Page 109 of The One Month Boyfriend (Wildwood Society)

Kat

We drive backto Sprucevale mostly in silence. I try. I swear to God I try to be normal and make small talk with him about, I don’t know, the cows on the side of the road, but I’m wound tight and my brain is spinning too fast for me to get words out of it. Silas keeps trying to start conversations, but I keep giving him one-word answers and after a while he gives up.

I feel like I ruined something.

No: I feel like I ruined everything, like the world will now crumble around my ears because I made some sex noises and made Olivia mad enough to drive off.

This sort of thinking is called a cognitive distortion, which I know because I’ve been in therapy for a million years now. I can see clear as day that I’m catastrophizing, thinking of all the ways the world could end because of something I did that had consequences I didn’t really consider. I know that this won’t result in Silas suddenly diving out of the car, or in me getting fired, or in Anna Grace no longer speaking to me, or my parents suddenly disowning me from the shame, but knowing and feeling are two different beasts and only one has its teeth in my throat right now.

When we’re back in Sprucevale, I suddenly can’t stand it any more. The thought of going to Silas’s house to drop him off feels like ice in my veins, and the thought of inviting him to my house makes me break out in a cold sweat, so I do the first thing I think of and park.

This street has houses on one side, trees on the other, the river invisible beyond them. There’s a bike path between the road and the trees. It’s very nice. Silas is watching me from the passenger seat, and I swear I can feel it, like his eyeballs are rolling over my skin.

“Am I walking home?” he finally says.

Wow, I have fucked up if he thinks that. I shut my eyes and put my head back against the seat, dimly aware that I’ve made everything worse by being so anxious about it.

“Evan and Olivia got into a huge fight this morning and Olivia stormed out and I waved at her,” I say, pushing all the words out in a rush.

Silas is quiet for a moment.

“You waved?” he finally asks, and fuck, I have to get out of here. The car’s getting hotter by the second, the August sun beating down, and it’s small and it’s cramped and I’ve been in here for too long and it’s a glass box and anyone could come along and just look at me and—

“Hey. I need a couple minutes,” I tell the steering wheel, because I can’t look at Silas right now. I can’t. “Maybe ten? I’ll be back. I need—yeah.”

My seatbelt nearly hits me in the face as I fumble it but I shove it back and get out of the car and the air out here is a little cooler by comparison, and at least there’s a breeze.

I cross the path and keep going, shoving a bunch of plants out of the way, until I can’t see the car or the road or any part of Sprucevale any more, just some rocks and a lot of water and the bright green jungle I’m supposed to be calling home these days.

It makes me feel like I might have fucked up even more than I thought.

I miss concrete. I miss ugly big box stores stretching for miles along the highway. I miss four-lane suburban roads and shopping centers; I miss manicured lawns and wide sidewalks and sprawling subdivisions and commuter parking lots. I miss all the familiar parts of suburbia that I never liked before.

I miss home, and I never should have let Evan drive me away from it to this half-wild place where I’ve let things get so fucked up and tangled I’m not sure I’ll ever untangle them.

I tromp through some more plants until I find a wide, flat rock overlooking the river. It’s shaded by a huge tree, and I sit crosslegged and watch the river, sluggish and red-blue-brown in the late summer, the rock warm underneath me.

What the hell did you do?everything whispers: the river, the trees, the birds chirping. What were you thinking?

The panic bubbles up until it’s overflowing, and I let it because I can, and because it’ll be worse if I don’t. It’s a different flavor of anxiety than the one that brings on a panic attack, at least for me; that’s a tsunami, this is a tide that comes in too high, only builds and builds until it’s flooding the shore. A panic that I can’t stop, only reckon with.

I got what I wanted, and it’s terrible.

All I really wanted, all along, was to hurt him. Making him crawl was just something to tell Silas; the real goal was to make him feel as bad as he’d made me feel. I wanted him devastated. Preferably because of me.

It feels awful.

Like I’m the worst person on earth. For orchestrating this stupid scheme for the sole purpose of emotionally harming another human being. For dragging Silas along, into it; for using him, no matter how much he swears he agreed to the terms.

I don’t know how long I sit there and feel shitty before the tangle of trees and vines and plants behind me rustles, and Silas steps through. He doesn’t ask permission, just sits right next to me, legs stretched in front of him. If I leaned a little, I could touch him. I don’t.

He sits there for a while, watching the river with me, before he says anything.

“I got your keys.”

Oops. “Thanks.”

We’re both quiet for a while as I try to fit the words together in my head. Sentences feel like Tetris when I’m like this: all pieces that could easily fit together if only I had enough skill and speed to make it work, which I never do. Finally, I take a deep breath and wing it.