Runaway: Part 2

(Continued from “Runaway: Part 1”)

I slid into my jeans and sat on the toilet, waiting in the dark while he finished putting on all his clothes.

“What do we do about the towel rack?” I whispered.

“Just leave it in the shower stall.”

“So what’s the plan?” the third voice spoke. I listened as the two of them discussed the plan to each other.

“You’re going to pretend you’ve been vomiting in toilet. We’re going to tell everyone that we’ve been helping you.”

“Okay, I guess I did drink a lot.”

Like anyone’s really going to believe he’s been vomiting for the last hour while the two of us were tending to him. In a locked bathroom.

“Alright, got my clothes on. You ready?” he asked me.

“Yeah.”

He opened the door and walked out first, while I stayed behind at the sink. Someone who had probably been waiting to use the bathroom for the last hour walked in and saw the “drunk mess” hunched over the toilet.

“Is he alright?”

I nodded. “Yeah, kid’s just been vomiting. Had a little too much to drink.”

He tilted his head and raised his eye brow at me.

I looked down. “Yeah, I know.”

I left the bathroom and found my pizza costume sitting next to the door. I didn’t bother wrapping it back around my neck. After putting on a shirt, I sat up against a wall, wondering what to do. I felt too nervous to go back downstairs to the party, nervous that everyone knew where I had been the last hour. Remembering that my phone’s ringer went off thirty minutes ago in the bathroom, I pulled it out and saw that I had one text message from Walden. I read it: Wow neexxxt!

Shit. With no one to turn to, I wrote a text to Trung: Just had a threesome with two other guys at the Halloween party. Linh wasn't one of them. And everyone knows, oops. What do I do now?



Trung lay next to me on my bed, tugging at my shirt and trying to look me in the eye, but I continue to stare straight through his pleading eyes at the ceiling. Both our sweat began running down onto my pillow and blankets; it was a warm summer evening.

“Brian, talk to me. Talk about our relationship. What’s bothering you?”

I grunted and turned away from him to look at the wall. “Nothing’s wrong. I’m fine.” I’m fine—I don’t know how many times I uttered this phrase in the last hour. But we both knew that everything was far from fine.

Trung pulled my shoulder and rolled me back onto my back. “Brian, I sat in my car for two hours outside your house waiting for you to come home. Why didn’t you tell me before I left home that you were going out to the mall? And when I called you to tell you I got to your place, why did it take you two more hours to come back?”

I motioned at the shopping bags on the floor. “I stopped by Oakridge.”

“I know that, but I’m asking you why did you feel like you could make a two-hour detour when you already knew I was at your place?”

I didn’t answer; I just stared at the ceiling again. Somewhere in my mind I pieced together the answers to his questions, but I didn’t know the right words to speak them. I just wanted to be alone, Trung. I needed to think because I couldn’t think with you around all the fucking time.

“Brian, please. What’s wrong?”

I’ve been pushing you away more and more every day because every morning when I wake up, I can see our end coming closer and closer. I’ve been growing so disillusioned; you know that picture we had of ourselves in the far distant future? How we’d just finish watching X-Files at 3 AM, and I’d be washing the dishes at the sink as you come up from behind to wrap your arms around me? Just as we normally would do now? That picture’s long since dissolved.

“Brian, say something!”

I’m guilty of keeping secrets from you Trung, secrets that I thought I could bury deep in the back of my mind. And for the longest time I did a good damn job of suppressing them, never letting them reach my conscience, but somehow, they eventually did. That pretty picture I had of us two huddled over a crib, making funny faces insides—gone. Now I just see me living alone in a beaten down apartment and getting a rejection letter from the adoption agency.

“Brian, we’ve been together for twenty months now. Every time we’ve fought, it’s always been like this Brian, you being angry about something me trying to figure out what’s wrong. I can’t always do this. You have to grow up and change some time.”

I finally turned toward Trung and met with his pleading eyes. I gazed into them, and I knew that this argument would be the one argument that I couldn’t get out of, the one argument in which I actually had to say something. “How about I write you a letter?”