Too wound up, I shot up off the couch and stepped over the crap littering the floor. I needed a drink to take the edge off. Chris followed me to the kitchen.
“Her asshole brother-in-law showed up at her door. He dropped a subpoena on her over some estate, and then he tossed that little bomb at me.” I slammed two glasses on the counter and uncapped the bottle. My hand shook as I poured. “You know what the worst part is? If that dick hadn’t stopped by, I still wouldn’t know, and then where the fuck would I be? Blissfully oblivious? A dead fiancé seems like a pretty fucking important detail to keep from me, especially when she’s clearly still involved with members of his fucking family.”
“I’m sorry, man. That’s one hell of a way to find something like that out.”
“I should have expected this. After all the shit I’ve dealt with, I finally have a good thing, and then poof. It’s fucking gone.” I slid a glass toward him and took a hefty gulp of my own.
“What do you mean it’s gone? I get that it’s hard to take, and you’re upset, but you’ll figure it out.”
I shook my head, remembering the way she had looked at me, with those vacant, dead eyes. “I’m pretty sure she broke up with me. It just felt like . . . I don’t fucking know . . . she told me to leave.”
Maybe the end was inevitable. Maybe once the tattoo was done, she would have walked away, having gotten what she needed. Like I was a temporary placeholder for the things she didn’t have anymore. Or maybe Tenley was drawn to me because I stood in direct opposition to everything and everyone she’d lost.
“What if she just didn’t know how to deal with it?” Chris reasoned.
“I don’t think so. She didn’t tell me about her fiancé because she didn’t want me to say no to the back piece.”
“What? According to who? You don’t really believe that, do you?”
“That’s what she said.” I took another sip of my drink and reached for the bottle in preparation to pour another. Chris grabbed it before I could. Whatever. I could get shitfaced after he was gone.
“Is that all she said?”
“She fed me some bullshit about not wanting me to see her differently, but she used that line before, back when she wouldn’t tell me about the crash in the first place.”
I scrubbed my face with my hands. She’d been so terrified that I wouldn’t want her once I found out how extensive her losses were. But knowing the truth hadn’t changed a damn thing. It wasn’t just the lie that got me, though. It was her refusal to be honest, to have faith that I could handle whatever she threw at me.
In spite of all that, I still wanted her. She was the one person I’d been with who got in past all the ink and steel, and when she found out what I was really like, she still wanted me.
Chris capped the bottle and put it away. “Can I ask you something without you ripping off my head?”
“No guarantees.”
He asked anyway. “What are you most pissed about, the dead fiancé or that she didn’t tell you in the first place?”
I thought about it for a minute, struggling to verbalize. “I don’t know. Both?”
“One has to outweigh the other.”
The exclusion of a crucial truth was a sharp pain in my chest. After a long pause I finally replied, “The betrayal.”
Ironic I chose to call Chris instead of Lisa. But I knew what Lisa would say. Chris got me on a different level. We’d been here before; the circumstances had been vastly different, but some of the emotions attached were similar.
He nodded slowly, mulling over my answer. “So you feel betrayed because she didn’t tell you, or because she was in love with someone other than you?”
And that was when it finally clicked. This dead man who had been hers would always be a black shadow between us. Death immortalized people. The less pleasant parts of them washed away, leaving behind a rosy, soft-edged impression of perfection. I was so fucking far from perfect. It hurt in ways I couldn’t begin to explain. I was her rebound. Her spiral down. Her punishment for surviving, just like her brother-in-law said.
“Tenley’s in love with my dick, not me.”
Chris arched his pierced brow. “I’m going to go ahead and disagree with you on that.”
“And you’re speaking from experience?”
Chris gave me a wry grin. “No need to rub that shit in. Look, I can hang out and keep you from trashing your apartment while you get wasted, but all that’s going to do is give you a hangover and a mess to clean up. The problem is still going to be there tomorrow. You might not want to acknowledge it, but this thing between you and Tenley is serious. In all the years I’ve known you, you’ve never been like this about anyone. Are you really going to drop it all because you find out something you don’t like and you don’t know how to deal with?”