Instead she called for Diana and tried to make small talk with me, but I turned my face into stone and stared past her, waiting for Diana to appear.
She did, finally, wearing a tank top and pajama shorts, her hair up in a ponytail, her face—looking at me—after more than a week—a blank. Like I was no one. No anger. No lamp thrown at my head. Nothing.
For a terrible second I thought she’d gotten a spell to erase her memory of me, but then she asked her mother “Can we have a second?” and when her mom left I caught a flash—barely there—of pain before the blank mask came down again.
“What do you want, Markos?” she asked.
“I’m sorry,” I said. “I’m so sorry. I was an asshole—I can’t even believe how much of an asshole—and I need to tell you I’m sorry.”
“You kissed Kay.”
“It was a stupid mistake.”
“You swore at me. You haven’t talked to me for almost two weeks.”
She listed my crimes quietly, much more devastating than if she’d screamed at me. “I’m sorry, Diana.”
She took a breath and straightened her spine. “Okay. I forgive you.”
My mouth probably flopped open and closed a dozen times. “You . . . do?”
“Yeah. Thanks for coming by. It’s good of you. Bye.”
She started to close the door, but I put out a hand to stop it. She looked at the hand and looked at me and I felt like a slug, or maybe a slug that died and was decomposing on her front steps. “So—wait a second. We can be friends again?”
“I don’t think so.”
“But you said you forgave me.”
“Yeah.”
“Doesn’t seem like true forgiveness if you never want to see me again.”
Her eyes went fiery. “Are you here to lecture me on how to properly forgive someone? That seems a strange topic for you of all people.”
I didn’t have the brainpower to deduce what she meant by me of all people. “I’m not here to lecture you, no. I’m here so you can yell and scream at me for fucking up your life.”
She appeared to grow five inches, her eyes level with mine. “Don’t flatter yourself, Markos. I’ll get over it.”
“You’ve got to give me a second chance!”
“Why?” she asked, sounding a lot like that Win-voice in my head.
“Because, I—” I stopped, swallowed, and had one of those moments where you see yourself from up above and you look like such a pathetic loser, begging and pleading. And yet I’d gotten this far. I had to keep going. No bullshit. Honesty.
Even though honesty sucked.
“Because I miss you and I can’t stop thinking about you and I actually I sort of need you in order to keep living, like I’m scared of who I’m going to become without you around because that guy, the guy I was, was such a mess.” She opened her mouth as if to argue so I kept talking, not because I thought I’d convince her but because I wanted to hold back her inevitable no. “And actually if I’m being completely honest, which I am, or at least I’m trying to be, I really think I might sort of love you, but I don’t know because that’s not something I know anything about. And I’ve been trying to figure out what Win would say, which is a losing game, but he was a better guy than I am so I think he’d say that this is love and that I should tell you, so I am. I love you. I think.”
I forced myself to make eye contact and had to stop talking because she was crying. It hit me like a baseball in the solar plexus: I made her cry. The look on her face was because of me.
No way was this good. I may have had no prior experience confessing love, but I doubted gut-wrenching tears were the optimal response.
“Please leave me alone, Markos,” she said. “I can’t be responsible for you being a good person. Why can’t you just be a good person?”
I took a step back from the door, stumbling. I shuddered, suddenly cold. I tried to take a breath but a sharp pain in my chest made me wheeze.
“I . . . I told you the truth,” I said.
“Thank you for that.”
She closed the door.
I was kneeling on her front lawn.
I had to get up or her mother would come out and find me.
I had to get up so Diana wouldn’t look out her front window and see me kneeling.
I had to get up to find a bottle of Maker’s Mark to start forgetting what happened here.
I had to get up.
I had to.
After what happened with Echo in my truck, I knew I had to get the money. I couldn’t keep things going the way they were. Pretty soon I’d make a mistake so big that I’d never be able to get back to where I wanted to be.
In the end, it wasn’t hard to get at all. We were at Markos’s playing video games. I didn’t even pause the game.
“If I needed money,” I said, “could you lend it to me?”
“How much?”
Neither of us looked away from the screen. Markos machine-gunned a couple pedestrians.
“Five thousand.”
He didn’t say anything right away, and I thought he might laugh, in which case I would have to laugh, and then I’d be paying off Echo in quarters I found underneath soda machines for the next thirty years.
“Okay,” Markos said. “You really need it?”
“Yeah.”