“I’m sorry,” I say.
“Don’t apologize,” he replies. “Be angry for as long as you need to be. I can take it. I earned it.”
This statement only makes me feel guiltier, though. Guilty, for being angry at a man who endangered my life and has done nothing but lie to me since the day that we met.
Why the hell do I feel guilty about that?
“I have to leave,” I say to him.
This time, he doesn’t try to stop me from getting out of bed. I cross the room in my thin pajama set, my hair in a loose braid. My uniform for the last ten days as I laid in bed taking medicine, drinking tea, and eating the meals Vincent brought me while surfing Netflix. It was oddly domestic, the most consecutive time we’ve ever spent together, and the most time we’ve ever spent doing mundane tasks like binge watching reality shows while eating leftover pad thai.
If only. If only he’d been willing to do this a year ago, when the future still felt bright. Hell, when the future even feltpossible.
Now it’s bittersweet. Knowing that I’ll go home to join Kristen in San Jose, that nothing will ever be the same between us, that no matter what happens, I don’t think I’ll ever be able to trust Vincent again.
And at the same time, knowing that I’ll probably never love a man like I love him again.
I fucking hate him for that.
Packing my things in my suitcase - one of Vincent’s “men” retrieved it from my hotel room after they discharged me from the hospital - I zip it closed and stand it up on its wheels.
“Brooklyn.”
I turn to Vincent.
“What?” I ask.
“That’s where I grew up,” he says, looking at me with hollow eyes. “A long time ago, you asked me where I grew up. I told you Denver, because I didn’t want to talk about anything to do with home. But…I grew up in Brooklyn. About twenty minutes from here.”
I nod, taking this tidbit of information in. It’s just another lie revealed.
“Um,” I say. “Thanks. Thank you for telling me that.”
“My dad was a salesman,” he continues, his voice flat. “But not a very good one. He got his commission checks on the first of every month. So by the end of every month, we were usually out of money. My father couldn’t provide for us, but he was too proud to admit it. He was an angry, insecure man. He felt small in the world, so he made up for it by being big at home. Took out his anger on my mom, on me and my siblings. Mostly me, since I was the eldest boy.”
I exhale slowly, resisting the urge to grab his hand. Vincent’s backstory, the story I’d asked him about countless times, is more heartbreaking than I previously imagined.
“My mom applied for food stamps behind his back, which helped a little,” he goes on. “Sometimes we’d eat spaghetti with ketchup because we couldn’t afford real sauce. Now, as an adult, spaghetti with ketchup is still one of my favorite comfort meals. As gross as it might seem to most people.”
I continue to stand there. Just receiving the information. Little shards of Vincent, fragments of him.
“My parents were old school Catholic,” he says. “We went to mass every week without fail. I fought against it; I hated mass. Didn’t want to go. My parents finally gave up on forcing me when I got caught smoking weed behind the sanctuary.”
This makes me smile. A detail about Vincent that sounds like the version of him that I knew, something I can easily imagine him doing as a kid.
“I was the black sheep of the family,” he continues, looking down. “That’s probably why I rebelled so much. I figured everyone was expecting me to fuck up anyway. Might as well go all in. Eventually, I met Derek and Damien when their parents moved to our neighborhood.”
Leaving the suitcase by the door, I come closer, sitting beside Vincent on the edge of the bed but still careful to leave plenty of distance between us.
“They were already dealing,” he says. “That’s how we met. I was looking to buy off them. But we started hanging out and eventually I started selling, too.”
“Just…” I clear my throat. “Just weed?”
He shakes his head.
“Cocaine,” he says. “If you can believe that. A fifteen year old kid dealing cocaine. I didn’t think about it like that at the time. But now I look back and realize how fucking young we were. We werekids. But I was big for my age. All of us were. And we had a reputation for being violent. I think people left us alone because of that.”
“And you had a reputation for being violent because…?” I ask, unsure if I even want to know the answer.
