Same choice.
My chest doesn't crack this time.
It just goes cold. Empty.
He’s not choosing me.
I put my drink down on the nearest surface. I look at the winger.
"Fuck you," I seethe.
He blinks. He expected something else. Anger, maybe. Deflection. A fight. Not this. I look at the rest of them. The guys who laughed. The guys who stood there and let it happen.
"Fuck all of you," I say.
I turn around.
I don't look at Jamie.
I just walk out.
The cold outside is immediate and sobers me up and I walk into it and keep walking and don't stop until the bar noise is far enough behind me that I can't hear it anymore.
Then I stop.
Stand on the pavement.
My hands are shaking.
Not from the winger.
Not from Marcus.
Not from any of that.
From Jamie.
From the look on his face when he figured out who Marcus was and still — still — said nothing. Stood there ten feet away and made the same choice Marcus made in a different room in a different place.
I’m not worth it.
I’m too much.
I press the back of my hand against my mouth and bite down hard enough to hurt because the second my chest starts shaking this isn’t the kind of crying I can control. This is the old kind. The humiliating kind.
The kind that comes from being wanted privately and abandoned publicly.
He's not Marcus.
I've been saying that for months.
He's not Marcus. He's different. He shows up. He called me. He told me about the beatings and the locked room and his father's words and all the ways he's been broken that he's never told anyone before. Jamie let me see the ugly parts of him nobody else gets to touch. The bruises under the skin.
He's not Marcus.
But standing here now with my lungs burning and my facecold and my chest splitting open anyway, I can’t find the difference between the two men who looked at me in a room full of people and decided loving me was not worth it.
I can’t.
