Discovery

Discovery

I found out not too long later.

It hurt.

And it made me feel guilty, because I had done the same thing.

I hated her.

Thing I Discovered:
Ian was with Rae, now. Rae was with Ian. Ian and Rae were together.
That stupid, stupid, stupid, stupid girl had won.
If I had seen her at any point during those days, I just might have killed her.

Hank brought home the news. I wasn’t actually sure that Hank had noticed that I’d moved in with them. He was just that kind of guy. He was pretty oblivious, as it happened.
It was just an idle comment: “And Rae was with that guy of hers—shit, what’s his name, Molly?”

And then when Molly looked at me and turned an unattractive shade of puce, I knew what was coming next. Which wasn’t to say that the actual information didn’t hit me like a punch in the stomach.

“Ian.” Ian. His name was Ian.

For a little while I tried to convince myself that it wasn’t my Ian. But that was just so stupid that it didn’t work. Of course it was my Ian. Rae had made no secret of the fact that she was into Ian. I would have been stupid to think that it was anyone else. But Ian had made no secret of the fact that he was into me, which is why everything hurt just that much more. He had gotten over it so quickly?

But then again, from the surface, it looked like I had gotten over it, too. And I hadn’t.

But then again, if I was being perfectly honest, I wasn’t completely unhappy. Kyle was good—a good boyfriend, I supposed he was now, to me. He was sweet and attentive, but not a pushover. And fun and flirty and attractive and smart and always had different things for me to read, and was always interested in what I was doing—but not clingy. And he always let me know where he was going to be, but not in a controlling way—just polite. But he also had no problem telling me that some things I said were a tad bit stupid.

As far as I could figure, we had a pretty good relationship going on here. Things certainly could have been worse. He could have been beating the crap out of me. He could have been a real asshole to me. He could have made me miserable in a thousand and two ways, could have brought up Ian just to be mean, could have gone out of his way to sit with Mark and Adnan, just to piss everyone off.

I gathered from Keeley that that kind of behavior was typical Kyle. “He likes to push everyone’s buttons,” she confessed to me one night—the night, incidentally, that we finally got to watch When Harry Met Sally. “It’s like the world is one great big social experiment, to him. The fact that he’s not messing with everyone—because, let’s face it, this is a damn good situation to see just how far he could push someone before they snap—is a pretty good indicator that he likes you a lot, Sloan. Trust me, I know.”

Something about her voice made me wonder what, precisely, Kyle had done when he had dated Keel. “What happened?” I asked—well, wonderingly.

She shrugged, but her expression said that she was still kind of annoyed about the whole thing. “He just kept making all these innuendos in front of my mom, just to be an ass, you know? Like he was pretending we were sleeping together, or something, which was totally bullshit, because we were fourteen. The stupid son of a bitch only actually got up the guts to kiss me once. So I don’t know where the hell he got the guts to mess with my mom from. That was a lot of why we broke up, actually.”

That didn’t sound at all like the Kyle I knew. It was kind of bizarre, actually, how little that sounded like the Kyle I knew. “He really did all that?” I asked. With me, he hadn’t even messed with Ian, and at some times, Ian had probably deserved it. “That’s weird.”

Keel shook her head at me, the corners of her mouth curving into a laughing smile. “Trust me, Sloan, it’s not. That’s not weird from him at all. What’s weird is how he’s acting now, all serious and shit, like he’s really afraid of screwing this up. Maybe we were wrong about the lesson you taught him.”

I raised an eyebrow. “Not the ‘he can get whatever he wants’ lesson?” I asked.

Now she laughed outright. “Nah, not that lesson. Maybe it was more of a ‘be a decent human being instead of a total jerk to everyone and something might actually go your way—if you work hard in addition to being a decent human being’ lesson.”

“That’s a wordy lesson,” I commented dryly. I wasn’t sure I liked the idea of myself as the harbinger of a change in Kyle. Couldn’t I just be a girl? Jeez, everyone was so determined to make this into something huge. Couldn’t it just be a romance? They started and ended and happened by the million—maybe even by the billion?—around the world, every day. I wasn’t much of anything special by ending one and starting a new one. In fact, there wasn’t much of anything else that was more normal.

She threw a pillow at me. Sometimes we did normal stuff like this, like throw pillows at each other. I liked those times. Kay and I had never really been too much of the pillow-throwing kind of friends. We’d been more of the friends that always kept a solid five feet of distance between each other during any sort of interaction. We didn’t hug. We didn’t cuddle. Kay was simply not that kind of person.

I definitely enjoyed having this cuddly side of things. It was nice, to be able to tackle Keeley—even though she was not the kind of girl that you would think would be into that, from looking at her—and give her a hug and know that she wouldn’t ever much mind.

So I had an interesting series of relationships forming. Interesting and bizarre and, on many levels, upsetting. But they were there, and that was better than nothing.