only person who sees me that way.

And she’s the one person I can never have.

Unless…