Page 25 of Teach Me To Sin
I’m so deep in my head I only kind of remember who called me earlier. “Because I don’t want to talk to you.” My voice cracks and wobbles as I struggle to get the words out. “Why would I want to talk to you? I don’t even like you.”
The silence goes on so long I almost end the call. “Where are you?” Colson demands flatly, like it’s a question on a geography quiz.
I cough out a short, slightly hysterical laugh. “I don’t fucking know. Some shitty beach.”
“Where’s the beach?”
“Will you leave me the fuck alone?” Before I can stop myself, I lash out and slam my fist into the column of metal between the front and back windows of the car. Based on action movies, I imagined it would make a fist-sized dent and give me an insurance headache for another day. Luckily for my insurance and not so luckily for me, the body panel stays unscathed and my hand explodes with the worst pain in my life. “Jesus Christ,” I sob, wheezing and doubling over while still, somehow, holding the phone to my ear like a good boy. “Fuck.”
“Share your location with my phone,” Colson directs brusquely, as if he didn’t just hear me scream in pain.
I wipe my watering eyes on the sleeve of my polo. “Huh?”
“Do it now, before you hang up, or I’ll call you six times an hour until the day you die.”
“I– fuck.” Propping my shoulder against the car, I slide down to the gravel with my injured hand tucked protectively between my legs and my body. I can’t remember how to do anything right now, but eventually I find the setting in my phone. “There. Now leave me alone and please don’t tell anyone else about this.” Colson just hangs up without a word.
When the pain clears enough to let me think, I gingerly flex my fingers to see if they’re broken. They all work, even though the movement makes my head spin. Getting to my feet, I toss my phone into the car and watch it bounce under the passenger seat.
The streetlights illuminate a tiny, unmaintained trail that zigzags down a slope to the beach. The darkness beyond it calls to the animal part of me that’s desperate for a place to hide. A third of the way down I can’t see the ground anymore, but I keep inching along slippery gravel and over half-rotted logs. Maybe the air down here won’t smell like him.
Since this is Washington, the beach is covered in golf-ball-sized stones that threaten to break my ankle as I creep toward the water like some kind of filthy sea creature. When my sneakers sink into wet sand, I stop and let the cold surf wash over my feet, soaking my socks.
I’m empty, a vessel with nothing inside, as the wind teases at the sweat on my forehead and I take one step, then another. My body starts shivering in protest when the freezing water reaches halfway up my calves. I bend over and let it numb my bruised hand, then wipe it up my face and through my hair. Victor always said the water protected him. To me, it was my father’s chain; I spent my whole life trying to break it even as the struggling just hurt me more.
I have no idea how Colson finds me. I hear a whistle, then splashing, followed by a light bobbing over the water that hurts my eyes. He’s standing over me, and he smells like teakwood, not lotion. “Back up,” he orders close to my ear, guiding me by the arm until we’re standing side by side on dry land. He turns his light off so we don’t have to see each other, just smell and feel and hear. I expect him to talk, but he lets go of me and breathes deeply, like he just ran a long way.
After a while I start to ramble, through chattering teeth. “Six years ago, before everything came out, I challenged Victor to swim from Naples to Capri–eighteen miles. We were young and strong, but we both almost drowned.”
Colson stays quiet, leaving us surrounded by the infinite sighing of the sea. A lost gull squawks overhead, and I can see the lights of a container ship in the distance.
I swallow through the fist-sized knot in my throat. “I think I wanted him to swim miles ahead, like a god, and prove to the world he really was the best. No one would notice for a while that I had never come ashore. But he started floundering, and I couldn’t leave him behind. When we reached land, it was too late for me to go back out and disappear.”
The tightness in my chest compresses and cracks, and I let out a weak sob, then another. I crouch down, bury my head in my knees, and cry so hard it shakes my body. It’s been such a long time I don’t remember how it feels. I’ve always stayed strong, because when it comes down to it, the doping and the sex abuse was never about me. Victor was the one who needed saving, and no one knew what to do with me—the one who was always there but never directly harmed, not quite a victim or a perpetrator. Why would I deserve to cry?
I don’t know how much time passes before hands grip my shoulders and pull me to my feet. No matter how hard I try, I can’t stop sobbing as Colson leads me up the beach to a patch of soft, dry sand and lowers me to the ground. My hand hurts, my dad feels terrifyingly close, and I’ve just remembered what it feels like to wish you could stop existing. So I just collapse in the dirt and curl into a ball.
I assume Colson left, because he doesn’t touch me or say anything for at least ten minutes. Then a hand feels for me and smooths through my fucked-up hair, lingering on the back of my neck before doing it again. As pathetic as I’ve ever been in my life, I claw my way closer until my head bumps his hip. I’m not sobbing anymore, just breathing fast and shallow with the occasional painful, hiccupping whimper.
With a disgruntled sigh, Colson slings a leg around me and manhandles my body until I’m between his thighs with my head resting on his chest. The hand returns to my hair, a restless, distant kind of stroking as I slowly relax. His heart beats a quiet rhythm against my ear. Whether or not he intended it, he’s the one thread holding me here tonight.
Nothing has changed when I twitch awake with a gasp. The parts of me that aren’t touching him are wretchedly cold. My eyes have adjusted enough that when I tip my head back, I can make out his profile looking blankly toward the water. “What the hell?” I croak. My throat burns and my face feels sticky.
“Don’t ask me,” he answers without looking down at me. His hand is still on the back of my neck, with his thumb brushing slow circles behind my ear. “I have no idea what’s going on.”
“I meant why are you still here? Why didn’t you wake me?”
I feel him twitch one shoulder. “I don’t particularly have anywhere else to be.”
“It’s what, two AM? Why aren’t you in bed?”
“I would be if you hadn’t kept calling me,” he murmurs, deadpan.
“I– Excuse me?” I struggle to sit up, our faces close together. “I never called you, you psychopath.”
He laughs quietly. I’m so exhausted, and he shows no sign of moving, so I let myself collapse against him again. All he does is resume the steady movement of his fingers through my hair.
“I’m sorry about the storage closet,” I mumble, angling my head to get a stronger whiff of his scent so I can erase the lingering memory of lotion, mint, and cloves. “I don’t know what got into Benji. I should have stopped it.”