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I print each photo, cutting his face out of each one and lighting one of the burners on the gas stove. I might set off the fire alarms and have the fire department called on me, but fuck it. I’m drunk, and nothing matters.
I take every photo of his face and light it on fire individually as I drop them into a jar. The paper curls in on itself as the flame smolders, infringing on his expressions and features until he’s reduced to ash. One picture after the next, I revel in the sight of his face being erased. Maybe this is a little crazy of me to do, but people do insane things when they’ve had their hearts broken.
I wonder what the world would be like if it was programmed into everyone to handle their emotions with grace. If stability was innate to everyone, how would that change the way we treat each other? How would it impact the way that we communicate?
I’m choosing to take the wrong approach. The only satisfaction I’ll ever get is from seeing him reduced and debased to nothing, whether it’s real or not.
After I’ve burned every single cutout of his face, I take the jar and put a lid on it, carrying it into my room and placing it on the shelf above my bed. Every time I’m going to let a man disrespect me, I’m going to look at that jar. I don’t ever want to come to this point with a partner ever again, whether we’re technically dating or not.
I still deserve to be treated with respect, no matter what our label is. He chose to mistreat me, and if he ever wants me back in his life, he’ll have to apologize profusely for all of this.
It’s such a strange problem to have in a relationship that was never defined. You sleep together, you have sex, you cohabitate, but at the end of the day, he’s not responsible for how he makes me feel? That’s bullshit. Just because you aren’t officially dating doesn’t mean that the person you’re spending all your time with is expendable. I hate the way that this philosophy has poisoned the way people date.
As I force myself to fall asleep in my bed, I feel the headache coming on from the wine, and I groan out loud. What a stupid way to punish myself for loving him, as if loving him wasn’t punishment enough.
23
Matteo
Since things are still pretty weird at Pepper, we decide to go to a different club in the same part of town where we’re not as well-know. We’re still familiar enough faces to get in for free, and plenty of women still want to sit with us, but it won’t be the usual swarm like it would be at Pepper. Maybe that’s what I need.
As much as I want to surround myself with beautiful girls to make Iris jealous, how the hell would she even know about them? She hasn’t tried to contact me once. I think she might actually be gone for real, and she didn’t even give me the decency of a conversation about it.
Maybe I was a little harsh when I called her work shit. That could have been pulled back, but everything else is true. She needs to understand the true depth of the risks that she’ll face by being involved with me. Now that I’ve seen how poorly she handles herself, it’s no wonder why she decided to run.
She had an idea in her head about how it would be to entwine herself with the mafia. She felt like she needed a little danger in her life, some uncertainty, or maybe just a rush of adrenaline to make her feel alive. Clearly, the men she’s dated haven’t been able to give her that feeling, and I’ll be shocked to my core if she doesn’t try to come back, even for sex. I heard the way she was screaming when I fucked her – she’s never known those feelings before.
I know part of this is my fault, but I didn’t think I could do anything that would make her mad enough for her to leave me behind. No woman has ever left me before. It’s always been me breaking up with them. I lived for the chase and the return when they would break on their own. They could never live without me for longer than a week, even if they believed that I was the devil himself.
This time with Iris, I’m wondering if I need to rethink my entire outlook on women. She signed up to be a part of this sting operation, and she literally knewfrom experiencehow dangerous it was going to be. That’s part of the only reason I let her do it to begin with. She knew I was listening in the whole time. She knew I’d be able to find her, and I’d assured her that I had a plan to save her if things went south. With all of these facts in mind, she chose to tempt the world of human trafficking into giving her a confession.
Leonardo and I are sitting at the bar together, and there’s a small crowd of women gathering at the other end, where they’ve been spying on us the whole time. It’s tempting to go and talk to one of them, but I know I have to play the long game. Iris isn’t going to stay gone – they never do. If I’m talking to other women the second she leaves, she’ll have even more ammunition against me to prove how bad of a person I am. I don’t need that bullshit from her, especially because I know she’ll demand a hard conversation as soon as I see her again.
“So, why her? What was it about her that stood out to you?” Leonardo asks, sipping a beer and grimacing at the bitterness. “God, I hate stouts. Why did you let me order this?”
“Don’t be a pussy. Anyway, what do you mean? About Iris? I don’t know. It was kind of hard to know whether I’d like her based on who she was when I saved her from Blanco. She’d been sedated. I had no idea what to expect,” I reply, taking the beer from him and drinking a substantial amount of it.
He rolls his eyes at my boldness, taking it back and drinking even more of it just to make his point. “Okay, but there has to have been something about her that you liked enough to keep her in your house for more than two months. That isn’t pure pity. There needs to be some genuine interest there.”
“I guess I just liked how refreshing she was as a person. She would actually engage with me in conversations and activities instead of following me around like a prize that I won. We played tennis one time, and it felt like the first genuine connection I’ve had in years, maybe ever,” I reply, thinking back to our game with regret.
Leonardo orders a different drink, and the bartender pretends that she doesn’t understand him the first two times he states the name of the drink. They bicker for a short bit about how she’s never heard about a drink with that name in her entire life, and I watch with both amusement and agitation as I wait.
Eventually, they sort out their issue, and Leonardo is present with me again. “Listen, I’ve been in your position before. It fucking sucks, especially when the woman started out trusting you with her life. Once you lose that trust, everything falls apart.”
He’s piqued my interest now. I knew Leonardo had a few long-term relationships, but he didn’t talk about them much. I figured he was just a very private person and didn’t want to open up to people about his relationship issues, which I do find mature and respectable.
Still, it means a lot that he trusts me enough to talk with me about it.
“Which girl was this?” I ask.
“Ana. She was beautiful, man. Absolutely perfect in so many ways. She owned a coffee shop downtown, so she was really busy all the time, but damn. She really knew how to take care of a man. She was gorgeous andactuallyreally funny. Like, hilarious. We spent four years together before she’d had enough of me.”
I remember brief glimpses of Ana, but I do also recall him telling me that she was too busy to hang out a lot of the time. He was happier back in those days, but I thought the change had just come from the way life beats optimism out of anyone. In work like ours, it happens at practically light speed.
“Yeah? So, what was the final straw for her?” I reply, bracing for the inevitable moral of the story while also trying to appreciate how open Leonardo is being with me.
He looks me straight in the eye with all the sincerity that lives within him. “I got her the wrong flowers.”
