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In theory, Cherry knew Joe slept with other people.
It was something they’d discussed time and again, the freedom to see and sleep with anyone who caught their interest. They weren’t anything serious—something to burn off a little steam after a beef, something casual and easy between two people who really couldn’t stand each other. They definitely weren’t together; Cherry had made that abundantly clear from the beginning and Joe had been quick to agree.
But seeing it in practice was an entirely different story.
Seeing Joe touching her, touching anyone—it was sacrilege, a desecration of the secret temples they’d built with their bodies time and again over the years. Showing up at S to Joe with someone on his arm toting the word girlfriend like it meant anything, like Joe’s tongue hadn’t been in his mouth that very morning—
It was a reminder, served raw and plated in a pretty little package of tanned skin and long blonde hair, fluttering lashes and a set of jeans so low-cut Cherry could see the hickeys lining her hipbones.
He could lie in bed with blunt fingernails tracking patterns along his spine, wake up to breakfast and the worst version of Italian coffee he’d ever had the misfortune of experiencing, and pretend like the things he experienced with Joe were exclusive to him. That the bedsheets were ones only he had ever laid on, the coffee cup was one only his lips had touched, that flipping onto his back to let Joe trail kisses down his spine was a roadmap to redemption.
(Cherry would not forgive himself—not for being young and stupid and not now, not when he had yet to learn his lesson).
He could do all those things, pretend like they mattered, but seeing the truth, cold and harsh beneath the stark-white lights of S, reminded him. He didn’t matter. He never had. He couldn’t, and had he ever really wanted to?
Love had left him with nothing but bones that ached before a rain and a mouthful of veneers his insurance wouldn’t cover. It was painful, destructive; it had taken everything from him, hammered him down into a cheap facsimile of what he’d once been. He’d built himself back, piece by piece, and it hadn’t been easy. It was the hardest thing he’d ever fucking done, hours in hospital and offices and therapy, all the while still thinking I can fix him and somehow this was my fault.
Every time a man hurt him (every time he hurt himself), Cherry was seventeen again: young and foolish and broken by the very world he’d once grasped in his hands, counting the purple-stained bruising patterns across his skin.
What was love, if not violence? If not pain?
Was there a difference, as long as he felt something?
He found himself going down the same trajectory now as the scenery of the track flew past him, mind playing a stop-motion film of the moments he had shared with Joe over the years. The brush-offs, the jabs, the stinging comments and barbs thrown in either direction as a defense mechanism against getting too close. The late nights and the laughter, the gentle way Joe touched him—carefully, reverently, fine china trembling in strong hands, as if he were afraid of finding Cherry broken again. Of being the reason Cherry shattered. Now, Cherry could feel the fine-line fissures along the face of his composure, cracks across the surface that ran far deeper than he cared to admit.
He would not be put together again, because he would not fall apart.
He swiped at the wetness on his cheeks, pressed it to the hollow of his throat. It’s sweat, he told himself. When he squeezed his eyes closed more tears leaked out, the visual of Joe—mouth kissing the shell of her ear, big hand palming at her waist with a possessiveness Cherry knew intimately—flashing across his lids.
He took the curve hard, tried to outrun the sick-green feeling in his stomach and the way Joe looked when their eyes met: surprise first, morphing into something shameless. Faultless. Because he was, because this was Cherry’s fault. Cherry’s fault for catching feelings, for trying to turn a himbo into a goddamn househusband, for romanticizing something that had never been anything but hate sex.
Sweat, Cherry repeated to himself. That’s all it was.