Chapter 6
The bed I went to sleep in was empty, except for me and my comfort bottle of whiskey.
The bed I wake up in is full.
Full of Arthur.
“Oh fuck,” I mutter, horrified. “No, no, no.”
His body is a mountain range beside me, rising high—too high to be ignored—and taking more of the blanket than is fair. Taking any is not fair because he’s not supposed to be here.
I pop up, head pounding with a hellish hangover and righteous indignation. These Kraut boys are all revealing their darker sides.
“What are you doing in my bed?” I shove his shoulder while making the accusatory demand. Technically, the mattress I curled up on last night in the guest bedroom belongs to Arthur, but that doesn’t give him the right to sleep on it with me. To do things with me in it when I was inebriated.
He lets out a bearlike grumble. “Not your bed.”
I huff and give him another furious shove. “You gave me the guest bedroom. That means, temporarily, it’s mine.”
Arthur rolls onto his back and glares at me with sleepy eyes. “Not the guest bed. My bed.”
At his words, I pause my berating and give the room a thorough scan, realizing that Arthur might be...correct.
But still!
“How did I end up in here? Did we fuck? Please tell me we didn’t fuck.”
Arthur frowns deeper. “No, we didn’t fuck. You stumbled in here, crawled in the bed. I asked what you were doin’. You told me to shut up. Then, you started snoring.”
“Oh. Okay. That’s good.” And embarrassing. Or it would be if I could be embarrassed in front of Arthur, which, taking a moment to soak in this entire situation, I realize I don’t.
He’s already seen the worst. That I trusted—worse, fell in love with—a man who treated me like garbage. Easy to throw away.
This is nothing.
I flop back on his pillows, which are big and puffy and amazingly comfy. “You know what? I’m not sorry. This is a better bed than that one in your guest room. That thing is a brick.”
Arthur mutters something like, “Gets people to leave faster.” Then, he rolls over onto his side and, for all intents and purposes, goes back to sleep.
I try to follow his example. This is a king-sized mattress, so even though Arthur is roughly the size of an adolescent grizzly bear, I don’t feel crowded.
But being in bed with Arthur isn’t what’s keeping me awake.
My pain machine is.
That’s what this grinding mess in my chest feels like. A bunch of rusty gears and parts turning and twisting and spitting out noxious fumes of loathing and anger and despair.
I massage my rib cage as if I could sink my fingers beneath the skin and find an off switch. Or at least a pause.
Why can’t I get a teeny-tiny break from this thing?
After lying for an indeterminate amount of time, listening to my insides produce a morbid soundtrack to the memory of Daren fondling Trinity’s boobs, I let out a disgusted huff and shove out of the bed and stomp into the bathroom.
The mirror over the sink is an honest bitch.
She doesn’t hide the smeared mascara around my eyes or the blotchy redness on my cheeks from hours of crying or the tangle my curls have twisted themselves into. I must’ve been tugging on them last night—a habit I thought I’d broken in high school.
“You’re a mess, Robin. A man-made mess.”
And despite how sure I am that the man who made me this way is an undependable asshole, there’s still a grinding pain machine inside me that aches for him. That wishes his body were beside mine this morning and I could cuddle up to him, like I normally do.
Daren would always roll over and insist he be the big spoon. And then he’d hold me until he got hard, and we’d have slow, loving—or so I thought—morning sex.
How could he do that with me and then turn around and call Trinity the moment he thought I was out of town?
My stomach curdles, and next thing I know, I’m bent over the toilet.
Luckily, I drank half a bottle of whiskey last night, so I can pretend this is hangover puking and not misery puking.
When I spit out the last mouthful of bile, I flush the mess down and splash cold water on my sweaty face. My mouth is sour and fuzzy, prompting me to sift through Arthur’s cabinets until I find an unopened toothbrush. But even after I rinse the taste of vomit from my tongue and scrub the smeared makeup from my too-pale cheeks with scalding water, I still hate the feel of my own skin.
There’s pain in my pores.
I turn the shower on as hot as possible, hissing when I step under the spray, but welcoming the sting. A small part of me wants to smile when I pick up the bottle of shampoo and realize Arthur and I use the same brand, only he has a pine-scented version. But the funny detail meets my emotional pain machine and gets ground to dust in the unrelenting gears, leaving me incapable of finding humor in anything.
When I finish showering, I’m clean, but the hurt remains. The face in the mirror is still the woman who let herself trust a man with her heart, only to get betrayed like she should’ve known would happen.
I need a break from Robin.
I want to be someone else. Someone who doesn’t have a broken heart, leaking painful sludge into their chest cavity. If I could, I’d step out of my body, into someone else’s, and live separately from myself for a stretch.
An idea takes hold, one that makes absolutely no sense, but I don’t care. I’ll do anything to get ahead of this perpetual pain machine.
I shove open the bathroom door, thoughts full of the man on the other side.