“Jesus, Fish, no. I’m as shocked as you are. Nobody saw it coming.”
“Including me.” Vulnerable from fatigue, tears stung his eyes. He bit down on his lip until he felt the plate armor of his stubborn resolve slide into place. You will feel nothing.
“Fish, look,” Will said. “I don’t know all the details, but my gut tells me this wasn’t an ongoing thing. I think it was just something stupid and random.”
“It was David wanting what he couldn’t have.”
“And you beat the shit out of him. I would’ve done the same. But now what about Daisy?”
“What about her?”
A bubble of frustrated silence on the other end of the line. Will inhaled then exhaled roughly. Erik imagined him slumped in a chair, his face in a palm. The lines of his body etched with pain. Good. Life was shit and everyone should hurt.
“Let me get this straight,” Will said. “You’re leaving her. You’ve left her. This is it. You’re gone.”
“Yes.”
“Just like that. What you have with her means nothing.”
“Clearly it meant nothing to her,” Erik said.
“No discussion, no goodbye, no… You’re not even going to hear her side of it?”
“I have no desire to hear her side of it. She wants David, fine, she can have him. God bless. And when he chews her up and spits her out, I won’t even say I told you so. Because I’m such a good guy.”
“Dude,” Will said, his voice softening. “She did a shitty thing to you. Nobody will say otherwise. You gotta be dying a thousand deaths and I’m so fucking sorry…”
Erik’s eyes narrowed, his body tensing. He could handle an argument with Will. He welcomed a screaming match, but compassion would destroy him. Empathy would dissolve the pathetic, flimsy barrier he had worked so hard to jerry-rig out of nothing. “Well,” he said. “I’m glad we agree there.”
“Fish,” Will said. “She fucked up but she loves you.” His love was bright, firm and clear, slipping through the holes of the phone receiver and shining into Erik’s eyes. He flinched from it, a mole squinting into the sun.
“She didn’t fuck up,” he whispered, turning from the light. “She fucked David.”
“It was a mistake, she’ll be the first to stand up and say it. Won’t you even let her—”
“Let her what? Explain? Apologize? And then what? I just get back with her and pretend nothing happened? Forget it, Will. I’ll never be able to look at her again without seeing her in David’s bed. That’s my last memory of her. That’s my souvenir. That’s what I got. I don’t ever want to see her again. You can tell her to just leave me the hell alone.”
“All right. Fine. Your fight with Daisy is your fight with Daisy. What about me, Fish?”
“What about you? What the hell do we have left to talk about?”
“You’re done with me? Pardon me sounding like a jilted woman but I thought I meant something to you.”
He did. Will’s friendship had no price. But Will was the open door back to Daisy. Now he was a dangerous liability.
Both of them had to go.
Erik hardened every soft and compassionate thing in his heart. He erased the previous version of events. He rewound, took it back. Back to the beginning, where Will was no innocent bystander. And he rewrote the past into a story he could live with.
“I’m done,” he said. “I was done when you fucked James and brought all this shit down. It all goes back to you and him. None of th—”
“No,” Will said. “No, you are not saying this.”
“—would have happened if you picked a goddamn persuasion and stuck to it. If you hadn’t strung him along like a toy and then threw him aside. You’re no better than David.”
“Don’t you put this on me, Fish.”
“You brought it down, Will,” Erik said. “He came into the theater looking for you.”