“Trihn,” he said. His voice was calm and controlled with none of the playful tone she had heard from him every day this week.
“Hi,” she said cautiously. “Hello, Mr. and Mrs. Peterson.”
“Trihn,” Mr. Peterson said, not looking up from his paper.
“Good to see you again, dear,” Betty said.
“Can I talk to you?” she asked Ian. She tilted her head to the side, gesturing for them to go inside.
He answered by closing his computer and walking past her into the house.
Once they were in the den, Trihn fidgeted from side to side. She didn’t normally feel uncomfortable around Ian, but something was definitely off. He hadn’t really even looked at her since he had gotten up from the table.
“So, what’s up?” Trihn asked.
She wanted to launch into what had happened this morning and freak out. She wanted to cry and scream and have someone who actually cared listen, but she didn’t do any of that. Instead, she just stood awkwardly and waited for him to say something.
“You’re the one who came over,” he said.
“Yeah. And you’re the one not looking at me.”
Ian glanced up into her eyes, and she saw pain. He was in pain. Both of them were—though clearly for different reasons.
“Now, I’m looking at you.”
“Okay,” she said. “Are you mad at me?”
“Mad?” he asked in disbelief. “That’s not the word I would use.”
“I don’t understand.”
“Don’t you?” he demanded.
She shrugged her shoulders.
“You told me that Preston was cheating on Lydia. You made me hate the guy. But you didn’t tell me that he was cheating on her with you.”
Trihn’s mouth dropped open. “What?”
“I saw you last night!” he cried, the words erupting out of him, as if he was releasing a caged animal.
Trihn stood stark still. “When?” Her voice was so quiet.
“You know when.”
“I—”
“You had sex with him, Trihn!” His hands visibly shook. “On the pool deck where anyone could just walk up and see you two together. And guess who did just that?”
“I don’t know what to say,” she whispered.
“What were you thinking?”
“I wasn’t.”
“Clearly!” Ian was barely keeping it together.
Trihn covered her face with her hands and shook her head. She could not do this right now, not with Preston and Lydia having sex next door while her whole world crumbled down around her.
“We were dating,” she told him.
“What?” Ian asked in confusion.
“Preston is the guy I was dating before I got here. We didn’t break up.” She looked back up at him. “I just said that when I saw him with Lydia because I didn’t know they were dating…or really that he was dating anyone else. I was blindsided, and then I didn’t know how to tell her. Everything swiftly got out of control.”
“Oh.”
“Yeah.” Trihn sighed and sank down into a chair.
“I still can’t fucking believe you had sex with him last night,” Ian said. He crossed his arms over his chest.
“You and me both.”
“Were you just wasted? Is that why you acted so stupid?”
She shook her head. She deserved that. “No. I was tipsy for sure, but I knew what I was doing.”
“You could have found me last night and told me the truth about Preston. Instead, you went to him,” Ian said. He sounded so disgusted with her. “What the fuck? You can’t say you were ignorant then. You knew that he was with Lydia.”
“I know! I didn’t go to him,” she said. “He found me, and I was just stupid enough not to walk away.”
“Unbelievably stupid!”
“I know how this must all seem, but I was in love with him, Ian. I thought we were going to be together when I moved into the city in a couple of weeks.”
“That doesn’t excuse you from having sex with him last night,” he said.
Trihn winced. “No, it doesn’t.”
“I was here for you, Trihn. All week, I consoled you over this guy who had broken up with you, being everything you needed. Then, you went and fucked him anyway.”
“I know, okay?” she yelled back. “Don’t you think I’ve already been beating myself up enough about this? I feel like absolute shit for letting that happen. I am well aware that it’s the dumbest thing I’ve ever done in my life. God! But it doesn’t mean that I’m not hurting! Not to mention the fact that he is fucking my sister in her room at this very moment,” she said, standing and pointing toward her house. “I just want out. I want away from here and away from them.”
“There’s nowhere you can escape to, Trihn. You’re going to have to deal with them eventually.”
“But not today, okay?” she pleaded. “Can we just…go away?”
“Where?” he asked skeptically.
“Will you just take me home?”
“Home? Next door or home…”
“The city.”
Ian sighed heavily. “I don’t think it’s a good idea to just run away from this.”
“If I don’t deal with it, maybe it will just go away?”
“I don’t think so.”
“Me either.”
Trihn sat and curled in on herself. She knew what she needed to do. She needed to talk to Lydia and get everything out in the open, but the thought of that was debilitating.
“Just think…he expects you to stay silent. He expects to just get away with this,” Ian told her. “Are you going to let him?”
Trihn shook her head and steeled her resolve. “No.”
TRIHN TOOK A HESITANT STEP back inside her house. Preparations were being made all around her for the sailing trip her mother had planned. She and Ian had discussed what she was going to say to Lydia, but it hadn’t made her feel any better. In fact, she felt awful. Her stomach ached, and at any second, she might be sick. She knew that she needed to talk to Lydia, but that didn’t make it any easier.
“There you are!” Linh said when she saw Trihn tiptoeing around. “Just in time. We’re leaving in half an hour, so go change.”
“Have you seen Lydia?”
“She’s tanning out back. Will you tell her that she needs to get moving, too?”
“Sure,” Trihn agreed easily.
She took a deep breath. The knot in her stomach hardened, and she was shaking by the time she made it to the back door. She didn’t know what she was going to find when she got there. She just prayed that Preston wasn’t going to be there because the last thing she wanted was to have this conversation in front of him.
No, she wouldn’t be able to have this conversation with him around. He would twist her words. It didn’t matter that she had loved him. She knew firsthand what he was capable of. She had experienced it last night on the very pool deck she was looking at now.
She tried to quell the tremble running through her body. It didn’t help that it was a perfect day. Couldn’t it match my mood or something? But no. No rain on the forecast, a perfect cloudless day, and the whole merry family was supposed to go out sailing.
Not after she got this over with.
Trihn pushed opened the back door and stepped outside. She could see Lydia lying facedown on a lounge chair in an all white bathing suit. Her blonde hair cascaded over the side of the lounger while she read a magazine. Trihn’s gaze shifted to survey the rest of the pool deck, but she found it empty, no Preston in sight. That was a relief. But it didn’t necessarily mean he wasn’t nearby.
“Hey,” Trihn said hesitantly. She approached her sister on the deck. God, can I actually go through with this?
Lydia’s head popped up. She rested her elbows on the lounge chair and smiled at her sister. “There you are! Are you ready to go sailing? It’s been so long since we went. I can’t wait!”