9.11 - 44. Chapter 44

September 15, 2001

“I hope you don’t mind driving over with me,” I said to Will as we motored down I-280 in the Ferrari convertible Robbie had bought me. I was getting immune to these constant reminders about him, probably because they were everywhere.

“No, it’s cool,” he said casually. “I ride in this car a lot.”

“In this car? In my Ferrari?” I asked him, pretending to sound outraged, when I was only joking.

“Yeah,” he said with a shrug. “It’s cool, and I figured it might piss you off if I put some miles on it.” That actually made me laugh.

“Nope. You’ll have to try something else to piss me off,” I said. “If it gets too cold, we can put the top up.”

“No, leave it down,” he said. It was 70 degrees and sunny, and we were both wearing long sleeves. “May be colder in Santa Cruz. It’s definitely wet suit weather.”

“No shit,” I agreed. “The weather report says it will be sunny, but only about 60.”

“Doesn’t matter as long as the waves are good,” he said. We drove on for a while, neither one of us saying anything.

When we took the exit for I-880/Highway 17, I spoke again. “So how was Marie?” That reminded me of Robbie, and how when we were having an intense conversation, he’d wait until we got to an intersection before he’d bring up a new topic.

“Fine,” he said casually. “How was your doctor’s visit?”

“Fine,” I responded in the same tone. “Gave me some pills. Wellbutrin.”

“Let me know if they help,” he said, as if he wanted some.

“So Marie was better?” I asked, again. I really was worried about her. He didn’t say anything, which made me feel like shit for prying.

He finally turned to look at me, and even though my eyes were on the road, I could see him looking at me with my peripheral vision. “I’m trying to figure out how to deal with you.”

That surprised me. “You’re trying to figure out how to deal with me?” I asked.

“Yeah. I’m trying to decide if I open up and tell you what’s going on, you’ll try to run my life and control me, or if you’ve gotten over that,” he said. At first that pissed me off, but then I calmed down, and decided that I was lucky he was being this open with me.

“I can see that,” I said.

“And the second thing is that you want me to tell you what’s going on in my world, and my mind, but you’re not telling me what’s going on in yours,” he countered.

“So what you’re saying to me is that you’re wondering why you should trust me to talk about things, when I don’t trust you enough to tell you my thoughts,” I said, summing things up.

“That’s what I’m saying,” he said, and sat back in the seat, leaving the ball squarely in my court. And there I was, at the wall, with a pretty solid choice to make. I was going to have to open up to him, and tell him what my issues were, if I wanted him to feel comfortable talking to me.

“Have you talked to Dr. Anderson lately?” I asked him, referring to his psychologist.

“Not since…not recently,” he said. “I have an appointment set up on Monday after school. We talk on the phone. It works.”

“I talked to my psychologist this morning, after the appointment with the psychiatrist,” I told him. “That’s why we’re running behind schedule.”

“We’re doing fine,” he said. “That was more important.”

I sighed, letting him see my frustration. “Robbie and I were having issues before he…” I paused, almost unable to say the word, and then I did. “Died.”

“I’m sorry,” he said earnestly. “I never meant to cause problems between the two of you.”

“That’s not how it was,” I said, now even more frustrated, because we’d gone off in a direction that I didn’t want to take. I didn’t want him to feel guilty. “If anything, it was those issues that helped make our problems worse.”

“What issues?” he asked.

“After that whole nightmare with Carson, I told Robbie that I’d rather have him fuck a guy he was attracted to rather than let him get under Robbie’s skin like Carson did,” I told him. “I thought that would be better than having him become obsessed.”

“That makes sense,” he said, just to urge me on.

“Robbie was working with this guy, and he was pretty into him,” I told him.

Will’s eyes flashed fire now, because he was angry. “Was this another twink?”

“No, it was with Alex Danvers,” I said.

“The guy he wanted to appoint to take over the company?” he asked me, shocked. “What if this guy’s as big of an idiot as Carson was?”

“He’s not,” I said calmly, and that slowed him down enough to listen to me. “Robbie took me out to dinner after we got back from Claremont, from the Fourth of July thing, and told me that he was really attracted to Alex.”

“What did you say?”

“I agreed with him. Alex is really handsome, and really smart. I actually was happy that it wasn’t some twink, but a guy in his early 30s. I don’t know why, but it seemed better.”

“If you say so,” Will said. “I’m not sure why it’s better.”

“I’m not sure either,” I admitted. “It just seemed that way. Kind of like he found a friend with benefits, and the fact that the guy was less than ten years younger than Robbie made me think that maybe he was over the mid-life thing.”

“So he wanted your permission to fuck this dude?”

“Yes,” I said. “I didn’t freak out like he thought I would, I actually took a day to think about it. But in the end, I really didn’t feel like I had much of a choice but to agree to it. I mean, if I said no, he’d either fire the guy so he wasn’t around, and that wasn’t fair, or he’d fuck him anyway, and then I’d really lose my mind.”

“I can see that,” Will said.

“So I told him I was OK with it. The next day, I got a call from Alex.”

“What did he want?” Will asked, pissed off again.

“He told me that Robbie had asked him out, and let him know that his interests weren’t just professional. He said that he thought Robbie was really sexy, and he was tempted to take him up on the date, but he wasn’t going to do it unless I was OK with it,” I told him.

“That’s a pretty classy thing to do,” Will said. “I wish I would have done that with Erik.”

“Live and learn,” I told him. “It was classy. He said that he wasn’t dating anyone, but he didn’t want to come between us. He asked me to call him if I got annoyed with them hooking up.”

“So Pop started banging this dude,” Will concluded.

“He did. It was only once or twice a week,” I said, like that made it any better.

“I can’t believe Pop did that to you!” he said, all pissed off.

“He didn’t do anything wrong. He handled things just like he was supposed to. He asked my permission, and Alex even made sure everything was good,” I said emphatically. “And I told him it was alright.”

“You were backed into a corner. You had no choice,” he said.

“I had choices,” I said. “I could have put my foot down and said ‘no’.”

“He would have done it anyway,” Will argued.

“Maybe. Maybe not,” I said. I paused to get myself together, and he gave me the space to do that. “I think that Robbie was one of those guys who needed some excitement on the side, something new every once in a while. It wasn’t about me; it was just something he craved. And when he got it, we were actually better together.” I mentally noted that I was talking to Will about my sex life and it wasn’t bothering me.

“That sounds like what Wade went through with that deal with Matt,” Will said. I nodded, because it was very similar, and that made me reflect briefly on how much alike Matt and Robbie were. “Wade wasn’t very happy with that either.”

“I think Wade dealt with it just fine,” I said.

“Right,” he said, challenging that. “Wade puts up with it. Just like you did.”

“It started to really bother me around the beginning of August,” I told him. “I decided that I’d talk to Alex about it, so I asked him to meet me for lunch.”

“How did it go?”

“It was nice,” I said, then swallowed hard. “We had lunch, then went to the Beverly Hills Hotel, got a room, and fucked all afternoon.” He laughed about that.

“Is he a top or a bottom?” Will asked, joking to try and help me stay calm.

“He’s versatile,” I said, remembering how sexy he was, and how he moved his body with the skill of a professional. He was actually a lot like Cody in bed, only with a smaller dick.

“What did Pop say about that?” Will asked.

“Well, he wasn’t all that happy about it, but he was smart enough to try and hide it from me,” I told him with a grimace. “So things went on, and we were both seeing Alex on the side. I mean, we have other guys we can do that with, like Cody, but somehow this was different.”

“You were into him too?”

I shook my head. “I think I was just having sex with him to stay involved in his relationship with Robbie.” I sighed. “Toward the end of August, we decided to try a threesome.”

He could tell by my tone that didn’t go well. “Not good?”

I shook my head. “I think sex with multiple people only works if the people are all into each other. When we were having sex, Robbie really didn’t pay much attention to me.” That had shaken me to my core, and it was inevitable that a tear fall out of my eye.

“So those two were all into each other, freezing you out?” he demanded, all pissed off.

I shook my head, and almost chuckled. “No, Alex was into me. And I was just annoyed and upset about the whole situation.”

“You know what I think?” he asked rhetorically. “I think that all of our fighting just made things that much worse.”

“You’ve got it all wrong,” I told him. “I didn’t really get that until today.”

“What do you mean?”

“Sometimes you can really love someone, they can love you back, but they can be really bad for you,” I told him.

“You’re saying Pop was bad for you?” he asked, really upset now.

“Sometimes, I think he was,” I admitted. “I love him, I really do,” I said, noting even as I did that I used the present tense.

“But?”

“But he had this wild side, this need for his freedom, and I tried to deal with it, but I never could,” I admitted, even as I wiped a tear away. “It’s as much my problem as it was his.”

“I’m not seeing that,” he said. “He’s the one who had to go find new meat all the time.”

“Yeah, but I knew that he needed that, and I gave him permission,” I argued, defending him.

“Bullshit,” Will said. “You were backed into a corner, and we both know it.”

We paused to let our emotions calm down a bit. “My doctor thinks that his fling with Alex, and my knowledge that this would probably happen again, fueled my insecurities. He thinks that I saw this thing as a competition, and when Robbie was with Alex, I was losing. I don’t like to lose.”

He laughed at me. “No shit.”

“Even back in high school when we dealt with this shit, I told Robbie that it bothered me most because it made me feel like I wasn’t good enough for him. It was like he needed more than I could give him, and that meant I was a shitty lover,” I said, pouring my heart out to my son.

“Do you really think that?” he asked. “Shit, Wade was ready to dump Matt after you rocked his world.” I felt myself blushing, and that made him giggle. But I really appreciated the shot to my self-confidence he’d given me.

“Having Alex be more into me than Robbie was a huge ego boost,” I admitted. “And it was pretty satisfying to know that Robbie got it too, even if he didn’t admit it, and to know that it must have bugged the shit out of him.”

“Tie this in with you and me,” he said, evidently tired of my rambling.

“My doctor pointed out to me that you and I had our biggest blow-ups around the times that I was dealing with this thing with Alex. I thought about it, and I was reminded of your mother, and how she dealt with you right before she had Maddy,” I told him.

“That was a rough time for her,” he said somberly, remembering his mother.

“It was,” I agreed. It had been a tough time for me too. “I mentioned that, and how she had demanded that you be around her, and had become pretty unhinged about you and your brothers leaving. He said it was probably similar. He said that I was probably feeling very insecure, and my foundations were crumbling, so I was grabbing for those I loved most and trying to control them.”

“Wow,” he said, getting my epiphany. “Dude, I’m fucking confused about all this. You must be losing your mind.”

I laughed at that, and it felt good, so good I kept on laughing, until it got a little weird. “It’s not easy.”

“So that’s how you left things?” he asked. “That’s what was going on when he died?” He used the “D” word and freaked out about it a bit, but I hurried to answer his question and take away the stigma.

“No. We got home from your mother’s house and argued for about an hour. I told him that I was done with this, and that when we got back to Malibu, I was moving out.”

“Shit. You were going to divorce him?”

“More or less,” I admitted. “The whole thing was just fucking with my brain. I told him that I couldn’t be in a relationship with someone who wasn’t happy with me, and only me. I told him that it had never worked before, and it wasn’t working now.”

“What did he say?”

“He finally seemed to get where I was coming from,” I said, and found myself pissed off at Robbie once again for being so thick-headed that I had to threaten to dump him for him to actually listen to me. “He told me that he was sorry, and that he fucked up, and that when we got back to LA, he’d dump Alex and that was that.”

“Did you believe him?” he asked.

“Yeah, I did,” I said. “I think he would have had a hard time with it, but he would have done it.”

“I don’t think he would have,” Will said.

“What?” I asked angrily, but settled down pretty fast. Will was used to that, and didn’t let it bother him.

“I think he would have been working with the dude, and would have been tempted to do something with him,” Will said. “And I think that you may have been tempted to do something with Alex too.”

“No I wouldn’t!” I vowed. We said nothing for a bit. “What makes you think that?”

He smiled at me, and my erratic behavior. “To reward him for liking you best.” I stared at him, stunned at how well he knew me, and how well he’d read me. And at how he was probably right. “Doesn’t matter anyway.”

“No, it doesn’t,” I lied. “So we had a really nice night, and had great make-up sex.” I didn’t go into all the details, about how that was the last time I’d fisted Robbie, and how I used that to remind him of our connection.

“I didn’t know you were dealing with all that shit,” he said. “No wonder you were acting like a crazy bastard.”

“You didn’t know because I didn’t tell you, and I didn’t tell you because you and I were fighting and it didn’t seem appropriate to share it with you, and we were fighting because I was crazed from dealing with Robbie,” I said, acknowledging all the underlying issues.

“I can see that,” he said. “Robbie accused me of doing things just to piss you off.”

“When did he say that?” I asked.

“When he was up at Escorial. We really had a nice time.” He told me about the dildo Robbie had left him, and the note, which cracked me up. And he told me about how he’d sat with Robbie and looked at his spreadsheets, and they’d talked about the business. “He said that some of the things I did, like buying that house without even talking to you, must have seemed pretty antagonistic.”

I smiled at his use of a big word, marveling at the influence Dad had over him. “What do you think?”

“I think that maybe there was something to that,” he said. We both laughed at that.

“My big fear in telling you all this is that it would make you mad at him,” I said.

He nodded. “He did stupid shit, and so did you. I guess I always thought that as long as I loved someone, and he loved me back, that was the most important thing. It’s more complicated than that.”

“It is,” I said. “I think that with Robbie, the biggest problem I had was that he just fueled my insecurities. I could never really be completely confident in us.”

“Maybe you fueled his too,” Will said.

“What are you talking about?” I asked, a little too nastily.

“Does he have a lot of cash?”

“Cash?”

“Yeah. Does he have a lot of cash?” Will asked.

“As a matter of fact, he does,” I said. I’d noticed that when I’d looked at his accounts. “Why?”

“He told me that he wasn’t going to be in a position where if he felt he was right about something, he’d have to let you and Stef bully him. He said that if he had enough cash built up, he could do his own thing if he had to,” Will said.

“He was planning to leave Anders-Hayes?” I asked, completely flummoxed.

“No, he was making sure he had options,” Will corrected.

“So you’re saying that because we had those shares of stock to hang over his head, we made him feel insecure too?” I asked.

“Maybe,” he said.

“Maybe that’s why he felt the need to be with Alex,” I mused out loud, remembering that he’d felt similarly with Carson. Then I got flustered. “See, this is what I’m talking about. It’s like we loved each other, but we were just toxic for each other.”

“Or maybe you just didn’t talk about shit,” he said, putting it so succinctly.

“Maybe you’re right,” I agreed. “He made me promise to find someone new.”

“Are you going to do that?” he asked.

“Maybe,” I said. “If I do, I’m not going through this shit again. I’m going to find someone who is stable, and won’t fuck me up like this.”

“I’m guessing you’ll turn into a total slut. You will have one hell of a time giving me shit after that,” he said, enjoying my potential dilemma.

“Look, having sex with all kinds of guys when you’re under 18…”

He cut me off, with fire in his eyes. “Stop! Don’t even go there. I told Aunt Claire and Uncle Jack last night that they should learn a lesson from us.”

“What lesson was that?” I asked with dread.

“I told them that no dude is going to put up with his parents telling him what he can and can’t do with his dick. Uncle Jack wouldn’t have, and you wouldn’t have. So knock it off.”

“Well…” I began.

“I’m serious,” he said, almost a yell. “Knock it off. You are not allowed to comment on who I fuck, how I fuck them, or how many times I fuck them. First time you do that, it’s the last time I talk about my sex life in front of you.”

“Fine,” I agreed grumpily.

“So now you have the control. You like that,” he said, trying to joke to make the conversation less confrontational.

“So what happened with Marie?”

“She was all whacked out because she fell in love,” he told me. He paused for effect. “With me.”

“She’s in love with you?” That freaked me out on so many levels, but I didn’t say anything more, I just processed it.

“Why is that hard to believe?” he asked with faux cockiness.

“So that’s why she was acting so weird,” I mused. People in love do stupid ass things, as I’d just pointed out.

“That’s why,” he said.

“So are you guys alright?”

“She said she was sorry, we fucked, and now we’re good,” he said.

“You fucked her?” I asked, and then forced myself to calm down. He was testing me with this, waiting to see how I’d handle it.

“I did,” he said.

“Aren’t you worried that will just make her love you more?” I asked. That question blew him away, because he was expecting a diatribe from me.

“So you think that if I sleep with someone, I’m so awesome, they’re bound to love me?” he joked, cracking both of us up.

“That’s how it works for me,” I said, making us laugh even more.

He got serious and looked at me, even as I turned into our driveway at Santa Cruz. I paused after I went through the gates to look back at him. “You know, it seems to me that’s exactly what happens.”

“Not all the time,” I said with a smile. “But thanks.”

“You know, when you guys were giving me all this shit about sleeping around, and I almost believed you were right, I actually felt bad that I was good at sex. And that’s bullshit. Being good in bed is something to be happy about,” he said.

“Yes, it is,” I agreed, and opted to leave the moralizing behind.

September 17, 2001

“Good morning,” Grand said to me as I came into the kitchen.

“That remains to be seen,” I said glumly.

“Is there a problem? It seemed like you had a restorative weekend,” he said.

“I think this weekend was about as good as it could be under the circumstances,” I said. I’d had an amazing time surfing with my father. It had been windy and cold, but that didn’t matter, because the waves rocked. Then it got chilly in the evening, so we had all relaxed by the fire and had a mellow evening. And every so often, Jeff and I, or Dad and Cody, would vanish for a while to fuck. I smiled at that, at how Jeff played my body like a flute.

“But you are worried about school,” he said.

“I’m bummed because Jeff went back to LA with Cody, but you’re right, I’m nervous about school,” I said. “Everyone’s going to be asking me about the towers. I don’t want to talk about it.”

“You are not required to talk about it, and no one can force you to,” he declared. “If you have problems, call us.”

“Thanks,” I said. My phone buzzed, which was my signal to go out front to meet the car. It pulled up and I opened the door myself and hopped in. I was surprised to find Aunt Claire there with John. “Good morning,” I said to them cheerfully. I was determined to be upbeat, even though I hadn’t been that way with Grand.

“Good morning,” Aunt Claire said. John just nodded at me, which was fine with me.

“Is there any news on Marie?” I asked.

“They are almost nervous because she is doing so much better,” she said. “You two must have patched things up.”

“We did,” I said, but didn’t expand on that. “When does she get home?”

“Sometime later this week,” she said. “I think she is planning to return to school next week.”

“That’s great,” I said. John looked at me dubiously, but said nothing. We didn’t really talk about anything substantial on the way to school. The driver stopped the car and we hopped out, then the car sped off. I stood there, staring at the school, filled with dread.

“It’s going to be OK,” John said. “Come on.”

“Alright,” I said, and walked with him toward my locker.

“Dude, what’s the deal with Marie? You guys are cool?”

I couldn’t tell him that I had fucked his sister, and that she’d thought she was in love with me. “She apologized to me for all the shit she did, and I believed her,” I said. That was true, that just wasn’t the whole story.

“I hope she’s figured shit out,” he grumbled. We saw Noah off to the side. “Look who’s here.”

“No hate today,” I said to John, and walked up to Noah. I could see him bracing himself, literally clenching his fists, wondering what the fuck I was going to do to him. “Marie has been pretty fucked up by the attacks. She’s out this week. She should be back next week.” He just stared at me blankly, while John and I walked off.

“Dude, you blew his mind,” he said.

“I’d rather blow you,” I joked, whispering that in his ear, and making him chuckle. We got to my locker and I froze. It was covered with paper.

“What the fuck?” he asked.

“I think that’s my line,” I said. I walked up to my locker and found that the paper was actually a bunch of notes taped to my locker. It was like everyone, or at least the people I knew, took the time to write a note and tape it on my locker. “Dude, that was a really nice thing to do.”

“No shit,” John said. He helped me pull all the notes off, and I put them in my backpack to read later. When I opened my locker, I found more of them, the ones that wouldn’t fit on the locker, and had been stuffed through the ventilation holes. “I gotta run.”

“See you at lunch,” I said. The notes were really nice, but in a way, they kind of sucked, because when people stopped to talk to me, I felt obligated to be nice to them. I’d planned to be aloof today, to shield myself, but now I couldn’t do that. I braced myself and walked toward homeroom, but no one said anything beyond “hi” or “glad to see you back”. Blaine Ledington just said “dude” and hi-fived me.

Things were going pretty well until I got to Algebra. I walked in a little late, like maybe a minute at most, because I’d been talking to my last teacher about my homework and a make-up quiz. “I see you’re back, Will,” Mr. Colston said. He was this goofy, nerdy guy who could be funny or mean: those were his two modes.

“Yes, sir,” I said politely.

“You missed a quiz, so that will hurt your grade.” I stared at him, stunned that he’d talk to me about that in front of the whole class.

“I have an excused absence. I was hoping to make that up,” I said.

“Where exactly were you?” he asked. I wondered if he didn’t know, or if he was just being a dick.

“I was in New York City, then in Virginia,” I said with no emotion. I must have sounded like a robot.

“Was this a pleasure trip or a business activity?” he asked, grilling me. Surely he couldn’t be that obtuse that he didn’t know what happened to me? I mean, shit, there were notes all over my locker.

“I have a note,” I said, trying not to get pissed off. I was losing that battle. “That should explain it.”

“And I want to know why you missed class,” he said.

“I don’t want to talk about it,” I said, clenching my teeth. I really wished I could get my anger under control. This was going to be a problem.

“Well I don’t want to administer a make-up quiz,” he said in a smarmy voice.

“You want to know what I did in New York?” I asked loudly.

“If you want me to let you make up the quiz,” he said.

And then I lost it. I walked up to his desk, leaned over it so I was only a couple of feet away from him. “I was on the observatory of the South Tower when the second plane hit. It was in between us and the ground, so we had to go down the one stairwell that was passable, if you could call it that. We had to go down thirty floors in the dark, and it was fucking smoky and hot as hell.” I was yelling by now, and he was not a little surprised by that, and by my language. “We got down to the 80^th floor and it was like an inferno. It was so smoky, we had to get down on our hands and knees and crawl down. I was carrying my sister, who’s one year old, and I had to hold a wash cloth over her face because the smoke was so bad. We finally made it to the bottom, and escaped from the tower before the building collapsed. Only my mother, my step-father, and my step-mother didn’t make it out, and were crushed when the fucking building fell on them. We barely managed to get out of New York after that, and the dust cloud from the collapsing building was so thick it covered everything in my mother’s house. We couldn’t get a flight home until Friday, because every plane in the goddamn country was grounded. So that, Mr. Colston, is why I was in New York City and not sitting in my fucking chair in your class taking your fucking quiz!”

“I think your language is inappropriate,” he said, being bitchy again.

“And I think you’re a complete asshole,” I said. Everyone in the class was just staring at me, stunned that I’d go off on a teacher like that. It was totally unlike me. It was totally unlike any of us. I decided to leave while I was behind, to beat a retreat, so I tossed my backpack onto my shoulder, and walked out of the room. I went out into the courtyard and called my father.

“Hello,” he said as he answered the phone.

“I fucked up,” I said. “I may need your help.”

“What happened?” he asked. I told him the whole story, trying to remember my rant word for word. He said nothing until I was done. “Just go to your next class and don’t worry about it.”

“I’m sorry. You have enough on your plate right now,” I said, feeling guilty for bugging him.

“Not really,” he said. “Just go to your classes, and work with your other teachers.”

“Alright,” I said. I hung up the phone and sat there in the courtyard, with a whole period in front of me with nothing to do. I pulled out the notes from my locker and started reading them. They all pretty much said the same kinds of things. They told me they were glad I was alive and proud of me for carrying my sister out of the building. So it wasn’t the content that made them special, it was the fact that they did it. Shit, even Ferris and Noah left me notes.

“Hey,” I heard a voice say, and looked up in time to see Jackie taking a seat next to me.

“Hey,” I said. “Aren’t you supposed to be in class?” She was in Colston’s Algebra class too, and she’d witnessed our confrontation.

“I had to go to the bathroom,” she lied, cracking me up. “I’m sorry he was such an asshole.”

“I shouldn’t have lost it like that,” I admitted. “Sometimes I get so pissed off that this happened, and I just lose it.”

She put her arm around my shoulders, and it felt nice. “Dude, it’s not you. It’s Colston. He’s probably shitting a brick right now.”

“Why?”

“Did you call your father?” she asked.

“Yeah.”

“That’s why,” she said.