CHAPTER 6.1: ISHTAR
I couldn't breathe.
I was having some kind of panic attack. I hauled myself onto the couch and tried to catch my breath. No matter how hard I tried, though, I couldn't breathe properly and for some reason, I couldn't stop crying. I just kept thinking...I honestly don't know what I was thinking. The only thing that ran through my mind was...was that I'd messed everything up in a way that couldn't be reversed. I didn't know how to fix anything, so I just sat on the couch hugging myself and crying over nothing and everything.
That was how Chrissy found me when he came back from work. He was so worried, so loving and perfect. He knelt in front of me and asked: "Ishtar, babe, what's going on? Did something happen? Did someone hurt you?"
I could tell from the panic in his eyes that his mind was coming up with the absolute worst scenarios. He didn't want to say it because he didn't want it to be true, but I could tell that he thought someone must have forced themselves onto me.
In response to his questions, I shook my head as vehemently as I could.
I could tell that he was slightly relieved; but I'd never had a panic attack before so my present state was still something that alarmed him. "What's going on, Ishtar. Please talk to me. I can't help you if I don't know what's going on."
In theory, telling him about me and Linc was the easiest thing in the world, right? All I had to do was say that Linc and I were exes (sort of) and that the reason I didn't tell him sooner was because I was kind of forced into the lie. I mean, wasn't that the truth, after all?
But I couldn't just say that, could I? They were brothers, after all. They were brothers and I was the Jezebel who was going to come between them. It wouldn't matter that Linc and I were together nearly a decade ago, it wouldn't matter that I chose Chrissy. In the end I would still be the slut who slept with two brothers and Chrissy and everyone else were going to hate me for it. It wouldn't matter what I said, or how I said it, the truth was that Linc and I lied about out past. There was no way anyone could ever fix the pain that was going to be caused by that.
"Linc is my ex," I said, suddenly.
Radio silence followed my statement. I now think that Chrissy was simply waiting for me to explain further because, as I soon realized, he didn't know who Linc was; and even if he did, it shouldn't have mattered for me to have been in a relationship with someone else before I met Chrissy, because Chrissy had had relationships of his own.
I saw the immediate relief on Chrissy's face. It made me feel worse because I also realized that he thought I was simply having a moment of cold feet about our wedding, and therefore experiencing some understandable anxiety and confessing irrelevant things from my past. He often worried that I was trying to do too much all at the same time.
To rectify his misunderstanding, and following my formula of mere moments ago, I simply spoke suddenly, without much thought to what I was actually saying. "Linc is Henry, your brother, he and I used to date."
I don't think the meaning of my words registered immediately, but as soon as they did, Chrissy immediately let go of my hands and squinted his eyes at me as though, like characters in the books I read while growing up were wont to do, he was truly seeing me for the first time. He closed his eyes and shook his head several times. He kept opening his mouth and closing it. Then finally, in what I can only assume to be extreme denial, he burst out laughing.
"That's a very good one, babe" he said, still laughing hysterically. "You almost had me there. Henry always played dirty games on me when we were kids. Of course he would do something like this. In fact, it's a double joke on me since I really should have expected him to do this. My brother is a little crazy in case you haven't noticed. Did he come up with the name Linc?"
He went back to holding my hands. I was suddenly crying uncontrollably again because my resolve to tell him the whole story was quickly getting weaker. His denial or misunderstanding, or whatever else it was that caused him to think we were playing a joke on him, was giving me an out. He was basically giving me a get-out-of-jail free card. I could still claim that yes, everything was all a bad joke and that yes, I was really that good of an actress—that the panic attack was something I put on to make the joke more believable.
"Hey, hey, hey," he said, pulling me into his arms. "Don't worry about it. Shhh, don't worry about it. We're good. We're good, okay."
"This isn't a joke, Chrissy," I told him in between sobs. "Linc...Henry is gone...because, because...he's gone, okay, this isn't a joke." Half the words made sense to me as I said them, the other half were like something that I had rehearsed in a drunken state and couldn't quite remember. And with each word that left my mouth, I felt Chrissy's hands slowly let go of me.
I couldn't quite place if what I felt was relief or dread. Sometimes Lexi and I had to give presentations at seminars and conferences, we both hated those things so much such that each time we had to do it, our skin broke into a million pimples, we puked our lungs out, and we couldn't eat anything that was solid for a week.
When we finally gave the presentations, we both got this sense of doom and relief at the same time—doom because public speaking is a really shitty thing that I should have seriously considered when I upgraded to a PhD degree, and relief because the nightmare would be over in only a few minutes. All I needed to do was power through it.
That was precisely how I felt when I felt Chrissy's hands loosening around me. No, actually, that's not true. I felt a thousand times worse when I was telling Chrissy about me and Linc. Perhaps even a million times worse.
The truth was finally hitting home for both of us; as a result, I no longer had to keep that terrible secret and lie to him all the time. But at the same time, the truth was finally hitting home for him and his heart was going to get broken. Gosh, how I hated myself in that moment. I couldn't believe that I even felt slightly relieved. What the hell was wrong with me?
He stood up and stepped away from me. I realized that I wasn't crying anymore. That was another thing that bothered me—I was only realizing that things were happening to and around me. Again, I felt like a character in one of the books I always read—like I was a spectator to my life and more specifically, to my unfolding misery.
I felt like even though Chrissy was right in front of me, and I could both see and touch him, that he was also like a nightmare I needed to wake up from because he'd never looked at me the way he was looking at me in that moment. The silence that existed between us was deafening. And slowly, Chrissy's face was filling up with a look of absolute horror.
"What do you mean, Ishtar?" he finally asked.
In response, I shook my head, like an idiot, I shook my head and tried to grab his hand. In response to that, he pulled even further away from. He took off his jacket, unfastened his tie and unloosened the top buttons of his shirt.
"I think you should talk, Ishtar," he said. "I think...I think..." He apparently couldn't finish his sentence because he resorted to demonstrating with his hand that I should go on with what I was about to say. Tears were pooling in his eyes, and his voice was getting shakier. I could tell that in that moment, in that very moment, I was breaking his heart.
"Linc and I were together."
"Why do you keep calling him that?"
I shrugged in defeat. "Because that was his name. That was what he told me was his name."
"You and he used to date? You're sure about that?"
