I didn’t realize I was crying until I felt the wetness dripping off my chin. I looked at Flynn who had his eyes scrunched closed and his hands over his ears. He was shaking his head.
“Just stop it,” he whispered.
Oh my god!
What was wrong with me?
I looked at the pieces of hardened clay shattered at my feet and felt the bile rising up in my throat. I ran down the hallway to the bathroom. I dropped to my knees and emptied the contents of my stomach into the toilet. I stayed there for what felt like hours, heaving.
When I was finally finished, I rested my forehead against the cool porcelain and tried to stop my spinning head.
I had never, in all the years I had known Flynn, ever spoken to him like that. I had never scared him with my violence. Not even when I was a messed up teenager, barely able to control my feelings or reactions. I had never taken my vicious anger out on him.
But tonight I had.
Flynn didn’t come to check on me and I was too much of a drunken chicken shit to go find him. I felt like the worst human being in the world.
So I curled into a ball on the cold bathroom tile and fell asleep.
**
I woke up the next morning with my face pressed into the tile, dried vomit on the side of my face. I moaned and sat up. My head felt like it was going to split open.
At some point in the night, Flynn had covered me with a blanket. I pushed it aside and stood up, running the water in the sink, trying to clear my head.
I splashed my face with freezing cold water and ran shaky fingers through my tangled, puke encrusted hair. I needed a shower. Badly.
I braced my hands on either side of the sink and tried to get myself together. There was a good chance I was going to throw up again. My stomach rolled dangerously.
The night before was fuzzy but I remembered, all too clearly, what preceded my rather accurate Exorcist imitation.
I had screamed at Flynn. Shit, I had broken his sculpture and his mom’s glass shoe figurine.
I had gone to Woolly’s and gotten drunk with Shane and Reggie and I had never called Flynn to tell him where I was.
Why in the hell would I do something like that?
Bile rose in my throat and I turned around and dry heaved in the toilet. Shuddering, I forced myself into the shower to rinse off my mortification and shame.
I couldn’t believe how I had behaved. I had treated Flynn horribly.
I realized, standing underneath the spray of water, that last night I had become the woman I had never wanted to be again.
Angry, bitter, resentful. Full of insecurity, tinged with self-loathing. I had been selfish and self-destructive. And for a brief moment I hadenjoyedit.
And then I had come home and had taken all of that crap out on Flynn.
I leaned against the shower wall. I was shaking so badly I wasn’t sure I could stay upright on my own. I was losing it. I was doing the thing that I always did best.
Detonate.
I got out of the shower and dried myself off and then wrapped the towel around my body. I quietly went to the bedroom and found it empty, the bed made. I threw on some clothes and brushed out my hair.
The house was silent. I wasn’t sure whether Flynn was there or not.
I went out to the living room and came to a sudden halt. Flynn sat at the tiny table he reserved for his art. Murphy looked up from his perch at his master’s feet, his tail thumping the floor.
Flynn was bent over the table, completely focused. I slowly walked toward him and my heart broke—shattering into a thousand guilty pieces.
