Rory and Sebastian Ch. 12

Looking back on it, I'm sure that morally-speaking, I should've been kinder to him. Cradled him and kissed him and taken him in my arms. But at the time, I felt so livid I thought I was going to burst a blood vessel in my brain. I thought of all the times I'd thought he was getting better. Of all the times I'd loved him and done everything I could to make him feel better and more secure about himself. Of all the times I'd been so stupid as to miss the fact that he was always tired or pale or that it took him weeks to get over an illness that other people could get over in days. I thought of every time he'd ever gone to the bathroom when we were at restaurants. Of how I'd failed him and how he'd lied. How he was doing the same thing he'd done when Josh had started tormenting him: excluding me. Telling me, implicitly, that he didn't trust me; that I couldn't help; that this was his problem. Not ours. Not mine. I felt my chest constrict with the weight of anger and upset, rage and sorrow, in equal measure. I was furious at him and at myself.

'Are you fucking kidding me?'

'I...'

'Do you ... Rory, fuck! Do you get what this is like for me? Have I not done enough? Have I not held you and cradled you and fucked you and loved you and done everything I can to make you feel better? Did you, or did you not, fucking promise me when the whole Joshua Peterly thing happened that you'd never lie to me about stuff like this, ever again? Have you... Fuck! You ... I mean, are you fucking trying to break my heart?'

He sat there; pale and mute. No tears.

I walked over to the front door and swung it open. He stayed where I'd left him: 'Do me a favor, Rory. Don't follow me.'

I walked down the path and passed the wall. For about ten minutes, I walked through the roads near my uncle's cottage. Every moment of the last few months ticked over and over in my head and I felt nothing but a futile sense of anger. How could I have missed it? I prided myself on knowing and noticing everything about him; I liked the fact that he seemed to know and notice everything about me. We hadn't physically had time to become as close as other couples do, obviously, but one of the main things I loved the most about our relationship was our synchronicity. It was our emotional compatibility with one another. I felt it even in our in-jokes and how we finished each other's sentences. Now, I felt shaken in everything I'd thought about Rory and me. How could I believe that our synchronicity was what made us work, when I'd missed something so big? And not just recently, but for months. There'd be times I'd seen him become distant, lost in thought or agitated at himself, but I'd never pressed for what specifically was wrong with him. Because I didn't want to upset his happiness. Because I thought that, at last, we were happy. And now I realized that only I had been. That for almost the whole time we'd been together, Rory had been encased in a private whirlpool of misery. And not once had he reached out to me. Not once had I helped.

As I walked, though, the cooler part of my brain began berating the angry part of it. The guy who liked to read books and think began winning out over the meat-headed boyfriend. What the fuck do you think he's trying to do now, I asked myself. He had just told me. It'd clearly been on his mind to tell me for a while; that explains all the silences. I'd told him to tell me when he was ready, this morning, but when he did, I threw a plate, screamed at him and left.

I turned back towards the cottage. When I got inside, Sebastian had cleaned up the mess I'd made with my plate, tidied the kitchen and washed his own dishes. He was sitting at the kitchen table; a cup of steaming, untouched tea in front of him.

'The kettle's boiled,' he said. His voice sounded hoarse and far away. There was a pleading quality to it. As if he was saying, "See? I can still do some things right." Poor Rory. My poor baby.

I nodded and sat down at the table-corner seat, next to him. 'Thank you.'

'Where did you go?'

'I don't know. I just needed to clear my head.'

'Okay.'

'Rory, how could you have kept this from me?'

He shook his head, mutely. I looked at him and saw his eyes had almost-instantly filled with tears. Thick tears that soon spilled down his face. He shook his head again and tried to say, 'I don't know,' but it came out more as a cross between a whisper and a mime. 'I don't know,' he repeated. He seemed so helpless.

I reached up and wiped away the right-hand tears with my thumb.

'I'm so sorry, Sebastian.'

'Rory, we need to talk about this. I've tried making you feel better, but it's clearly not working and if we don't sit down and have a full, painful, humiliating, no-holds-barred talk about this -- I mean with no secrets, no lies, no fucking politeness -- then it's going to break my heart and ruin your life. Can you do that for me? For us.'

He nodded. Another run of tears spilt out of his lovely eyes.

'Okay,' I said, relieved. 'I'm going to light the fire and then we'll sit down and talk about this.'

I lit the fire and the heavy rain returned. We sat in different places over the course of the afternoon. Sometimes, together on the sofa; other times, I stood by the fireplace. Sometimes, he sat on the armchair, or on my knee. The talk lasted, I think, close to five hours.

Initially, it didn't go anywhere near the bulimia. Jesus, to use that word to describe your own boyfriend is disgusting, heartbreaking and surreal. Initially, I asked all the questions I'd ever had about how it had started, what triggered it, what Rory thought of himself, what made it better. I asked for the supplementary information I'd always wanted after the piecemeal snapshots Robbie had given me when I first began dating Rory.

Rory answered honestly; sometimes in excruciating detail, like I'd asked. Now and again, he'd hesitate or skip over something that he didn't think was relevant, but which I wanted to hear more about. In this supremely fucked-up situation, even Rory's interpretation of events couldn't be fully trusted. Perhaps his could be trusted least of all, given how differently he saw himself compared to how the rest of the world saw him.

He told me of a childhood in which everyone in the family had praised him for being such a beautiful little boy; always so well dressed by his mother, always doted upon by his grandparents and his godparents. Then, a disparaging comment made during the puppy fat years by a fellow classmate had made him realize he wasn't that child anymore. It was the same version of events given by Robbie; only when Rory told it, the story became dark and melodramatic. He saw it as a case of the kid who'd insulted him saying what everyone else had clearly been thinking and correctly, cruelly highlighting Rory's now-monstrous physique. But I knew that when Robbie, who'd been there on the day it happened, had told me the story, he remembered it as a throw-away remark that meant nothing to the deliverer and everything to Rory, the recipient.

Rory then described a time in his life when he'd been "fat." I, who'd been at school with him that year, remembered nothing of this. And I was quite certain that I'd have noticed, given that I didn't particularly like him back then but had never been able to rebut comments from other people that he was quite good-looking. Rory, of course, believed I was only saying this because I was now his boyfriend, not because it was actually true. His sad, distant smile when I told him this told me that he didn't believe me, but rather that he thought it was a very sweet gestured lie on my part. He was quick, too, to dismiss my suggestion that his friendship with the girls had exacerbated his problem. The girls weren't as nearly into diets and weight-loss as people outside the clique thought they were. The occasional holiday diet was talked about, but nothing too serious and Rory never, ever brought his problem up with the girls. Virginia knew he wasn't comfortable with his weight, but the only person who'd really know anything was Robbie.

It was Robbie who'd been at his side the last time it had happened, when they were sixteen and Rory had rapidly lost shed-loads of weight, over a very short period of time. That, in fact, I did vaguely remember. It had been leading up to the school's summer vacation and I could remember looking at Rory one day in History class and thinking how thin he was. But, I was uninterested in him then and so I hadn't given it much more thought.

Over the course of the conversation, Rory raked up stories and neuroses that he'd hidden from anybody else ever. Like the agony he felt when people commented on how much alike he and Robbie looked; being mistaken for brothers or cousins. To Rory, it wasn't a compliment. Robbie was so dazzlingly handsome that Rory illogically assumed that people therefore thought he was the "ugly brother" and Robbie was the hot one. It never entered his head that people were making the link because Rory had something of Robbie's good looks; not because he was the ugly version of him. Then there was the new discomfort he'd experienced (exacerbated, if not created, by Joshua Peterly) - that he was too ugly and too fat to be dating me. That I exuded some kind of rude, jock health and vitality and so people must wonder what I was doing with someone like him.

From time to time, I could get Rory to concede that a certain point of view he had was stupid or incorrect. But for the most part, I just sat and listened. This is what I had wanted, no matter how hard it was to hear, and it was agonizing, this is what he needed, finally, to say out loud. It was what I needed to hear, too.

As it fell dark outside, I realized, though, that no argument, no logic, no platitude, no compliment, no hug, no endearment, nothing like that, could possibly break Rory out of the self-belief that what he was doing, whilst wrong and disgusting, was understandable. He knew making himself throw-up was wrong and harmful; that's why he'd told me. He wanted my help, belatedly, and to be honest with me. He wanted to reach out. But the hateful thing about his sickness was its power to convince him, somewhere inside, that as vile as his disorder was, it was the lesser of two evils. The alternative was for him to be fat. And I just didn't understand that because, as far as he was concerned, I was physically perfect. Which was dumb, on so, so many levels.

Drained by the conversation and seeing that I had to do something to save him from himself, I sat down next to him on the sofa and pulled out the mother of all emotional blackmails. It was manipulative and disingenuous, but if that's what it took, then that's what it took.

'Rory, I cannot get through to you about this and I really do think that you need to see someone, but in the meantime, I'm sorry, but I just can't live with this. But I can't live without you, either. I've been as supportive as I can, but now it's your turn to return the favor.'

'What do you mean?'

'I want you to stop throwing up after you eat and to stop skipping meals. But I don't want you to do it for yourself or because you think it's the right thing to do. Because you clearly won't. Instead, I want you to do it for me. I want you to prove that you do really love me and I want you to prove it by stopping all this. I want that sacrifice from you, Rory. No matter how hard it is for you or how fat you feel because of it. You have iron levels of self-control when you want to; more than most people I know. If you really love me, you'll stop this. Prove to me, and to yourself, that you love me as much as you say you do. And Rory, if you don't stop then I know that you don't love me and that will break my heart even more than what you're doing now is.'

He gazed blankly at me for a minute. It's the same face someone has when their king is checked in Chess, but you're not totally sure if they're going to keep on playing by moving him lamely to the next square and just prolonging the inevitable. But Rory Masterton was always one to accept defeat with dignity and after a pause, he nodded and said, 'Alright.' His tone was somehow both hollow and sincere. He would do it, for me, if not for himself. He was incapable, then, of doing it for himself, but he loved me totally and I'd thrown down the gauntlet. He either had to say yes to what I ask or break my heart. And Rory, I knew, would never, ever do that. I wish I'd felt better about my victory, but I felt as hollow and sincere as he sounded. More than anything, I just wished it wasn't necessary.

'Do you promise?' I asked.

He answered instantly. More confidently and purposefully than before, 'Yes. I won't do it again. No matter how I feel.'

I took his hand and we sat there, I think, for ten minutes, in silence. The rain kept going outside and I think that was a moment where a big part of my teenage version of love died away. I was becoming, more and more, an adult with Rory. Because I realized that love -- true love, which is what I knew we had -- would have moments like this. Where it was hard and awful and difficult. But it was still real - and as bad as he and I felt right then, we were in love with each other and we were in this together.

And he was my guy.