“By ‘ended it’, do you mean you did the typical Elias thing?”
“No—”
“Where you treat women like they’re disposable trash? Like she was just another person in your Blonde Parade or whatever she calls it? Did you do that to my fucking sister, Elias?”
“I didn’t,” I say to the floor.I did.
“Then why was she fucking crying?!” he says, shoving me off the stool.
People move away from us.
“Dude—”
“What did you do to my sister, Elias?” he growls, shoving me again. My back hits the bar.
“I—” I think he might hit me. I think he’s going to hit me. I want him to hit me.
“You fucked my sister and dropped her, didn’t you?”
“I…” I can’t lie to him anymore. The lying is over. I deserve this. “Yes,” I finally admit.
It finally comes. I get a fist in my face. Just one, hard enough to make me see stars, and it’s not like the play fighting of our youth, it’s a genuinefuck youpunch, and it feels like getting hit by a truck.
The bouncer of the place we’re in drags him out of the bar. Through one good eye, I watch again, as thirty-two years of love and friendship moves away from me, hatred oozing out of him, and it feels like being drawn and quartered. A second time.
I don’t go home. I go straight to the gym because I’m a coward, and I can’t hear Mia fucking some dude in my house right now.
I look at my face in the mirror, at the beginnings of a black eye mottling half my face.Whatever.
I pull out the air mattress I keep in one of the closets. Take out a pillow and a blanket. And crammed into the sad few feet between my desk and the back wall, I sleep.
Luckily, I have back-to-back sessions today. From each of my clients, I get some variation of “damn, whose daughter/sister did you touch?” when they see my face.
My last session of the day is with Ethel Anderson. I’m tired, I’m hungry, and my face hurts. I pop some anti-inflammatory just before the buzzer to the gym rings.
“I can’t see much, but I can see color. And your face seems to be an unnatural shade ofrocked in the face.”
I manage to crack a small smile. Which hurts like hell. “Are you sure that you, as PS 2’s school safety officer, should be admitting to me that you can’t see?
She waves her hand. “I’m kidding.”
I raise one good eyebrow.Are you?
She doesn’t see it, obviously. “Besides, you don’t work there anymore, anyway.”
I think about how I just left Mia to deal with the whole Courtney Thomas bullshit herself.This is why it’s for the best, I tell myself.
I let her get set up and put her things away. She hobbles back to the gym floor, and we start with our stretching routine.
“You wanna talk about it?” she asks, during a calf stretch.
“Not really.”
She hums. “Could it be anything to do with your girlfriend leaving the building all forlorn-like the last few days?”
I keep my face a mask. “No.”
“I didn’t take her as the type to throw a mean right hook,” she says, ignoring me.
