Page 46 of On the Breakaway

For a second, I think maybe she’s actually going to answer me. The noise of the bar swells around us while she stares down at the fries between her hands, expression going strangely distant.

“Do you ever think maybe there’s just something fundamentally wrong with the way you’re built?”

My brows pull together. “What?”

“Like an Ikea dresser.”

Following her drunk logic is nearly impossible until she continues.

“It comes with everything you need to build a decent dresser. But then the people building it fight constantly and don’t even notice when someone else steals all the tools and pieces.” She gestures vaguely with another fry. “So then you end up with this shitty dresser that looks mostly normal from the outside, but really it’s just one bad day away from collapsing in on itself.”

God, she’s seriously drunk.

But worse, I actually think I might understand what she means.

Tonight, she’s stripped raw beneath the alcohol. Her sadness is slipping through the cracks, no matter how hard she tries to bury it.

“Do you want to tell me what happened?” I ask quietly.

“Nope.”

“You’re the most difficult person I’ve ever met.”

She points at me again with another fry, but this time, I lean forward, biting it right out of her grasp.

She gasps, then breaks into a fit of giggles. “I like you better when you’re mean.”

The smile slides off my face. “Why?”

“It’s more real.”

“And being nice isn’t real?”

“It makes sense in my head.”

She goes quiet after that, eating fries slowly while the buzz of the bar swells around us. Every few minutes, her shoulder brushes mine again like she keeps forgetting where her body ends and mine begins.

I order her another water, mostly to give myself something else to focus on while she gradually sobers up enough to become argumentative again.

“I should get an Uber,” she announces, sliding off the stool.

The movement almost sends her directly to the floor, but I catch her around the waist before she can tip sideways.

“No, Chaos. You can barely walk.” I rub a hand over my face. “I’m driving you.”

She opens her mouth to argue, then abruptly goes pale.

“Oh no.”

That is never something you want to hear from a drunk person. I barely get her outside before she throws up in the nearest bush.

“Well,” she says weakly afterward, pushing hair out of her face. “That’s deeply humiliating.”

I cringe. “Little bit.”

She glares at me halfheartedly while I grab napkins and water from my glove compartment. While she wipes her mouth and mutters something about tequila being evil, I stand there trying to decide what the hell I’m supposed to do with her now.

Taking her back to her apartment feels wrong. She’s vomiting, barely steady on her feet, and clearly having some kind of breakdown beneath all the sarcasm and drunken nonsense. The idea of leaving her alone tonight settles badly in my stomach.