Page 38 of The Way I Used to Be

“But...,” he begins again, “I still wanna know.”

“Just pretend you’re the first, okay?” That’s what I’m doing, after all.

“That’s not what I meant. It’s not like it bothers me or anything. I was just—”

“It bothers me.” Goddamn it, my stupid mouth—it needs to be wired shut. I roll away from him so that I’m on my own side of the bed. I feel my underwear down by my legs. I put them on under the sheets.

“What? Why? It’s not like I haven’t been with other girls.”

“Yeah, I guess.” It’s definitely not the same thing, though. I clamp my teeth down on the insides of my cheeks—need to stop myself from saying anything else. I taste blood, I bite harder.

“No big deal or anything, I just wondered is all.” He pauses a beat, two, three, four, then inhales and says, “So... was it more than one person?”

“Seriously, Josh! I really, really don’t want to talk about this!”

“All right.” Pause. “I’ll tell you mine....”

“No, don’t. I don’t care, okay? It doesn’t matter to me. I don’t want to know.” Of course, I already knew his, because he was never exactly a low-profile type. Until me. “And I don’t want to talk about this anymore. Really, I mean it.”

“I just—sometimes I feel like I don’t know anything about you. It’s weird.”

“You do too.” But I know that’s not the complete truth.

He just sighs.

“All right, ask me anything else, really, anything else and I’ll tell you, okay?”

“God, it must’ve been pretty bad, huh?” I turn my head to look at him; there’s no other way to tell him how incapable I am of discussing this. “What? I’m just saying the guy’s a fucking asshole. Whoever he is.”

“Why?” I smirk. “Because of all the nasty things written about me on the bathroom walls?”

“You know about that?” he asks quietly. “Eden, you know that I don’t believe any of those things, right? I mean, I know the truth.”

Truth. Truth! Truth? He doesn’t know shit about the truth. I open my mouth, and I almost tell him that. “Never mind,” I mumble instead.

“What now? I’m just trying to—” I pull away from him. “Oh, come on. I’m just trying to tell you I wouldn’t do that. I think that’s really shitty.”

It was a shitty thing to do. He’s right about that. I don’t say anything though. We need to drop this immediately. I think he finally gets it too, because he’s quiet for once. Quiet for a long time.

I stare up at the ceiling of his bedroom. His house is soundless like always—parents sleeping or somewhere else, I don’t know which. I turn to look at him, lying there, still facing me.

“Tell me a secret,” he whispers. I always get the sense he knows I have a secret. A deep, dark one. “You know, something that I don’t know about you—a secret.”

“Right.” I grin, trying to erase what just happened. “Because you don’t know anything about me...” I’m only halfheartedly mocking him.

“I know,” he says, pulling me closer, covering my mouth with his, “that’s why I want you to tell me something.” I wonder what he would say if I told him. What he would do. If I told him my deep, dark, black-hole secret, the one that had the potential to swallow up the entire universe.

“Okay, my middle name is Marie.” That’s a lie. My middle name is Anne. “Now you?”

“That’s not a secret. I meant something real.” Kiss. “Matthew.”

“What?”

“Matthew,” he repeats. “Joshua Matthew Miller.”

“Oh.” Kiss. “That’s nice.” Kiss. “Tell me something else.”

“No, it’s your turn, Eden Marie McCrorey.” He smiles that crooked smile of his and lays his head down on my chest, waiting for me to be honest, to share some tidbit of truth with him, a detail, anything. I should’ve told him then that Marie wasn’t really my middle name. He seemed to like saying it, though, like he thought that small scrap of information made him know me a little better, made him like me just a little more.