"Lo?" Justin answered the phone lazily. As if he had fallen into a deep sleep while drunk. As if his tongue had fallen into an equally deep sleep and now couldn't form complete syllables. As if he were channelling 50 Cent post the bullet to the mouth.
"Justin?"
There it was. The voice he had been dying to hear for a year. Instantly, he was awake. He sat up and wiped the sleep from his eyes. The clock on his bedside table read 3:22am, though he had to read it twice and he was still seeing double.
"A-are you there?"
He was confused and happy, but mostly confused. He knew if he didn't say something soon, she would hang up. He also knew if he said the wrong thing, she would hang up. Saying the wrong thing was so easy when you were just pulled from REM sleep.
"Yea." At least it was a start. He was sitting up now holding his house phone as if it might break. As if it were made of porcelain. As if he was completely fucking terrified of it.
And, in this moment, he really definitely was.
"Okay." She breathed more than spoke.
There was silence on both ends and he wasn't sure if she was challenging him or just didn't know what to say. He wasn't sure which category he fell under either. It was nearly 3:30 in the morning and he didn't know if he was up for a challenge. Hell, he didn't even know if he was sober. He did, however, know that she had been removed (rather forcefully) from his life a while ago and he had thought about her every night. If she wanted a challenge, then he would make sure she got one.
But the thing with challenges is that someone has to win. And well, he didn't seem to be doing much winning these days.
"I thought about writing you." She admitted quietly.
He tried to picture her in this moment. In his mind, she was curled up in her twin sized bed, oversized t-shirt and boyshort underwear. Her phone was cradled in one of her small hands between the pillow and her face. He blond curly hair was splayed out all over. He smiled thinking about it. Her hair was the first thing he noticed about her. It put up a good fight to take all attention away from her face. It was big, unruly and, quite honestly, bordering obnoxious. Yet, somehow completely endearing. It was like there was an assembly line and someone royally screwed up by putting all this hair on this tiny female body, but they didn't want to get it trouble so they sent her on down the line completely mis-matched anyway hoping no one would notice.
But he realized this was all in his mind. He hadn't seen her in a full year. Her hair might not be blond or curly or curly anymore. Perhaps she colored it dark brown and straightened it. Perhaps she doesn't even wear boyshorts anymore. Or oversized t-shirts. Perhaps she doesn't even wear underwear at all anymore. A lot can change in year.
"Oh, yea?" He sat up straighter. He had to keep switching the phone from one hand to the other while he wiped his now sweaty palms on the bed sheets. He wanted to punch himself for contributing a total of three words to the conversation and two of them being the same damn one. He sounded like a moron, but he didn't know what else he could say. He was trying to play it so safe. There were out-of-bounds lines drawn all over this conversation ( if you could call it that) and he was a pro at over-stepping them.
"Yea, I tried really hard." Her voice was small and unsure. "This whole time I've tried really hard, but I just couldn't."
He felt his heart sink a bit at that comment. Sutton had never had a problem getting out her feelings. She talked them out, wrote them down, yelled them from time to time, but she was always a great communicator. That was the detail that killed him the most. If she had done to him what he had done to her, she would have told him. She would have acted like a mature, respectful adult and told him. To his face. That day. She wouldn't have waited for him to innocently go through his phone and find out for herself. She wouldn't have made him break his own heart. Not like he made her.
"I understand." He spoke slowly and without emotion. He couldn't pick the right way to feel so he chose nothing. It was a bad habit of his.
"I don't think I can, Justin. And I'm not sure if it's because it's too hard or because I just don't want to."
Every sentence she spoke felt like someone taking a hacksaw to his ribs one at a time. Pretty soon his own heart wouldn't even be in his body anymore. He was no longer sitting up straight, but slinking down the wall one sentence at a time. Pretty soon he would be as low as he felt.
"Part of me feels like I shouldn't even be telling you this because you shouldn't get to know how I feel. You don't deserve it, but it's been a year now and. . .I still think about it."
It was so strange to him to hear Sutton so calm and logical. And, well, talkative. The last few times they had spoke, she had managed to find a clever way to throw what he did into his face every time he spoke. Sometimes she was super witty about it, and because of the nature of their relationship, he wanted to high five her. But after a while, she became repetitive and he found himself wanting to high five her head instead of her hand. He never did. He had to remind himself that he caused this. He was the reason she was no longer a treat to talk to and it was up to him to fix it.
Of course, he never fixed it. His emotions got the best of him and he got angry instead. What a stupid thing to do. He wanted an easy fix and Sutton just wasn't going to give that to him. He started talking back to her every chance he got. He was rude and oftentimes mean, but couldn't she see that he didn't want to relive the biggest mistake of his young life over and over again? It was just so aggravating. She wouldn't even listen to him. She would let him apologize, but that was it. If he wanted to talk about the weather, she would bring up Meredith. If he wanted to ask how she was doing, she would ask how Meredith was doing. If he wanted to fuck, she would tell him to fuck Meredith. Then she would remind him that he had already done that.
"I still think about it, too." He slid a little lower. He was reliving his past scene by scene. What he felt the most guilty about was the way Sutton reacted when she found out. She found out in the morning and waited until the end of the day to confront him. She said she needed her time to think it through and she wanted one last semi-normal day with him. She brought it up that night after dinner. She stopped him from clearing the plates and asked him to sit down. She simply asked who Meredith was and if Justin had slept with her. Justin knew he was caught and and hadn't been telling the truth for long enough. When he nodded his head, she quietly walked away. Justin never would have acted so tactfully and they both knew that.
Even though he apologized, the way he acted afterwards negated how sorry he was. She was more hurt that he didn't even tell her, that she had to find out from his cell phone, that she had to find out a month after, and that she only found out because he kept in touch with the girl. It was like even when she was down he wouldn't quit kicking.
Eventually, she grew tired of his selfishness. She grew tired of paying for his mistakes. She told him not to call her anymore, that she was done. Sutton knew Justin for four years, which meant she knew better than to threaten something she didn't mean because he was stubborn enough to follow through with it, So when she finally broke, he knew she was serious. Part of him did as he was told because he didn't want to see her cry anymore and part of him did it because it was just so much easier. He knew that to make this up to her, he was going to have to spend a lot of time and take it painfully slowly. He was fed up after three months.
"I was really mad at you, Justin. I swore I hated you."
"l know. . " He choked out, but she was on a roll so she didn't even notice.
"I couldn't believe you took us away from me. You didn't only ruin your future, you ruined mine too."
"Sutton, I. . " He didn't even know how to finish that sentence, but the more she talked the more his heart broke. That hacksaw was down to his last few ribs.
"And then I, well, I just got really sad. I missed you a lot." She paused and he couldn't tell if she was crying or not. He couldn't tell if he was hoping she was crying or not, which made him a total asshole. "Then I thought I was okay with it, you know? So you made a mistake, you know? We could never be together again, but we could still be buds. People cheat on people all the time so there was really no use in harboring all that hatred, you know?"
Justin rested his forehead on his knees while she went through her thought process from the last year. It was difficult to hear, but he was sure it was more difficult to feel. He wanted to tell her that she had never done anything wrong, and though she never said out loud that she questioned herself, he wanted her to know that she shouldn't. She was perfect for him. He was just drunk and stupid. Meredith wasn't better than Sutton in any way. He was just on vacation and she was there. He wanted attention. It was that simple. He could't say any of those things, though. He had had months to, but he never even tried. She had made her peace on her own.
"But that's not me." She continued. "You never even seemed truly sorry, so how could I just be buds with you after that? I mean, I knew you were sorry in your own small way, but you weren't sorry like I needed you to be. You were too prideful. How could you hold onto your pride when you had just destroyed mine? You TOLD her about me, Justin. She knew about me and I didn't know about her, and you both turned me into your own private joke. You spent one night together and she knew you better at that point in time than I did."
He wanted to stop her, but he knew he deserved this. He wanted to tell her that Meredith was stupid and they could never have had private jokes like he and Sutton had. He wanted to tell her that he hadn't spoken to Meredith in forever and that she would never even cross his mind again if she weren't the catalyst for Sutton leaving.
"For months I still hoped you'd call regardless of me telling you not to. I knew you wouldn't, but hope makes you insane sometimes. I guess I thought. . .I thought we could still make it work. If only you would call. If only you would make up for it. But that was just silly and me being weak. You could never make up for that sort of betrayal. I'm sure someone could, but you couldn't. You're too selfish."
His breaths were so shallow that he wasn't even sure he was breathing anymore.
"I can't write you because it's not worth it to me anymore. But I need you to know that It's been a hard year, and a lot of things have happened that you weren't there for. That was a huge mistake on your part because it showed me I can do anything without you. I'm stronger than I thought even though it hurt like hell to find that out. So I want you to know that I no longer want us to get back together, that I actually like myself better without you, and that, while I'm still pretty angry and hurt, I am working on letting it go now."
"Sutton." He tried again weakly, but just like the last time, she just kept talking.
"And I'm not going to lie and say that I wish you well, because I don't, and I'm not even sure if one day I will. but I feel confident that one day I just won't care how you are at all. "
It took him a while to realize that the line had gone dead. The phone slipped out of his hand and onto the wooden floor.
And it broke.
Just like it were porcelain.