The funny thing about the situation we were stuck in was that I knew he hadn't actually done anything. That was also the stupid thing.
The strange thing was that after he came around, it left me thinking, which was something I should've done in the first place. But I hadn't, and so it had finally come to this. I knew that if either of us had had the nerve at that point, we'd have laughed in each other's faces. But we hadn't. He was coming to terms, however slowly, with what I had done, and honestly, so was I.
Conversations between the two of us, before then, had rarely ever been awkward. This one had been. The glass, the phones…We were, I'd thought, both trying to keep up some kind of façade. Like it was impossible for us to admit to what was really going through our minds. He was still a cop, and I wasn't. Somewhere along the lines, the differences had become more obvious, the lines had been blurred, and this was where it had gotten us.
It was this that made me want to laugh, hours later, hours after he had gone. We'd been friends once, he and I, before all this. Had even been so after numerous occasions from years gone by, things that would have ruined it all if we hadn't known each other for longer than we cared to remember. Friends, until I had screwed it all over, all on my own, and had pushed it to this point, and now, where it all would end was yet to be seen.
Of course, the future was always unpredictable. That was part of the problem. Neither of us knew what was going to happen, and neither did anyone else, until it actually happened, and then, well…then, it was too late to stop anything. Just like it was too late to stop this. I wondered for a moment if it was my own stupidity that was making me suddenly regret what I had done, or whether it was something there inside me that I'd thought was missing until just now.
After a while, I figured it had to be the latter. Whether or not I wanted to admit it, I had gotten myself here, and there wasn't any getting out of it for a while. That was another one of the strange things. There had been so many situations before in which he and I had both seen fit to take the fall for whatever had gone wrong, one for the other, time and again. And yet, now…now that I had taken the fall for myself, I wondered what the point was in making him take one as well, though he hadn't done anything.
The stupid thing about this was that I knew it was just my way of getting back at him, but for what? I found it ironic that I was thinking about this now, after all had been said and done. After I knew it was too damn late to make anything change. I wondered if I'd even be thinking about this if he hadn't come around, and doubted it.
Oddly enough, it bothered me. But then, a lot of things were bothering me lately, considering that I was stuck here, where I'd never thought I'd end up, because I'd been a cop once, and things like this weren't supposed to happen. But they did. And I'd heard before that when a friendship lost whatever it had, there wasn't anything that one wouldn't do to make the other person's life miserable, and that was what I'd done.
"You really think you're worth that?"
The question had been repeating itself, over and over, in the back of my mind, ever since the conversation had ended.
And the thing about it was that it should've been one that he'd been asking me.