Chapter Twenty-Three
By all rights I should’ve had the hangover to end all hangovers the next morning, but I didn’t. Just a fog of bleary-eyed misery, as though life had a permanent smear on the lens, and the feeling that I was wading through air that was thick like syrup.
In a way, a headache would’ve been a nice distraction from the guilt.
I tried to sleep through the feelings of disappointment in myself. Could only lie there, uncomfortably, in awkward restlessness. Seeing the look of sad resignation on Kai’s face; hearing my own voice telling him he was no longer welcome.
The sickness rose in my throat by surprise, nausea suddenly blooming as I desperately clawed my way to the bathroom. Heaved over the toilet bowl, until only bile and disgust remained.
The empty bottle was still where I’d left it on the deck; wine glass toppled over alongside it. I’d not even bothered to shut the patio doors behind me, and the crisp morning air felt like a reproach as I pushed them closed with weak muscles.
I rinsed my mouth out with water from the faucet, then filled a glass and forced myself to gulp it down. Held onto the edge of the sink as the nausea churned in me again, until the feeling passed.
Then slumped down on the couch.
I felt... empty. Hollow. Not just from throwing up, even as my throat felt raw.
As though the feelings, the part of Tate that could experience emotion, had been cored out somehow.
The room, the whole house feeling like a staged set: artificial and two-dimensional, and me just as lacking in depth, pasted on top and running through the same repetitive motions.
All I could hear were my words to Kai on a loop.
A flash of his face, the expression as he’d heard me, and seen me.
.. maybe seen me for the first time, really.
The filter of lust, and romance, and the unusual scraped away, whatever had been left of it after the trip anyway, and now nothing but the man himself remaining.
A man that had shown himself to be nothing but disappointment.
I only realized I was crying when my bare arms felt the tears.
Rolling, fat and warm, down my cheeks as my vision clouded.
I couldn’t remember the last time I’d cried, and it was maybe the thought of that over anything else which cracked the floodgates and left me sobbing.
My body aching even more than when I’d vomited, all the muscles in my stomach jerking like snatched elastic bands.
I was crying for what had happened with Kai, yes, but for my broken down relationship too.
For the things I’d put aside, the possibilities I’d rejected, because I’d thought I had met “the one.” The fact that I was almost forty years old and suddenly floundering in a way I hadn’t experienced since being a teenager, and no better at dealing with that despite the intervening years.
It was grieving, for a partner and for a new friend, and for a man who had been traveling on autopilot only to plow straight into a road-closed barrier.
Crying for the times I’d said “I love you” and the times I hadn’t, and for the times I hadn’t heard it back.
Selfish, pitying grief, that left me feeling disgusted at myself even as I wallowed deeper into it.
I didn’t know what I wanted, but I knew it wasn’t this.
By the time I dragged myself to the shower I felt desiccated. All dried out, of tears, yes, but of emotions too. A hollow, Tate-like shell standing under the water and lacking even the basic motivation to reach for soap or shampoo.
Eventually I toweled myself off half-heartedly and crawled back into bed. It was fitful sleep, but still better than being conscious.