Page 33 of Down Bad

Then I turn off the kitchen light and sink into a chair at the table, clinging to the handful of roses I dropped, to the tool in my other hand, staring at the ceiling fan in the kitchen as it slowly goes round and round.

Everything feels so far away.

Like my whole life’s a dream and I’ve woken up.

“What just happened?” I ask aloud.

No one answers.

For once, I have a problem I can’t talk to anyone about. I know right away this is something I need to keep to myself. No one can know. No one can help me. Like what just happened on that porch is news from some strange world I’ve never known before.

I have to solve this myself.

If “solving” is the right word for whatever just happened.

I spring from the chair and go to the window, as if some silly part of me expects him to be standing at his own waiting for me.

I see no one. Even though I know he’s in there.

I wish he hadn’t just run away like that. I hate leaving things unresolved. I don’t know what to do with my hands. Or the tingle on my lips he left me. Or my racing thoughts.

What now?

After finishing up with the roses—the only thing I can focus on, even though I nearly miss clipping my own fingers instead of the thorns a few times—it’s nearly four before I get myself in bed.

And barely seven when I’m up.

Only soft light touches the sky when I’m in my kitchen again.

Puffy eyes. Slouched shoulders. Staring at the house next door while waiting on the coffeemaker.

Unless he did it in the seven and a half minutes it takes for me to get cleaned up, dressed, and do my bathroom business, I don’t see Diego leave the house. I know he walks to work, Whitaker Auto just being a few blocks into town. The car in his driveway is totally inoperable, so I can’t use that as an indicator. He probably snuck out the second I was away. Or is still asleep. Or calling in sick.

I’m the sick.

I’m what he’s calling in.

But whatever he does or doesn’t do, I won’t know. He’s in that house, and I’m in this one.

I notice the orchid isn’t in the window anymore. I won’t read into that too much. I did advise him to pull it away from the front sill for indirect sunlight, didn’t I?

Not like he threw it away or tossed it into his backyard to fend for itself, done with the poor thing.

Maybe I should call Lottie.

No. Terrible idea. What the hell? That’s worse than going over there to face him myself. And what would I say? Not like I can tell her what her precious nephew just did to me.

And what I did to him.

This is between me and Diego. And the roses on the ground we stepped on in our passion.

Passion? Is that what I’m calling it?

I think about Diego all morning at the flower shop. How can I not? I accidentally lop the head off a rose in my distraction, like I’m decapitating a traitor. Then I try to turn it into a corsage or something I can salvage, cursing myself at the back counter. “You are blooming,” I recite, some wicked old thing my dear mom used to say to me over and over when I was a child fending off tough circumstances at school, mean classmates, unfair crap. It doesn’t help, but maybe through some deep-seated trick of psychology, it makes my parents feel less far away, less helplessly out of reach.

I’ve been kissed before.

I’ve had boyfriends. My first one was mean. My last one was—well, he was also mean, but in a different way.