I get to Friday before Bella asks again what happened between Clayton and I. We're sitting in my living room watching reruns of Friends and eating a pasta dish that I made for dinner.

"So how are you doing with this whole Clayton thing?" She casually squeezes it into the conversation with a mouthful of pasta. I know I couldn't avoid the subject forever. I usually tell Bella everything going on in my life. It feels weird not telling her about this, and I know she feels it too. "I've never seen you this upset before."

"Falling apart," I admit to her, trying not to think about it too much. Whenever I think about it, I start crying and when I start crying, it takes me hours to get it to stop. My stomach still aches from my morning sobs and I didn't have the energy for another breakdown. "But I guess there's a silver lining, right? I don't have to listen to country music ever again."

"Am I allowed to know what happened? You've been together since high school, I can't even see you two apart like it just doesn't make sense to me," She says. 

"He cheated on me," I say, giving her as much of the truth as I can stomach saying out loud. "I caught him with somebody else at the party at my house. Once I saw them together, he told me that it's been going on for a while."

"No," She gasps. "There's no way."

"Apparently, there is."

"How long is a while?"

I close my eyes and open my mouth to say it but my throat closes up. It's humiliating to admit that he's been cheating on me for two years and I never picked up on it. I was just that stupid, blinded by my one-sided love that I just didn't notice. Humiliating that I am so easy to abandon that he had been lying to me and going behind my back for so long. "Since high school," I finally tell Bella.

"What?" She says loudly, her voice almost yelling.

I nod in confirmation and feel my sore stomach twist in knots. "Yeah."

"Who is the bitch? I'll kick her fucking teeth out," Bella threatens. "No, actually, I'm going to cut off her feet and then I'm going to use her feet to kick out Clayton's teeth. How could he do this to you? What. No. Clayton? Wren, I'm so sorry that I wasn't there for you that night, you must have been so heartbroken. I was hooking up with Timothy Wyatt in the backyard. No, that's not important right now. I'm so sorry."

"Yeah. Thanks." If I open my mouth to say anything else, I'll start crying into my uneaten pasta.

"What did Jesse do when you told him?"

"Jesse and I aren't talking right now. At least, I'm trying to avoid talking to him at all costs," I say without looking in her direction. I can't get the words out, the full truth. Getting cheated on for so long is humiliating enough, but that Jesse was a part of it... it's a whole different level. 

"First Clayton, now Jesse?" She wonders exasperatedly. "What did he do?"

"Just sibling stuff," I shrug off the question. "Bell, please don't tell anybody any of this, okay? It's already so embarrassing."

"For who? You? Honey, you should not feel embarrassed. You should feel full of rage. The rage of a thousand scorned queens coming back from the dead for vengeance. This is not on you," She assures me before putting her plate on the coffee table and then she wraps her arms around my shoulders. "This is in no way at all your fault. You have to believe that. Clayton is just a piece of shit, and the hell with Jesse too. You don't need them."

"Jesse is my brother," I remind her.

"Cain killed his brother," She adds.

It makes me laugh because that's the exact story that I had used against Jesse when he pulled the 'we're siblings' card. 

"What kind of revenge have you gotten? Also, what are your plans for future revenge schemes? Because I want in on this. I know that he directly hurt you but by hurting you, he's indirectly hurt me and I need a way to vent my rage so please tell me that you have something."

"I haven't planned any revenge, Bella. I'm barely now coming to terms with what happened," I admit to her with a small shrug.

"No," She shakes her head at me and then stands up from the couch. "Not good enough, not even close. This bitch is going to pay. You are like a gentle little flower in a meadow of goodness and you need to be protected at all cost."

"Thanks, Bell."

"I'm honestly so mad and I can't focus on anything else," She seethes. "Can we egg Clayton's door?"

"No, Bella, we'd get in so much trouble," I shake my head at her. But she's brainstorming more revenge ideas when the front door opens and Jesse walks in with Kelsey following quickly behind him.

I don't know why I'm so surprised to see Kelsey, Jesse's girlfriend, but I guess that I just assumed that Jesse would break up with her now that I know about him and Clayton. She's just as clueless as I am, she's going to be hurt just as badly as I have been. Jesse knows how badly I'm hurting right now, why doesn't he care about Kelsey? They've been dating for almost a year now, which means he built their entire relationship on lies because he was already sleeping with Clay. I think that she's a nice girl but I don't think that she'd take it as well as I did if she finds out the way that I did. She'd definitely be angry enough to tell everybody that Jesse and Clayton are gay.

"Hey, Wren," She smiles at me. "How was your summer?"

"Busy," I mutter out slowly. "Yours?"

"I spent some time in my cousin's beach house in San Francisco, it is so cool out there. But I'm glad to be back, I really missed this guy," She leans into Jesse, who is looking at me apprehensively, probably trying to gauge my reaction. I wonder if he makes her feel as shitty as Clay has made me feel, if she puts herself completely into their relationship in hopes of getting him to notice her.

He smiles back at her, kissing her cheek. "Nah, the beach is way cooler than I am."

She rolls her eyes and then looks back toward me. "Did you make dinner? It smells amazing in here."

"Pesto pasta," I confirm. "No leftovers though."

"Bummer," She sighs. Whenever I cook, I usually make a lot so that anybody who wants some can have some but of course Jesse has been cut off from anything I make from now until the end of time. 

Jesse wraps his arm around Kelsey's waist and pulls them both into his bedroom as quickly as he can without her detecting how weird he's being.

I don't understand how he can be okay with hurting her like this, especially since he knows how badly I've been hurting this week for the exact same reason. He has to know that I'm not going to let him get away with this. I won't be complicit in his awful scheme.

I don't make a scene with Bella and Kelsey still in the apartment. Bella leaves after a couple more episodes of Friends to hook up with a Tinder match, after checking nine million times with me that I don't need her to spend the night here for emotional support. A couple of hours later, I hear Kelsey leaving too.

That's when I stand from my bed and open the door into the living room.

"I know what you're going to say," Jesse says when he sees me standing there.

"How are you going to tell me that you regret not coming clean, that you're sorry about what all of this has done to me, and then turn around and continue to do all of this same shit to her?" I ask him, spewing out all of this frustration and anger that I've felt building up for these last couple of hours. "Obviously, you don't regret it because you're still doing it. You're using her, just like Clayton used me."

"I really care about her," He tells me. "At first, it wasn't supposed to be anything serious, we were just trying to make other people jealous. I thought if Clay saw me with somebody else, he'd finally talk to you about things. But he didn't and Kelsey and I were becoming friends, it just sort of snowballed. She'll be so upset if I breakup with her, I can't do it."

"You have to," I inform him. "You don't have to tell her why, but the longer you play her like this, the worse it's going to be. It is so shitty of you to make her fall in love with you when she doesn't matter to you at all."

"She does matter, I just said that she does."

"No." I refuse to believe that, and the fact that he's even trying to convince me that he cares about her fuels me with an ugly rage that I've become familiar with in the last week. "You matter. To yourself. You're so fucking selfish that you can't even see how much damage you're doing. Do you realize that? Jesse, I am so sorry that you feel terrified to be who you are. A lot of people might give you a hard time for things that are none of their business, and I'm so sorry. I can't imagine what that must be like for you. But this shitty hurtle that's been thrown in your way, it does not give you the right to treat everybody else like pawns in your game. Kelsey is real, and she has a real heart too. And she deserves to be able to give it to somebody who isn't going to throw it in the trash."

"It's not like that," He insists, but his voice is quiet and wavering, because he knows he's full of shit.

"Do you love her?" I ask him with raised eyebrows. "Like she loves you."

"It's complicated," Jesse mumbles, becoming smaller and smaller as he shrinks against the wall.

"It's not," I shake my head at him. "You love Clayton. And that's fine but what isn't fine is you two destroying everybody else because of it. So you will break up with her or I'll tell her the whole truth."

"Please don't do this," He mutters one last plea to me. "I know that your relationship-"

"I didn't have a relationship!" I shout at him before he can finish his sentence. "I had three years of lies shoved into my face that I thought was a relationship. I had nothing. Kelsey has nothing. I'm not going to try to appeal to your conscience because you clearly don't have one. You're not going to feel bad about what you did to me or what you're doing to Kelsey."

"Of course I feel bad," He interrupts me. "I'm not some fucking monster, Wren. Jesus, I feel awful all of the time."

"Either you tell her or I will," I warn him again before I turn around and go into my room, shutting the door between us to end our conversation. 

I wonder when everything will stop feeling so shitty because I'm definitely not seeing the light at the end of the tunnel of shit that's been piled in my way. I honestly just want a break, a breath, I want all of this to end just for a few seconds. Just enough to give me some time to breathe and relax before my chest starts tightening again and my tear ducts kick back up.

But I do not get my breath. My chest is still tight, my tears are still flowing, and the end is nowhere in sight.