Runaway: Part 3

(Continued from “Runaway: Part 2” and “Part 1”)

I was still sitting up against the wall, rolling the back of my head against it when Walden found me upstairs. “I just wanna have a talk outside, Brian. But yes, that does include having to walk past a bunch of people, including Linh, who all knew that you were messin’ around with two other guys in the bathroom for the last hour. You guys couldn’t have been any more obvious.”

Walden had already taken off his tranny/cowboy/stripper Halloween costume, so it was easier to take him more seriously. I followed him downstairs and tried to stay as close behind him as I could. Once I entered the kitchen where the party was, I narrowed my focus to the backyard door, but someone, who obviously hadn’t sobered up yet, called me out—or congratulated me.

“Whaddup Brian!” He stumbled up to me and jabbed my shoulder. “Shit man, you da shit! Homie you been having a good Halloween? You been enjoying yourself? I know you been!” Getting this kind of reaction actually lifted a little weight off my shoulder; not everyone thought I was a skank for hooking up in the bathroom with two other guys, but then again, not everyone on the team really knew that I had been talking to Linh. I scanned the kitchen for him and easily spotted him. Standing on his however-many-inch heels he stood out above the sea of heads, but as soon as we made eye contact, he whipped his head away, as if to bitchslap my face with the long curls of his wig. I felt the weight on my shoulders again.

The backyard was empty. Walden and I sat down in lawn chairs, and Walden lit up a cigarette and spoke to me while he smoked.

“So, you and Shaun. And Tyrone. A threesome. Wow. How much did you drink before?”

“Two shots.”

“Two shots! It only takes two shots to get you in a cramped bathroom with two other guys? One shot per guy!”

I shrugged.

“I think you need more shots. That’s what you need right now because you look bummed.”

“I am.”

Walden tilted his head at me. “Why? There’s nothing to worry about. Yeah, everyone knows but no one cares. Trust me. No one is judging you.”

“I’m not worried about what everyone thinks about me. I’m worried about Linh.”

“Oh, that’s right.” Walden leaned back in his chair and took a long drag from his cigarette. “Okay, well Brian, let me remind you: you and Linh aren’t even together. You guys have been talking for a week.”

“That doesn’t mean I can still mess around with other guys.”

“Well, yeah, but I mean that at least it’s not much of a loss.”

“Yeah I know, but I’m still disappointed in myself.”

“Why?”

“You know what’s been on my mind this whole time since I got out of that bathroom?”

“What?”

“Trung.”

“Why?”

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to tell him what I wanted to say next, so I paused and deeply inhaled the second-hand smoke from Walden’s cigarette. It relaxed me enough to initiate the conversation. “Did I ever tell you why we broke up, Walden?”

“Something about issues, your own or his. You were never really clear.”

“Do you wanna know the real reason why we broke up? You’d be the first person to ever know, ‘cause hell, Trung doesn’t even know.”

“Yeah, what is it?”

I needed to calm my nerves before continuing, so I breathed in and filled my lungs with a few more breaths of smoke. Bad habit—whatever.

“I cheated on Trung. Five times.”

“Wow.” Walden raised his eyes brow as he took another puff on his cigarette. “And he found out?”

“No, I uh, managed to keep them all a secret. Well, he sorta found out about one, but I lied to him and told him I only made out with the guy. I mean, I guess you could say I did, but with his dick in addition to his lips. But yeah, for the most part, they were all a secret.”

“So you guys didn’t break up because he found out? Who broke up with who again?”

“I broke up with him. I had to. I thought that I could keep all five of my slip-ups a secret forever because I learned a long time ago to separate sex and emotion. Walden, I loved Trung, and to this day I still love him, but somehow back then, each time at the moment before I cheated, I figured what I was about to do was okay. I thought that if I played it safe and didn’t contract any STDs—and I didn’t—then I could put my sex scandals all behind me. But, I dunno, my guilt eventually caught up to me. I was surprised. As much as I tried to shut out the guilt, I couldn’t. I couldn’t imagine us together celebrating our anniversary in ten years with him still not knowing about something I did nine years prior. I knew I couldn’t go on in our relationship for as long as I kept the secret to myself, but at the same time, I knew that if I admitted to him about all the times I’ve cheated on him, he’d break up with me anyway. It was a lose-lose situation, but I couldn’t face that. I had to find a way out, a way to still win.”

“What’d you do Brian? What’d you tell him?”



Trung sat still in the passenger seat and stared out into the dark street through the front window. I unfolded my letter and struggled with it until I could hold it up against some of the dim light that shined through from the street light above my car. The paper fluttered in my shaky hands, and my voice cracked as I began reading it out to Trung.

“‘Even though we’ve talked about it before, I never forgave you for the whole Anh drama back in May 2008. You made me choose between keeping our relationship and ending my friendship with Anh, or breaking up and keeping my friendship with him. You even gave me a day to think about it. And do you remember what I chose? I chose to break up and keep my friendship with Anh. But you forced me to choose our relationship. I insisted on breaking up, but you managed to manipulate me into choosing otherwise. I think you (specifically you) could make anyone do anything if you forced them to converse with you for a million hours too. Because like two hours after I said, ‘I want to break up,’ you were still trying to convince me otherwise and wouldn’t get the fuck out of my car. I just wanted you to shut up, so I finally agreed. And then came the grueling process of deleting Anh’s phone number from my phone, etc. whatever.

“‘Like I said, I never forgave you for that.

“‘So maybe, I never address my problems with you as they come up because I want things to build up and become unbearable for you. Maybe I’ve always secretly wanted you to break up with me since I wasn’t allowed to break up with you the first time I tried. I feel like the option to break up isn’t even available in this relationship. Honestly, every time we do fight, I secretly hope, ‘Please let this be the one. Break up with me already.’ We were never supposed to make it past that Anh argument.

“‘I’ve fallen out of love many times in this relationship. The reason is usually different every time, but because I’m feeling moody and depressed, I end up focusing on all this stuff from May. And then that becomes the main problem.

“‘But you still probably want to know the reason I fell out of love this time around.

“‘I feel like the reasons why I fell in love with you in the first place no longer apply to you. You’re no longer the committed, driven person that you once were when I met you.

“‘When I met you, you were on your way to being a valedictorian. You had a big interest in history and foreign policy on politics and all that junk. You were really committed to education and so much more.

“‘But college really changed things. You no longer really cared about school, and you’re not the passion-drive history/politic nerd that you used to be. I can’t think of anything that you’re driven toward now. What are you dedicated to right now? I don’t fucking know. Celebrity gossip?

“‘I realized this once Breakthrough ended. Without Breakthrough, I couldn’t see anything in you that kept you going. If you need an example of what I mean by driven, I had dance, a workout plan, and writing to keep me going. You were just the same inside jokes that we’ve had for the last year and a half.

“‘And what’s annoying is that you get irritated by people who are driven. To you, Cameron’s just ‘way too unrealistically excited’ about helping his step mom start a frozen yogurt business. To you, it’s ‘great that these young teenagers [Funksters] want to dance, but why bother ‘cause it’s not like dance is going to get them anywhere in the future.’

“‘Well, at least they’re all passionate about something.

“‘So you can try to start trying more. You can try to stop being lazy and find something to do. All that would be good for your future, but it won’t help this relationship. Nothing that you’ve done has ever really fixed the main problem. You’ve only fixed the reasons I fell out of love each time, but nothing ever fixed the main problem. The main problem, to remind you, is the whole wanting-to-break-up-but-couldn’t thing back in May 2008. As I said before, that—this main problem—is unfixable. It’s unforgivable.

“‘It doesn’t matter if you try to do anything to get me to forgive you for forcing me to stay in the relationship back in 2008. I wanna wake up tomorrow and live as though I never let you convince me to stay with you back in May 2008. You gave me the choice to stay or break up, and I wanted to break up. There wasn’t anything unfair about that until you forced me to stay. I want things to be the way they should’ve been if you hadn’t forced me to stay. There shouldn’t even be any hypothetical statement. When you gave me the choice and when I made the decision to break up, that was it. I broke up with you in May 2008. That was the end.’

There was no more to read. “So, in conclusion, uhh,” I folded the letter and set it in my lap, “ever since that one incident, our almost-breakup five months into our relationship, it was never meant to be.” ...