Best Friend's Ex Box Set

“What?” I wasn’t sure I had heard him correctly.

“It’s really nicely constructed and well-rehearsed, I’ll give you that,” he replied.

“I have no idea what you’re talking about!” I yelled.

“Sure you do,” he countered. “You know exactly what I’m talking about. That’s the story you’ve told your parents and all the nosy people who’ve tried to pry into your personal life, but it’s a lie. You know it, and you know I know it.”

“I…I…I…” I stuttered as I tried to find a way to cover my vulnerability. He’d seen past my carefully constructed mask and was calling me out.

“Ava, look, I’m not here to spy on you or rat you out to your parents,” he said with an earnest sincerity. “I’m here to make sure that Dominic doesn’t hurt you, that’s it. My whole job is to protect you, but I can’t do that if I don’t know what kind of enemy I’m up against. You need to come clean if I’m going to be able to do my job.”

“I…I…I can’t,” I whispered.

“Yes, you can,” he replied as he moved from the chair to the edge of the bed. Reaching out, he cupped my chin with his large hand and tipped my face up so that I was looking him in the eye. “You can’t escape a nightmare until you tell someone about it, and I’m the person who can help you leave it behind.”

“How on earth would you know anything about a nightmare!” I yelled. “You know nothing about this!”

“Maybe not this particular nightmare,” he said quietly as he held my gaze. “But believe me, I know about nightmares. So, tell me. Let me help you escape. Please, Ava?”

*****

I stared silently at Brian as my brain frantically searched for a way to explain my way out of the spotlight he’d just shone on my story. It wasn’t that I’d lied to anyone, it was more that I’d committed the sin of omission, and in doing so, thought that I’d fooled everyone into believing that things weren’t nearly as bad as they’d actually been. Everyone around me had wanted to believe my story, and I knew that the reality of the situation was more than they could handle, so I told them only small details and left out the big, scary parts. My parents didn’t ask at all, so I didn’t even have to omit anything. We just didn’t speak.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” I insisted even as the tears began to leak from the corners of my eyes. “I’m fine. I’m fine. I’m fine!”

“Ava,” Brian’s voice was soft as he continued cupping my chin, refusing to let me look away. “It’s okay. It’s safe to talk about it here with me. I promise.”

“You wouldn’t understand,” I whispered.

“Try me.”

I looked up into his steely blue eyes and saw something so familiar there that I had to look away. When I looked back up at him, the steel had b

een replaced by a softer expression, and something in me broke. I took a deep breath and began to tell the whole story; the real one.

“Dominic and I met during Rush Week,” I began. “He was trying to get into the Fiji house, and I thought the entire week was a joke. We both come from families with enormous wealth, and so we bonded over our rich kid isolation. I know, pathetic, isn’t it?”

“I’m not going to judge you, Ava,” he said softly. “I’m just listening.”

“I didn’t have to explain things to him about my family—all the weird things that no one else understands—so it felt good to be with him, and after a few weeks, it just felt like we were supposed to be together,” I had never admitted that to anyone, not even to myself. “But I knew there was something off about him. In the first couple of weeks we’d been seeing each other, he’d gotten arrested for fighting with another guy at a frat party, and once he was released from jail, he’d disappeared for a few days. When he came back, he just said he’d been ‘summoned home by the big guy,’ which was our code for when one of our fathers wanted to have a word with us. We lived in a cocoon; buffered by money and our shared isolation, but I liked him because he paid attention to me—close attention—and he was nothing like my father.”

As I’d begun telling my story, Brian had backed up and given me some space. He now sat with his back against the headboard, his arm resting on his bent knee while his other leg hung off the side of the bed. It was a constructed pose that was designed to look very casual and relaxed, but the tension in his jaw told me otherwise.

“It started small; he’d joke about summoning me home and I’d show up at his apartment.” I cringed as I began telling the story of the slow and steady descent into the darkness of our relationship. “But if I didn’t show up quickly, he’d pepper me with texts and phone calls asking where I’d been and who I’d been with. He said it was because he was worried about me and he wanted to make sure I was safe.”

Brian nodded as he connected the dots between his presence and my resistance to the whole safety routine. I wasn’t sure how much of the rest of the story I wanted to tell him, but when I looked up at him he said, “Tell the truth, Ava. Just tell the truth.”

“I was flattered by his attention. My whole life I had felt like an inconvenience to my parents. They’d shipped me off to boarding school in third grade, and I hadn’t lived in any house for more than a month at a time; often times, my parents weren’t even there. It was just me and the staff, and maybe a friend or two if they weren’t traveling with their own families,” I explained as the sadness crept up and wound itself around me. “Dominic was always there. He’d call me in the middle of the night just to tell me he missed me or he’d drop by my classroom to give me flowers or tell me a story about his day. There wasn’t anything menacing about it at all. He looked out for me and took care of me in a way that my parents had never done, and I felt…loved. I know that sounds ridiculous to someone who grew up with parents who loved them, probably like yours did, right?”

I looked over at Brian as he nodded slowly and then shifted his gaze away from my face. There was something going on, but I was too deep into my story to stop and find out, so I continued.

“Halfway through our second semester, I moved out of the dorm and into his apartment,” I shifted my body so that my knees were drawn up to my chest with my arms tightly wrapped around them. I felt as if I were standing on the edge of a terrifying abyss, as I had never told anyone what I was about to tell Brian. “Dominic was so sweet when I moved in. He took me shopping for all our household items and we picked out new bedding and sheets and towels. It was like we were married. And he was so attentive and kind in those first new days that I didn’t notice the change. Have you ever been to a lobster boil, Brian?”

“No?” he replied with a perplexed look on his face. “What does that have to do with anything?”

“If you really want to boil a lobster the right way, do you know how you do it?” I asked quietly.

“I really hadn’t thought about it,” he said.