Trust the Focus by Megan Erickson Page B

do. That you’d touch me and look at me like you do and all of this would just be a very distant memory.”
    I dug my fingers into my thighs and clenched my teeth until all I felt were those five points of pain on each leg and all I heard was the grinding of my molars. The rage consumed me now, coating the bricks of guilt in front of my heart in a bright shade of crimson. I wanted to take a sledgehammer to the whole thing, then hunt down Bastard Brad and fucking smash in his face.
    “So I got up and I walked out. And I tried to pretend it never happened.” He laughed bitterly. “But it didn’t work. You were busier with school and you couldn’t baby me.”
    “Landry, why didn’t you—”
    “Because it’s fucking embarrassing!” He yelled, his voice cracking on the last word. “Are you kidding?”
    “But we tell each other everything . . .” As soon as the words left my mouth, I knew they were a mistake.
    Landry jerked his head toward me, those eyes ablaze again. “Don’t even fucking come at me saying shit like that with the bomb you dropped on me a couple of days ago.”
    I clenched my jaw. “I shouldn’t have said that.”
    “No shit.”
    “You had every right not to tell me.”
    “Thanks for the unnecessary permission, Jus.”
    I breathed in through my nose and out through my mouth, accepting his anger because I deserved it. “But I wish I would have known.”
    He shrugged and looked away. I reached out and flicked his gauged ear. “You did this that summer.” I ran my finger down his inked arm. “And started this the next fall.”
    Landry got a couple of tattoos done after he turned eighteen, but it was the fall when he’d started his sleeve. He had his ears pierced since high school but didn’t start with the gauges until college.
    His Adam’s apple bobbed as he swallowed. “Gave me something to focus on. I don’t know, I guess I wanted . . . control back. Of myself and my body.”
    “Did it help?”
    His lips moved from side to side in thought and he swiped under his eyes roughly with the heel of his hands. “Yeah, it did. Fuck, I hate talking about this. I’m not over it, because I don’t think there
is
getting over it. But I try not to dwell on it.” He gave me a sad smile. “And I guess I’m still technically a virgin. Like, halfway? Leave it to me to be half a virgin, in this gray area. I thought virginity was like pregnancy. You either were or you weren’t.”
    He laughed, but I found nothing fucking funny about it. I was bleeding around the twisted, rusty knife in my gut and there was a hammer banging away in my chest and I was a fucking mess.
    “Landry,” I whispered. “I hate that this happened to you.”
    He rubbed the inside of his boots together. “It’s not your fault.”
    “It kind of is.”
    He shook his head vigorously. “No, I told you—”
    “I know you said it wasn’t, but fuck, Landry, if I would have just told you the truth, then this wouldn’t have happened—”
    “How do you know that?” He shouted, jumping to his feet in front of me. “We can’t predict how our lives would have been if you’d come out in high school or college. What if we got together and broke up? What if this guy had been a rebound for me?”
    “But—”
    “No buts, Justin. I can’t do that to myself—look back and say,
If only
,
if only
. Because my history is what it is. I can’t change it. That’s what I’ve been thinking since that night you told me the truth. I wanted to hate you and blame you, but I can’t.”
    “I know that. I know that more than anyone, but that doesn’t stop me from looking back, learning from what I wish I would have done or said.”
    Landry’s face darkened. “What do you wish, Jus? How would you have changed our lives? Tell me.”
    I stood up carefully, mindful that one wrong word—one wrong step on a twig—would send Landry running like a skittish animal.
    I held out a hand. “Okay, you’re right. Maybe there is no point