Fake You Out - Joshler

Chapter Thirty-Three

As ready as Tyler feels, he realizes, belatedly, that he's not prepared at all. He stares at Josh from across the table, his mouth hung open slightly, and his mind completely blank. Josh's staring at him, his face carefully made to look bored, an expression he knows that Josh has perfected. It's the look he used to give everyone in high school, the one he used to send in Tyler's direction after the locker room incident, and the one he knows now to mean that Josh isn't going to tolerate any of Tyler's bullshit. He's given it to him enough times over the last several months when Tyler was going to do something particularly stupid, just not the dumbest thing he's done since he's known him since the accident.

Josh releases a heavy, heavy sigh and Tyler's forces the words out of his mouth to keep Josh from kicking him out.

"Do you remember the story I told you about what happened in the locker room? The one where you, um, let everyone in the entire school see me naked and take pictures?" Tyler says, figuring he should start from the beginning of things, the place his terrible, terrible idea started.

Josh looks at him for a minute, his eye slightly squinted as he thinks. "Yeah, I remember it."

"It's start there, really. We grew up together and had barely spoken to each other, and then, one day, you decided that I was going to be a pawn in your little game. I'm still not completely sure why it happened, or what your reasoning was, but it made my life a living hell. That day haunted me until graduation. I went from being the kid who was forced to work to help his mother, the kid who wore second hand clothes and the one with holes in his shoes half the time. And of course, I was one of the only people in the school that was gay, or at least the only one that was out.

"I had a lot of things going for me that people could have picked on, but I was relatively invisible until the day you decided to target me. I still don't understand why you did it, but I don't really care anymore. It was stupid of me to hold onto something like that, especially when so many great things have happened to me in my life. You've met three of them," he says, smiling.

Josh looks at him, one eyebrow raised as he stares intently at Tyler. "A stupid prank of a child, in your mind, deserves to be avenged in a manner where you fabricate a lie about an entire life, telling him that you're married, he's a father, and manipulating everything to play into your father because you were upset about something that happened years ago, yeah?"

"I did, in the beginning, believe that, but not anymore," Tyler says. "And I don't know why I did it, because, for some reason, I never fully imagined what it would be like if you got your memory back or if the truth was revealed. At some point, it stopped being a lie. At some point, you belong with us."

"No I don't," Josh says, laughing a hollow, bitter laugh. "If I was meant to be in your life I would have tried to contact you after high school, don't you think?"

"I don't know what I think anymore," Tyler says, shaking his head and shrugging his shoulders. "I might have agreed with you months ago, before I got to properly know you, but not now. After Jenna left, I wasn't sure if my family was ever going to be just my boys and me. I thought that it would be me until all three of them were off living their lives, and then I'd be at home, and maybe that's why I did it.

"I saw you on the television at work, decided to go and see you, and then, when I learned you had no memory, I came up with the lie. I could have easily corrected the nurse and said I was just a concerned friend, but I didn't. They thought I was your husband, and somewhere, deep inside of me, I think that I wanted someone. Maybe I wanted someone so I wouldn't have to be alone, I don't know. But you were there, and you were lying in a hospital bed and some woman had just introduced me as your husband, and at the time, it seemed like a good idea. I can't say what I was thinking, but apart of me believes it was for the best that I did, it. I mean, Josh, look a this, you're living alone in a small apartment," Tyler says, immediately tucking his lips into his mouth to stop himself from saying anything else, worried that he might have crossed a line with that last bit.