Jesse and I only have one car. Our parents didn't want to spoil us with having our own cars and I never thought it was important enough to save money towards. We're almost always going places together anyway, so sharing a car has never been an issue. Until now that I have to ride back to school with him, enduring the entire two hour drive while completely ignoring him like I have been for the last couple of days.

"Text us when you get to campus," My mother instructs us as everything is all loaded in the car and it's time to leave. Since we took everything to campus last week, the packing is light and quick.

"We will," Jesse assures her and then we hug both of our parents goodbye and then we're off. These drives between campus and home are usually pretty fun for us—we'll blast the radio, play cheesy license plate games, catch up on town gossip, complain about our parents.

This time, it's dead silence. Before we get on the highway, I crawl into the backseat and lay down. I want to be as far away from Jesse as possible and if I spontaneously combust into tears, which has been happening a lot these last couple of days, I don't want him to see it.

I tried to get a ride with Bella but her car is so stuffed with the things she's taking for her apartment that there's no room for me in her car. I also haven't told her what happened the night of the party yet and I'm not sure how to say it. I want everybody to know that Clayton cheated on me and that's why we broke up because I want people to know that that's the kind of guy he is.

But how can I explain all of that without saying the whole truth? Clayton never loved me and I was too stupid to see it. So pathetic that when he didn't show interest, I blamed myself instead of seeing what was right in front of me. That my own brother, who I've always seen as one of my closest friends, partner in crime since birth, was willing to stab me in the back. 

He's listened to me talk about Clay, talk about our dates and how much I love him, the whole time knowing that none of it was reciprocated.

I love Bella and I usually tell her everything, but I can't handle that humiliation on top of everything else.

Ever since the party, when I saw my boyfriend with his hand down Jesse's pants, I haven't said a word to my brother. He's been trying to apologize and I've been dodging them as fast as he can throw them. I don't want his apologies or explanations or whatever else he can give me. I can't even look at him without feeling like I want to fall off the face of the earth.

In the silence of the car ride, I start thinking back to all the signs I should have noticed. The way Clayton would get up in the middle of the night whenever we slept together, to go to the bathroom or get a drink of water I thought. Most of the time I'd be sleeping, I'd only wake up a little bit when I felt the bed moving and I'd immediately go back to sleep.

I've also been thinking about those rare times that we'd have sex. If he's not into girls, does that mean that he had to think of my brother to get it up? Was he thinking of Jesse when he was inside of me? We do look a lot alike. Maybe that's why he was ever dating me, because he knew it would be frowned upon for him to date the real thing.

I wish that Jesse hadn't come out to me like this. I want to be there for him, to support him through this because I know that coming out as gay in a town like ours must be terrifying. I want so badly to just be there for him and protect him and tell him that I don't care what gender he's attracted to. 

About halfway through the drive, Jesse clears his throat in the front seat. "I know you're not sleeping." Just hearing his voice pisses me off.

"Never said I was."

"We need to talk about this, Wren," He says to me, his voice hard but trembling. I open my eyes but still avoid looking at him by staring out the back window. "Please, I'm so sorry about this. About everything. I don't know how to make things right. Please just talk to me."

I won't look at him, but I know that if I don't talk, I'm just going to have to listen to him ramble at me for the rest of this trip and I'll start crying until I throw up again. "I don't think we have anything to talk about."

"What can I do to make this right?" He asks me, the tremble getting worse in his voice and I know that he's about to cry. Usually, seeing my brother cry ignites this burning rage inside of me that wants to crush whatever is making him so upset into the dirt. I would fight every battle for him to make him feel better, and I thought he felt that way about me. I thought we had each other's backs. This time, I have to swallow that feeling because there's nothing I can, or want to, do to make him feel better about what he's done to me.

"Unless you have a time machine, you can't unfuck my boyfriend, Jess," I respond sarcastically.

"Are you..." He trails off, takes a deep breath and then continues, "Are you going to tell anybody?"

I finally spin my head to look at him in the rear view mirror. His eyes are wet, his knuckles are gripping the steering wheel in a death grip, but he's not crying. "Is that the most important thing to you right now?"

"You are the most important thing to me, Wren," He promises me, and I can't help but roll my eyes. 

"I'm the most important thing to you?" I reiterate in disbelief. "You've got a really funny way of showing it, don't you? And no, I'm not going to out you to anybody. Just because you're an awful person doesn't mean that I'm going to stoop to your level." 

"I know that you're trying to make me feel bad but I'll save you the breath because I already feel like absolute dog shit about this. I don't think that my level of guilt can get any worse," He says to me. "This was never to hurt you at all. We both care about you a lot and you don't deserve this."

"I know that I don't."

"I'm going to make this up to you, Wren. I swear, I will," He promises me and then there's a long silence that fills the car and I lean back on my chair, focusing on my breathing so that I don't start crying. This is going to be a long car ride, I need to keep it together. "Clay said that you called him disgusting."

"He is disgusting." I close my eyes and tell myself to breathe in, breathe out. Keep it together. "So are you."

I watch him wince in the rear view mirror. "Wren, I-"

I don't want him thinking that I think being gay is disgusting. Not because I care about what he thinks of me right now, but I hate the idea of anybody thinking I could be that cruel. So I interrupt him to set the record straight. "We've basically been making out with each other for two years. You do realize that, don't you? And if you've been hooking up for that long, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say that your relationship doesn't only extend to making out and hand jobs in the garage. I keep thinking of it like a Vin Diagram. Parts of him were just for me, parts of him were probably just for you but pretty much his entire body is in the middle of that diagram."

"I forced myself not to think of it like that," Jesse tells me with a grimace.

"Well, I don't have that luxury because that's the only way that I can think of it. And you were a consenting part of this diagram. I wasn't," I snap at my brother. "And it makes me want to vomit."

He doesn't say anything to that.

"If you just told me that you were gay, I would be okay with that. I am okay with that," I inform him. "Just so that's clear. And if you just told me that, I would be so supportive. I am not mad at you for being gay, I'm furious because you were hooking up with my boyfriend for two fucking years. Two years. I can't get over that. We are so close... we were so close and I just don't understand how you could keep this from me for so long."

"I was scared," He says. "I'm still scared. If this gets out... if Mom and Dad find out, they'll kill me. Or force me into some traumatic conversion therapy. I know that doesn't excuse what I did. I know it's so many levels of fucked up. I was just so scared and I didn't know how to tell you."

"You couldn't tell me?" I repeat back. "Because I've been blaming myself for our entire relationship for the fact that he could never look at me like I wanted him to. I've felt like shit about myself this entire time but you couldn't tell me that it was for nothing? That it wasn't my fault?"

"I didn't know how you'd react and I was too afraid to find out."

"Did you ever suggest that maybe he should just break up with me?" I ask him. "Just say that maybe he wasn't into the relationship anymore and end things so that at least he wasn't cheating on me?"

Jesse doesn't say anything and I'm starting to get angry, but it's a mix of anger and sadness that is so intense that I've never experienced it before. I don't know how to handle this horrible hurricane of emotions I'm dealing with and it's overwhelming. Despite my best efforts, I'm going to start crying soon. I'm surprised that I have any tears left, I've been crying nonstop for the past few days.

"No," I answer for him. "It probably never crossed your mind because then you wouldn't have an excuse for your sleepovers. The only reason that you didn't get caught for so long was because he came over to spend the night with me but then crawled into bed with you. You used me, both of you. A prop in your cover up game. Don't tell me that you're sorry. Don't tell me that you regret it or that you feel guilty. Don't say that you didn't want to hurt me. I don't believe it, not a goddam word. Because if you didn't want to hurt me, it wouldn't have gone on for so long. You would have told me instead of waiting until I caught you."

He's crying in the front seat, I can hear his soft sniffling. I don't know how I'm going to forgive him for this. I want to, so badly, but I don't know how.

I would have helped them, if they told me sooner. I could have faked a relationship with Clay so that nobody would wonder why he was always at our apartment, spending the night. Our entire relationship was just a scam and if I was just let in on the joke, I would have let it happen and I would have been okay with that. I would be happy for Jesse and even Clayton.

But they didn't even think about me or how I was deeply in love with Clayton, how I fell for his every word. They didn't think about how I only ate shrimp because it was his favorite or how I spent hundreds of dollars on sexy lingerie because I thought that my boobs were the problem --I mean, in a way, they were, but not in the way that I was thinking. They didn't think about how I've slowly began to hate the way I look over the past three years and it's gotten so bad to the point where I can't even look at my body in the mirror.

I used to love my lean body, I have long toned legs, my boobs are even a nice size. I'm a little short but that's not really a flaw. Deep in my heart, I know that I'm pretty by this society's definition but I've been conditioned for three years to think that I'm just not worth looking at. I can see every tiny flaw on my body and I'll think 'THAT'S the reason that he doesn't want me and I need to change it'. My bony hips, the birth mark on my shoulder, the stretch marks on my thighs. These little imperfections are the reason that Clayton never wanted to sleep with me, and why no other guy would ever want to either.

Even though I know now that this isn't the case, I don't know how long it's going to take me to get over the self-hatred that Clayton has ingrained in me over the length of our relationship.

I put my headphones in to end the conversation and distract me enough to ward off the worst of my tears. It doesn't work very well, but at least it lulls the car into another uncomfortable silence.

Another twenty minutes goes by when Jesse pulls into a McDonald's in the middle of nowhere. He waits until I take my headphones off to give him my order and then spews his word vomit out before I can get my headphones back in. "I love you, Wren, so fucking much. I can't lose you because of this," He says to me and his voice is fluctuating like he's trying not to cry again. "I'll stop seeing Clayton, I'll come out to Mom and Dad, I'll... I don't know. Whatever you want. Whatever I can do to make this up to you, just tell me."

"Why do you think coming out to Mom and Dad would make this better?" I ask him without waiting for a response. "And as for you and Clayton, you two do whatever the hell you want—you have so far—you've already done the damage, it's not like it can get worse if you two are happy with each other. I'm the only one that has to be hurting here and considering you've never thought of my feelings before, I'd guess that you should be just fine with that."

"I did think about your feelings," He insisted and then paused before adding, "Granted, not as much as I should have but it's not like we just didn't care about what happened to you."

"Could have fooled me," I mumble as the cars move up in the line and it's our turn to order. Jesse feeds both of our orders to the employee before we're waiting in line to pay. "But to answer your question, there's nothing you can do right now to make this better. Like I said, without a time machine, you can't take it back."

"You are my sister," He says. "Siblings fight all the time, we'll get through this."

"Being siblings doesn't mean that much," I inform him. "Cane and Abel were siblings and Cane still killed Abel."

"So you're going to kill me?"

"I'm definitely going to give it some serious consideration." Even though I'm joking, it doesn't sound like a joke with the serious tone that I use because I'm not really in the mood to joke. After we're out of the drive thru with our greasy lunch, Jesse gets back on the freeway and we're zooming toward campus for another forty minutes.

"I can't lose you," He says again, his voice strangled and desperate. I want to hug him and take away his pain, because that's what I've always done before and no matter how much I want to deny it, it hurts me that he's hurting. But I'm hurting too, and it's all his fault.

I swallow hard, wipe some tears from my cheeks, and then tell him the brutal truth. "You already have, Jesse."

Five minutes later as I'm nibbling on some fries with my headphones back on, I feel the car start to slow down and then we're pulling off onto the side of the road into the hazard lane. Before I can ask him why he's stopping, Jesse puts the car in park and then rips himself out of the car like his ass is on fire.

I watch as he walks around the car into the grass, hides his face in the palms of his hands and starts to break down. He's facing away from me in the field by the road, but I can see his chest heaving and even from this far away and the windows rolled up, I can hear his big, ugly, gasping sobs.

I start to cry with him, but I don't get out of the car to ease him out of what seems to be some sort of panic attack. My body aches to help him because I still love him so much, but I have to remind my muscle memory that he isn't the brother I thought he was. So I sit in the car and we cry together as we mourn the death of our relationship. It'll never be what it was ever again.