His voice is thick and muffled. In the wind, his hair, hispuff,rattles and dances. Mocks me.
The terrible thing is that I still want to kiss him, even as I want to kill him. I want to scream at him, but I want to do it close to him. I want to tell him I love him.
But what I say is, “I hate you, Zach.”
He shakes his head, pained, willing me to take it back.
I don’t. I won’t.
The world is blurring around me now and I start to walk toward Katy’s car. I can hear her wrapping up her argument with Lindsay, and by that I mean they are still screaming strings of obscenity at each other but without referring back to past events or even current ones. Just “bitch,” “slut,” “ho bag,” “assface.”
Zach is following me toward Katy’s car now, still pleading.
Maybe there’s an alternate version of this where I take him back, where I hear his remorse, where I forgive him. Maybe it doesn’t matter that all his films include her or are about her or that I played a thinly veiled Lindsay in one of them and possibly all along. Maybe I’m so desperate to love someone, to loveZachand have him love me back—so desperate to be pried awake by how I feel about him—that I can forget this.
Butno.
I can’t.
I whirl around and face him, not caring if tears are streaming down my face, not caring that tearsarestreaming down my face.
“Stay the fuck away from me,” I say, pulling open the door of Katy’s car and climbing in.
AFTER
January
It doesn’t feel like it belongs to me. He tells me the start, the middle, and the end as he remembers it, but it could be the story of any two strangers, two people I don’t know and neverwill.
Even when Zach says, “I’m sorry, Addie. Really sorry,” it feels like it belongs to someone else. I nod vaguely, blankly. “I know you didn’t want to hear it before, but Iam.”
And I nod again.
He mentions in passing a night I spent at his house when his family was away. Though neither of us says it, I know what it means.
We slept together.
Me and Zach.
Really, it’s her and Zach. Another Addison. I don’t feel different, I haven’t noticed anything different, and I would have if it was me and Zach.
I would have.
“I screwed up,” he says now in a soft voice, a voice that forces me to look up at him. His face is red. His eyes squint a little bit, like he’s still mad at himself. “But Ididlove you. I hope you know that.”
His gray eyes rest on my face as he says that, and I feel the air vacuum out of my lungs, confirming, I guess, that his words do belong to me. Or I want them to.
I want Zach to have loved me. I want to know that.
“So that was it?” I ask after I trust myself to speak again. I mean, it isn’t hard to see how I might have been crazy about him, how much he’d meant to me before. I could see myself being upset at the breakup, but according to my family and Katy, I’d been devastated.
Was it because we had sex? Was I even more in love with him than I can comprehend? Or was I just too weak to moveon?
“That was it,” Zach says.
He was right. I am a coward.
To erase my memory over a breakup?
