Chapter 2: Homecoming

The drive home should have been simple. Twenty minutes. Dark streets. The same route I had taken the last time I left his house looking like a crime scene and pretending I still had a plan. It was not simple. My body had opinions about every red light, every speed bump, every time I had to press the clutch. I sat up straighter than I needed to, as if good posture might convince my hips that they had not spent the evening being used as a negotiation table. The blue box with the new diamond earrings sat in my purse like a second heartbeat. Mike’s name sat on my sent-message screen like a confession I had already edited into something livable.

“Hey babe. Sorry, phone died. Heading home now. Long night. Love you.”

Long night. That part, at least, was not a lie.

I kept replaying the last few hours in pieces that would not stay in order. The bed. The quiet. The shower, supposed to be innocent, and then very much not. The way he carried me like I was breakable, then took me like I wasn’t. The earrings, the fork on the shelf watching the whole stupid miracle of my life coming apart in 4K. Three encounters ... that was the official count if I was being clinical about it, and I was trying very hard to be clinical because the alternative was admitting that my entire existence had been picked up, turned upside down, and shaken until the parts I recognized fell out of my pockets.

Two weeks ago I had been Mike’s girlfriend whose dislike for Tyler verged on disgust. Then I had been Mike’s girlfriend who had made a drunken, catastrophic mistake. Then I had been Mike’s girlfriend who drove across town for closure and came home unable to walk in a straight line. Now I was Mike’s girlfriend with a replacement anniversary gift in my purse, a roommate who would take one look at me and know everything, and a man I was not allowed to want waiting in a house that already felt like he was becoming a central part of my life.

It was not love. I had said that out loud, and I had meant it, or I had wanted to mean it. Love was supposed to look like Mike. Love was supposed to be the safari-park version of a life: a good man, two little girls who already called me by a name that made my chest hurt, a future with grocery lists and school recitals and a bed that did not leave me wondering which parts of myself I had handed over on purpose. What I had with Tyler was ... something else ... chemistry with teeth. A switch I had not known existed had been turned on, and the sweetness afterward made the filth harder to dismiss as just filth.

I told myself I was driving home to my real life. The car did not believe me, and neither did the dull, ridiculous throb between my legs every time I shifted in the seat.

By the time I pulled into the parking lot at home, I had constructed three separate speeches for Amber and discarded them all. There was no speech for “I was supposed to spend the night with my boyfriend and his daughters after a day of giraffes”, and instead I let his oldest friend destroy me and then wash my hair before I got on my knees in his shower and asked him if I was a good slut. There was only the limp, the purse, and the hope that Amber had fallen asleep in front of whatever garbage Bravo was currently peddling to ruin people’s minds.

Hope is adorable. Hope is also an idiot.

I unlocked the door as quietly as a person can when her entire pelvic region is filing a formal complaint. The living-room lamp was on. Of course it was on. Amber was on the couch wearing the same oversized hoodie she had “borrowed” from me the night prior, phone in her lap, expression already halfway to a verdict. For one frozen second she just stared at me. Shock first. Then a grimace of theatrical disgust so overdone it belonged in a silent movie. Then the laugh started.

It began as a snort. It escalated immediately into the kind of helpless, ugly, whole-body laughter that made her fold forward and slap the couch cushion. I closed the door behind me, dropped my purse as if it had personally betrayed me, and began the long, dignified journey across the entryway.

There was nothing dignified about it.

I walked like a woman who had lost a bet to break an untamed horse. Small steps, careful weight shifts, and one hand hovering near the wall in case my hips decided to stop working. I tried to play it cool for exactly two seconds and then committed to the bit because there was no saving it. I exaggerated the limp on purpose, then immediately regretted it because the real soreness punched through the joke and made my breath hitch. I was smiling anyway. I could not get the smile off my face. It sat there, foolish and bright, while Amber laughed so hard she started crying.

“Oh my God,” she wheezed. “Oh, my God. Look at you. You look like a baby deer that got run over while staring at a very attractive truck.”

“I hate you,” I said, which would have landed better if I had not also been laughing.