16. Eve
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Eve
Simon comes for me three nights after they take Kiara away.
I’m alone in the loft for the first time in weeks, Dean gone twenty minutes to pick up dinner from the noodle place that finally reopened, when the buzzer goes off in a long, rude, leaning-on-it way that I know before I even cross the room.
I look at the little screen by the door.
Simon. Swaying on the front step in a suit he’s clearly slept in, tie gone, hair wrecked, a bottle in one hand.
Out on bail and falling apart and here. He’s got a monitor on his ankle and a trial a week out, and he drove to his brother’s building drunk anyway, which tells me everything I need to know about how far past saving he is.
A man with anything left to lose doesn’t do this.
Every smart thing in me says don’t. Don’t open it, don’t go down, don’t give him a single second of your night.
I go down anyway. Because I want to look at him. Because for weeks he’s been a problem handled through phones and locked doors, and some part of me, the part that walked down an aisle toward him and meant every step, needs to stand in front of the actual man one time and see what’s left.
He’s slumped against the brick by the entrance when I push through the lobby door, and up close he’s worse. Gray. Unshaved. The expensive shine gone off him entirely, like someone reached over and unplugged it.
“There she is.” He pushes off the wall, unsteady. “The woman who ruined my life.”
“You’re drunk, Simon. Go home.”
“Home.” He laughs, ugly, and the whiskey rolls off him in a wave.
“I don’t have a home. I don’t have a job.
My own mother won’t take my calls. And my phone, Eve, my phone rings all day and all night.
Mormons. Cat Facts. Some furry thing. A Bible verse at four in the morning. Was that you? Was that YOU?”
I don’t even try to hide the smile. “Every bit of it.”
“You think this is FUNNY...”
“I think you got off easy on the Cat Facts.” I cross my arms. “What do you want. Say it and leave.”
And the anger gutters out of him as fast as it came, the way it does with drunk men, and what’s underneath is worse, because it’s the face he used to wear when he wanted something and knew exactly how to get it.
“I want my life back.” His voice cracks. “I made a mistake. Okay, a lot of mistakes. But Eve, we were good. We were so good before all of this, and I know you. I know you still...”
He reaches for me. Drunk and certain, his hand coming up toward my face, going for the old gesture, the one he used to settle me down with when I got too loud about something he’d done.
I slap him.
My palm cracks across his cheek before I’ve decided to do it, hard enough that his head turns with it, hard enough that my hand sings all the way to the elbow.
The sound bounces off the brick and dies.
And God help me, it feels good. It feels like the thing I should have done at the altar, instead of standing frozen while his mistress did it to me.
“Don’t you ever put your hands on me again.” Low and even, which is somehow worse than a scream. “You don’t get to touch me quiet. Not anymore.”
He presses a hand to his cheek, stunned stupid. Good. He never did meet me. He met the woman I shrank down to fit him.
“And don’t,” I add, flat and final, “stand there and tell me what I still feel.”
“You loved me.”
“I did.” And here it is, the thing I came down to say, rising up clean and steady where I braced for tears.
“I loved you so much I made myself small enough to fit in the corners of your life. I apologized when I got suspicious. I covered for you at dinners when you were two hours late from being inside another woman. I found a honeymoon you’d love and paid for it myself and felt lucky you let me.
I bent every part of myself into a shape that wouldn’t inconvenience you.
” My voice doesn’t shake. That’s the part that would break his heart, if he had one left to break.
“You didn’t just cheat on me, Simon. You let me believe the smallness was love.
For three years. You let me apologize to you for the things you were doing to me. ”
“Eve...”
“And the worst part?” I take a step toward him, and he actually leans back.
“It isn’t even that you wanted her. It’s that you were never going to choose me, and you let me plan a wedding anyway.
You let hundreds of people show up. You let my father walk me toward you knowing exactly what was waiting at the back of that church.
That’s who you are. That’s who you’ve always been, and I was too in love with the idea of you to see it. ”
“Eve, please...”
“You took everything I had...” he tries, and the self-pity in it is almost funny.
“No.” Soft. Absolute. “You did this. Every single piece of it. You stole, you lied, you humiliated me in front of everyone I love. The only thing I did was stop cleaning up after you the way your mother taught the whole world to. I stopped catching you, Simon. Turns out you fall pretty fast on your own.”
“You’re with him now.” The words come out wrecked, and his gaze drags past me, and I don’t have to turn to know.
Dean. Standing in the open lobby door, a bag of takeout forgotten in one hand, his whole body gone still in a way that has nothing to do with the bottle in his brother’s fist.
“You’re with my brOTHER.” Simon’s face twists. “That’s what this was. The whole time. You wanted him...”
“I wanted someone who saw me.” I don’t move toward Dean.
I don’t have to. The truth of it is already standing in the room with all three of us.
“I spent those years confused about why I felt more like myself across a dinner table from your brother than I ever felt in your arms. You solved that for me, Simon. At the altar. So thank you. Truly. You set me free.”
Dean crosses the lobby slow. He doesn’t grab Simon, doesn’t swing, doesn’t give him the fight he’s drunk enough to be begging for. He just sets the food down on the floor, steps between his brother and me, and looks at him with something almost like grief.
“Go home, Simon.”
“She’s MINE...”
“She was never yours.” Dean’s voice is quiet, and it hits harder than a shout would.
“You had her for years and never once noticed what you were holding. You don’t get to be surprised that someone else did.
Go home. Sleep it off. And don’t come back here, because next time I won’t be the one carrying dinner. ”
For a second Simon sways there, looking between us, and I watch the last of it drain out of him, the charm and the rage and the certainty that the world owes him a gentler ending than this.
He looks, all at once, like exactly what he is.
A man who threw away something good because he never once believed he could lose it.
“You’ll regret this,” he slurs. The same threat his mother made. The Valentine family motto.
“I really won’t.” I hold his bleary eyes until he’s the one who looks away. “Now get the fuck off this street, Simon.”
He stumbles off into the dark, and I watch him go, and I wait for the grief to come. The old reflexive ache. The reason I came down here in the first place.
It doesn’t come. There’s just relief, and Dean’s hand finding my back, warm and certain, and the smell of food going cold on the lobby tile.
“You okay?” Dean asks.
“I am, actually.” I turn into him, press my face to his chest, and feel him let out a breath he’s been holding since the doorway. “I keep waiting to be sad. I think I used all of it up on a church floor weeks ago. There’s nothing left down there for him. Just done.”
“Good.” He kisses the top of my head. “He didn’t deserve your sad either.”
We leave the food where it is. Neither of us is hungry anymore, and there are better things to do with an empty loft and a long night than chase down the last of an appetite Simon Valentine just drank away.