Chapter Eight — Callum
I’ve been feeling sick about what happened last night. I thought I could do it. That I could treat her like the other girls —callously, cruelly, and feel fine afterwards. But I don’t feel fine.
It felt good in the moment, sure. Hurting her, punishing her. But now I just feel broken. Because the problem — that she lied to me and betrayed me — is still there. And now I have an additional problem: the fact that I betrayed myself with my behavior.
I don’t know how to fix this.
And what’s worse, I don’t know who to talk to. I can’t talk to Trent about it for obvious reasons.
So what should I do? I take the morning off work just to think about it. I even journal. I need clarity. I need a plan.
The problem I keep coming back to is this competition. Alex and I had basically written the whole thing off around the time we played the darts game. It was just symbolic at that point. I mean, I threw the game for her, and she knew it. Neither of us cared.
But now that I know she’s untrustworthy, that changes everything. I have every reason to think that she’s in this for the money and will take the million dollars if she can. And now that I’ve thrown the darts game, she’s won three competitions.
I want her out of my life as soon as possible. I mean, what I really want is to erase what I found out about her and Trent. But since that’s not an option, the next best option is to move on and forget I ever met her. But I can’t do that while this game is still hanging over my head.
So I have to end this game. But I can only do that by getting her to quit or by letting her win, and the latter is obviously not an option anymore. There’s no way in hell I’d let this woman walk away with a million dollars after what she’s done.
The more I think about it, the more I realize that while the motivations for my behavior last night might not have been good, my behavior made sense. It would have actually been good if my behavior had driven her to quit. But she didn’t. Which means I’m going to have to escalate things.
Fuck.
It’s going to be hard, because Alex is a tough cookie. Not only is she smart and resilient, but she’s brave, too. I’m not sure what would be enough to crack her. I’m going to have to really think about it.
The End