My hand leaps into the air between us, stopping him. “We both know you could have bought another blender. You could have bought one hundred blenders.”
His features arrange into genuine sadness. “I wanted to see you.”
His scratchy voice makes me feel the tiniest shred better, but I bat it down. I need the anger to stay in place while he is here. He cannot sweet talk his way out of this one, or apologize, or even grovel. But deep down, buried beneath the anger, my broken heart is there.
To the world, he is Tate Mack, box office god and sexiest man alive. To me, he was just Tate. My boyfriend.
Ex-boyfriend.
I blink and look away. “I hope she was worth it, Tate. I hope she was worth losing our relationship.”
He rushes forward. The blender tumbles to the ground, plastic cracking, and Tate drops to his knees. He grabs my hands, pulling them to his chest.
“Please,” he moans. “It was a mistake. A moment of weakness.”
His words are like lemon juice in my fresh wound. They are acid, and they burn. There is no apology on this earth that could make me consider forgiving him. Extracting my hands from his grasp, I push my chair back and rise to my feet. “You made your bed, Tate. Now you get to lie in it.” It would be so much easier to accept his apology, to move on. Nothing would have to change. His blender could stay on my counter. He could stay in my life.
But no. I can’t have that. I can’t live with myself, knowing I condoned that behavior. And what about next time? With a person like Tate, there will always be a next time.
“But we’re so good together, Ten. Come on.” He stays on his knees, his face upturned, his eyes big and pleading. Maybe for other women this routine would work, but not me, because I recognize that exact look. I acted opposite that same expression, in the movie we made right after we met. In the film, my character dropped to her knees and kissed him. But this is real life, and I’ll stay on my feet.
Calmly, I walk to the front door. By the time I’ve reached it, Tate is off the ground and walking toward me. He passes through the door I’ve just opened. He doesn’t stop. He won’t grovel twice. The fact that he groveled even once could be labeled anothermoment of weakness.
I watch, stony-faced, as he guns the engine of his canary yellow Ferrari. The car creeps forward. His eyes meet mine in the rearview mirror. He looks contrite. For the first time since he showed up, I let down my guard. The tears fall. His brake lights illuminate.
No.
I step back, swallowed up into my foyer, and slam the door. The last thing I see is his Ferrari rolling forward through my gate.
An hour later, Morgan shows up with champagne and tacos. She strides into the kitchen and dumps her bags and purse on the counter. Her dark hair is wound into a wild bun on the top of her head, a pen shoved through the coil to keep it secured. She plucks at the end of the pen, and her hair tumbles down around her upper arms. Pen in hand, she grabs an envelope off the top of a stack of mail. “Let’s make a list of everything you didn’t like about him.”
“Tacos first,” I grumble.
Morgan waves a hand at the brown paper bag, where grease stains soak through the bottom. “Well, duh.”
I reach in, coming away with a parchment-wrapped taco. “Heaven,” I announce, biting into the warm picadillo. Sauce dribbles down my chin and she throws me a napkin.
Morgan looks down at the envelope she turned over. I peek. She’s already written three things, and titled the listCons.
“Where is the pros column?”
She shakes her head. “Cons only.”
I read them aloud. “Ranch on pizza. Looks at himself in reflective surfaces every time he passes one. Sits down to pee.” I shake my head, my finger poised above the third con. “He only sat down right after sex. He said the first pee was unwieldy.”
She shrugs. “Still. It weirded you out the first time he did it.”
“True.”
She writes another and I read it out loud. “Tendency to tell dumb lies.”
Morgan’s not wrong about that. Tate had a problem telling inconsequential lies. Stupid stuff, like saying he went shopping for something when he hadn’t. But once he told the lie, he would make good on it. He’d do what he claimed to have already done. More of an aspirational liar.
“You know why he did that,” I point out, starting on my next taco.
“Right,” she agrees, grabbing some food of her own, knowing I might very well eat it all. “Everyone has childhood shit. We all act out as adults. People can still choose to dislike us for it.”
Tate once told me that if he had to grade his parents, they’d get a C-. An only child, he was fed, clothed, and mostly ignored. He began making up stories in his head, ones where fantastical events occurred. Some as simple as buying every type of candy the grocery store sold. One day he told someone his story, but delivered it in past tense, casting himself as the main character. It made him feel important and special, and he kept going, careful to keep it small so that it was attainable. He didn’t see it as a lie, because he always made sure it came to fruition. I didn’t have the heart to tell him it wasn’t normal behavior.
