Something’s going on with Will.
He’s avoiding my calls, and I’m desperate to tell him about Trent. I thought eight months of keeping Trent a secret was hard, but after spending two weeks with him and rarely spending any time apart, I’m dying to finally tell my brother.
Everything with Trent feels different than it has with other guys. We spend every night together, making dinner together, watching TV together, having leg-shaking sex together. It feels perfect. I don’t know if I’ve ever been this happy.
Which also scares me, but I’m trying not to sabotage this. I know it’s my insecurities that are making me feel scared, and I refuse to let them ruin what finally feels like a solid and healthy relationship. I’ve continued to see my therapist, and while things still feel like they’re improving at a snail’s pace, they are, in fact, improving. I’ll take progress, no matter how small.
But part of that progress also means I need to finally admit to my family that Trent and I are a thing, and I feel like I need to tell Will first, especially given how close we all were growing up. I don’t want him to feel weird about this or disapprove of my relationship. But I can’t tell him if he doesn’t answer his fucking phone.
So I decide to go to his house. If he won’t answer his phone, then he’s going to have to see me face-to-face. And he can’t keep me out of his house since I have the spare key. Trent wanted to come—because he feels like we’re in this together and should talk to Will at the same time—but he got pulled away for an emergency band meeting, and I didn’t want to wait any longer. I feel like I’ve waited too long as it is.
I knock, but when he doesn’t answer, I use my spare key and am immediately overwhelmed by the stench in his living room. Rex comes running over to me, his tongue lolling out of his mouth, and I look around Will’s living room in absolute shock. There are beer cans everywhere, takeout boxes, and a lump on the couch that I slowly realize is my brother.
“Will?” I rush over, suddenly terrified that someone died and he didn’t tell me. “Will!” I shout, shaking his shoulder.
He grumbles and then squints one eye open. “Becka?” His voice is still drowsy with sleep, and when he sits up, I have to step back because someone desperately needs a shower.
“What the hell is going on?” I ask.
He looks at me like he’s not sure if I’m really standing in his living room or if I’m a figment of his imagination. “Will? Seriously, what is all this?” I ask, gesturing to the disaster that is his house. It looks like he invited every frat house in SoCal to come hang out in his living room, and it smells worse than the boys’ locker room used to smell when we were in high school.
He rubs his eyes with the heel of his palm and then rests his elbows on his knees, and his whole body sags with what can only be described as defeat. “Gina and I broke up.”
My face goes slack in complete and utter shock. That is the last thing I expected. They were happy and in love when I saw them only a few weeks ago. “What happened?”
He shakes his head, and alarm bells start going off in my brain. I sit down on his couch—brushing off crumbs and an empty beer can first—and then place a hand on his arm. “Will, tell me what happened. You both seemed so happy.”
He turns his head, and instantly his eyes flash with anger, but it’s gone so fast I almost wonder if I imagine it, especially when he sounds so broken when he says, “She deserves better.”
“Better than you? Did she say why she broke up with you?”
He frowns at me. “I broke up with her.”
I slap his arm. “What the fuck, Will!”
“What?”
“Why would you do that? She was perfect for you!”
“Beat a guy while he’s down, why don’t ya.” He’s trying to joke with me, but his lips barely quirk into a semblance of a smile, and his eyes remain vacant and lost.
“You need to fix this.” I immediately start thinking of all the things he could do to get her back.
“No, I don’t. She’s better off.” There’s something in his voice that makes me pause. He believes that.
This might be the first moment I see my brother as the broken little boy he was when my dad left. Will stepped up after that, and he’s always been put-together. Or at least more together than the rest of us. Even Lainey, who can be very type A, is clearly a hot mess underneath all her perfection.
But Will always seemed steady and sure. It wasn’t until Candace—and her subsequent death—that he seemed to change. But even then I never saw him as low as he is now. Maybe it’s not just the Edmonson girls that let their insecurities ruin their relationships.
Maybe all of us Edmonson kids are messed up adults. We have jobs and function in society, but there’s something broken internally.
“Will, I don’t want to have to torture it out of you. You know I am a pro at giving wet willies, even to a pro football player. So is it going to be little sister torture, or will you give me the truth freely? Either way, I’m gonna find out what happened.”
He glances at me, his stare gauging how serious I am and then finally heaves the heaviest, most dramatic sigh I’ve ever heard from my fairly stoic brother. “I fell in love with her.”
“Heaven forbid.”
He glares at me. “There are things you don’t know, Becks. Things about me. I’m a mess, okay? Is that what you want to know? She deserves someone better.”
I ignore the comment about me not knowing things about him—clearly I’m not the only one keeping secrets—and focus on what’s important. “But she wanted you.”
He opens his mouth to refute my comment, but then closes it and stares at nothing.
“Will, are you still seeing your therapist?” Will finally caved and started seeing a therapist a while back, but I haven’t heard him talk about it in a long time, and since he seemed like he was doing so well, I didn’t bother to ask. But he’s clearly spiraling if the state of his living room is any indication.
He needs help. More than I can give him.
“Why does everyone ask me that?” he mumbles, and I have to wonder who else he’s been talking to. “No, I stopped my therapy sessions a while ago.”
“Maybe it’d be worth starting them back up again. You look miserable and heartbroken. I hate seeing you this way.”
And because he’s so miserable, I bite back the words that were clawing at my throat the whole way here. I don’t tell him that I’m dating Trent, or that I’m quite possibly completely in love with him. How can I share my happiness with my brother when he looks so sad? It feels like bragging that you won the lottery to a homeless person.
Will rubs his face again, and when he looks back up at me, his eyes are shining. My big, masculine, stoic brother is on the verge of tears, and my chest aches from the pain I see in his eyes.
“I messed it all up,” he whispers, further breaking my heart.
I reach out, put a hand on his arm, and say, “It’s never too late to fix it.”
Instead of giving him hope like I’d been going for, his eyes look haunted. “Sometimes it is.”
I stay with my brother for the rest of the day, much to his dismay. He clearly wants to be alone, but I’m not about to abandon him when he’s going through hell. That’s not what we do. We’ve always had each other’s backs—at least when we’ve been honest about what’s going on in our lives. As the day goes on, I can’t stop thinking about what Will hasn’t told me. It’s obviously something big and something he’s still not willing to share. It makes me wonder all the more about what my brother’s been hiding from me and for how long.
When I finally get in my car to go home, I think about all the months I kept Trent a secret and worry that maybe my brother and I aren’t as close as we always thought.