Chapter 25: Broken.

I woke up alone.

The sheet was warm where he had been and cold everywhere else. I stretched because that is what a person does when she is pretending the day is ordinary, and my ass answered. There was a deep, sore throbbing, not the fire from last night but a reminder. I lay still and let the night come back in the order it wanted, which was not the order I would have picked.

Gary in the driveway. The discussion of the lights and then dinner.

My Thai, the right dishes, Amber’s betrayal in the form of a menu. Laughing with him. Watching him steal a spring roll. The easy part. The part I had wanted the talk to be.

I had been so happy, I thought everything was good. I had been so very wrong.

Then the punishment.

The talk I had wanted all day hadn’t been a talk. It had been me, bent over his table, being asked why I had done what I did the night I was drunk and angry and determined to make him the villain of a story I was writing with my mouth. He had come to get me at midnight and treated me with nothing but kindness and respect. A no, when I had done everything I could to force a yes that would have proved me right about him. I had been vulgar. I had been cruel. He had not matched me.

I had been the monster.

The tears threatened, and I hated them for being on time. Self-disgust came up the way bile does, hot, sudden, already in the throat before you have agreed to be sick. I had not interrogated him. He had interrogated me. The pain had stripped all my normal clever answers. I had told him the truth because I could not hold a lie and a count at the same time. I had tried to make the pain a washing.