Chapter 2 #3
“I’ve carried that for years,” she admits. “I didn’t want to carry it into the next part. You deserved to know who you were apologizing to.”
I can’t speak. I genuinely cannot find the air for it.
My heart is slamming against my ribs, the same animal rhythm it had in the back of a transport with my shoulder out of its socket and four sets of dog tags biting into my fist and a fifth I couldn’t reach burning forty yards behind me.
Melissa starts to cry, quietly, both hands at her mouth now. She’s saying something along the lines of, I know I don’t deserve your forgiveness… I think it’s that, I think those are the words, but they’re coming to me from far away, underwater.
“This Ben guy,” I say, nodding to her stomach. “That was the affair?”
“No, that ended years ago. I’m doing everything the right way with Ben.”
The right way? This isn’t the right way.
The right way ends in a happily-ever-after. For both of us. Not Melissa with her baby, and her man, and me feeling like the world’s biggest fucking idiot. Because not only does she not want me back, she didn’t want me when she had me.
And the flashbacks bang to life again. Whenever I’m stressed, sad, or holding back an emotion that needs to spill out, I go back to the worst moment of my life.
A helicopter on fire. Gunfire popping from the left and right.
The whistling sound of the wind, hissing at me to run or die.
Pick your fate. The broken leg that couldn’t carry me.
Taylor. Ferro. Cordova. Gray. The four tags I carried out. And the one I couldn’t.
I was trying to move on. That was the point with PALADIN and Vesper. I was trying to reinvent myself. Trying to escape their ghosts. But they’ll haunt me until I put the one responsible for their deaths in the ground or in a cell. I know that now with a flat, cold certainty.
There was never going to be a Tuesday. There was never going to be the smallest possible life. I was always going to be a man at a beautiful dinner with his hand half in another decade.
“…and I hope someday you can—” Melissa is still going. I’ve missed most of it.
“You know what,” I interrupt, and I’m surprised by how level it comes out. “I think I’ve lost my appetite.”
I rise and take out my wallet. I don’t make a thing of it. A couple hundreds, laid flat on the marble next to the untouched soy.
“I’d like to buy dinner for you and the baby, though.” My voice cracks at “baby” and I push past it. “Get the omakase. Just—” I almost smile. It almost works. “Make sure they cook your fish. The doctor told you nothing raw in your first trimester, right?”
She must be in her first trimester. Her belly is still flat as a board. I had no warning for the sucker punch that was coming.
She’s looking up at me with her ruined makeup and her hand still on her stomach and an expression I’ll be unpacking for a while, something that is mostly sorrow and a little bit relief that the worst part is over, and I find I can’t quite hold her brown eyes.
I look at the table instead. I reach out and tap the marble twice beside her place setting—two knuckles, the way you’d knock on a doorframe before you go.
“Take care, Lyss. Good luck with everything.”
I leave the drinks sweating where they sit, and I walk out.
In the entryway, under the good amber light, while the host is asking if everything was to my satisfaction this evening, I take out my phone.
I find her contact. Melissa, it says now, in clean white letters, the new leaf I thought we were turning, not an hour old.
I block her.
Then I delete her.
The number, the thread, the church hug, the Dassai 23, the whole architecture of a normal life I let myself draw on a napkin for one week like a kid. Gone. It’s the one clean thing I can do.
I’m not financially on the hook for her anymore, not legally tied to her by so much as a dollar, and that means for the first time in a decade there is a door between us I’m actually allowed to close.
So I close it. And lock it.
The night air off the river is cold for the season.
Martinis is a mile up the way. I could call Lance or Linc.
My new brothers I suppose. Annoying little brothers, one broody, the other a little bratty.
They’d sit with me, get a few drinks in me, then the gentle ribbing would begin.
Or, I could call Eden, who is more of a companion.
She’d therapize the situation until it made sense.
To her, at least. This will never make sense.
But right now, I don’t want my friends. My family. That’s for tomorrow.
Tonight, I want to be someone else, in a different world, with a different heart, one that’s whole.
So, instead of my usual watering hole, I head south.
Two blocks down, there’s a seedy dive bar that a young woman shouldn’t visit alone at night, the kind with no name worth remembering, and a bartender who won’t make eye contact.
I unfasten my top button, letting my neat collar slacken.
The old fashioned’s still in me, too sweet, doing nothing.
I need a drink that fucking does something.