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“What’s your address?” I ask Ilsa.
She mumbles it to the driver. Hopefully he understands her better than I do, ‘cause he starts driving.
Giving up on the seatbelts, Ilsa and I slump together in the backseat, her against the window, me with my head on her shoulder.
I’m taking slow, deep breaths, pretending it smells nice in here and not like old cigarette butts and takeout shawarma.
“They’re always fuckin’ tryna cheat me …” Ilsa mutters. “He owes me ten K already …”
“Why do you keep playing with him?”
“Who else am I gonna play with?”
“Not me. I’ve already lost enough money to you in cards.”
“That’s ‘cause you get bored and stop paying attention.”
“I might have ADD.”
“You’ve got something …” she looks at me as if really seeing me for the first time. “What are you doing here anyway?”
“In Moscow?”
She snorts. “At Apothecary.”
I take another breath and let it out slowly, wondering how much to tell her.
“I split up with Adrik,” I say at last.
It doesn’t feel good to say it. Actually, it feels fucking awful. Real in a way it wasn’t before.
“I kinda figured that would happen.”
I lift my head to glare at her. “Could you try not being honest for once in your fucking life?”
Ilsa shrugs. “You’re a terrible girlfriend and you’re both volatile as hell.”
I guess that was obvious to everyone but me.
A dark wave washes over me, so heavy and cold that I sink all the way down in the battered back seat. I close my eyes, wishing I could just drown.
“Hey,” Ilsa says, resting her hand on my thigh. “I shouldn’t have said that. I drank too much.”
“It’s okay.” I’m blinking hard. “I just … really liked him. I thought it was going to be different this time.”
LikingAdrik doesn’t even begin to cover how I felt about him. But I can’t explain that to Ilsa, because I can’t even stand to think about it. And what good does it do now? It’s over.
It was never going to work. To believe that I could have what my parents have … I was delusional. I’m not my father and I’m sure as fuck not my mother.
I’m just a person who destroys what they love.
I was always going to end up alone.
After a minute Ilsa says, “I guess I split with my sister, too.”
“What do you mean?”
“It’s fuckin’ Simon. Ever since she met him, she’s a different person. It’s allSimon says this,andSimon thinks this …like he’s the fuckin’ boss instead of her. Letting him speak for her, letting him handle our business … she was the genius, she was the one with ambition. Now she thinks the sun shines out of his ass.”
