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It was better that way. Better that they all thought I was actually fucking this girl. I didn’t want them to know that the second I got her alone all drive left me, my dick deflated like a fucking balloon, and her very touch made me want to tear out my hair. I didn’t want any of my friends to know how much Rachel had messed me up. I couldn’t admit to myself that I’d never be the same; I certainly couldn’t admit it to them.
I’d take their judgement. But I couldn’t fucking deal with their pity.
I hadn’t told any of them what had happened. The man I had met at the doorway. The truth he revealed to me as my white-knuckled fist shook on the door handle. The calls I’d received from Rachel. Tentative, hesitant at first. Spaced out between hours. Then panicked, rushed. Sometimes I received several within just a few minutes. They didn’t know why I’d changed my number after a few days so she couldn’t reach me. I told them I was getting calls from telemarketers. I told them I’d lost my phone. I told them lies that contradicted other lies, which I didn’t give a fuck about coming up with a lie for anymore. I hadn’t told them the truth: that I was lying because I’d been lied to. Hurting them because I’d been hurt. Leaving them alone because I was terribly, horribly, inescapably alone.
Conor, Rian, Aurnia, they didn’t know anything. So they judged me. They were mad at me, especially Aurnia, who’d believed—like the little kid that she was—in Rachel’s and my love.
So they shook their heads and thought to themselves, “He was going to bollocks it up somehow.” Conor sighed and dropped his head when he saw me with Miss Last Night. Aurnia looked wounded, a small woodland animal I’d accidentally felled with an arrow not meant for her. Even Rian glanced up from the drawing of that girl he’d been obsessing over and his eyes bounced between me and the unfamiliar woman in confusion.
They didn’t know. They didn’t know it wasn’t my fault. They didn’t know that this was just my curse in life: to be left. To always be fucking left.
Rachel never had any intention of coming back. It was all just lies. She gave me enough to get her divorce papers. She told me enough to have a good time while she waited for the thirty days. She promised enough to ensure it would hurt as much as fucking possible when she closed that door. Got in that cab. Boarded that plane. Left.
She hadn’t forgiven me. She never would.
So Conor and Rian and Aurnia could all go fuck themselves. They didn’t know shite. They didn’t know Rachel like I did.
Miss Last Night yelped from where she stood by the open closet. A mountain of shoeboxes tumbled down around her from the top shelf. She covered her head as the last one slipped from the shelf and then turned to smile sheepishly at me.
For fuck’s sake.
“There were a dozen shirts hanging right there,” I told her angrily.
“Yeah, but I saw this up there.”
She held up a cream cashmere sweater over her naked body. Rachel’s sweater. Miss Last Night purred as she ran the material all over her skin. She nestled her cheek against it and smiled as her eyes fluttered closed.
“It’s so soft and luxurious,” she cooed. “It must have cost a fortune for whoever bought it.”
“Don’t touch that,” I told her, voice dark.
She must have noticed the change in tone. She opened her eyes and with a half-smile still fixed on her deep-purple lips, laughed a little.
“What’s that, boo?” she asked.
I must have stood with enough violence in my glare to scare Miss Last Night because she extended her arm forward, careful not to get any closer to me, and draped the sweater across the end of the bed.
“Get the fuck out,” I said.
Miss Last Night looked around the room like there was some explanation somewhere for the sudden change in the mood. Her eyes trailed up and down my own naked body. Maybe to see if I was aroused. Maybe to see if this was some sort of kinky sex thing: the scorned lover, the abandoned soulmate, the sucker-punched sucker. Maybe it was my limp dick against my thigh that finally convinced her the anger I trembled with was real.
“You can choke me, you know,” she said softly.
“Get the fuck out,” I repeated.
“Whoever she is,” she said, toes playing over one another in the mess of my nan’s shoeboxes on the floor, “you can take it out on me. What she did to you. Revenge sex, you know, boo? Hot, rough, painful revenge sex. I’m totally into it.”
“I’m married.”
I managed to shock Miss Last Night. She took a little step backward. Reassessed the room. Reassessed me. She wagged a finger at me. Shook her head. She was laughing again.
“No, you’re not,” she said. “You know, I’ve heard there’s this new thing that guys are doing. Having some chick roommate come in and scare off—”
I snatched up the cashmere sweater. I almost expected it to burn my fingers. I almost expected the faint linger of Rachel’s perfume on it to poison my lungs. I almost dared to hope that she would appear there in the doorway, angry and indignant. “What the fuck are you doing with my sweater? What the fuck are you doing with her?”
But I wasn’t burned. I wasn’t poisoned. I was perfectly alive and well to see that Rachel was not there in the doorway. Perfectly alive and well to live the rest of my fucking life without her.
“This is my wife’s,” I told Miss Last Night, shaking the sweater at her. A sweater I thought wasn’t “her”. A sweater from a lifestyle I could never afford. A sweater I thought she didn’t want. Not when she had me. “I’m married. And my wife is coming back and she can’t find you here.”
