“I don’t want her.”
“Could have fooled me.”
“I haven’t talked to her since that day.”
“Has she tried to contact you?” I ask.
He nods. He looks like he has nothing left to lose, like he’s hanging on a frayed string that he’s been cutting into. So I want to quell every single piece of my curiosity just for the sake of closure.
“If I ask you… things… would you be honest with me?”
“I’ll tell you everything you need to know. Everything you want to know.”
“Why didn’t you do that before?” I question.
“Cuz I was scared that I would lose you,” he chuckles sarcastically. “A lot of good that did, right?”
His voice is so tired. Might as well bite the dog’s ass. Dropping the bag on the carpet at the top of the stairs, I stand on the other side of the threshold of the door, my right side up against the frame while he leans on his left, facing me.
His arms are folded around himself now, hugging his own body, holding himself together like he’s trying to self-soothe.
Blinking once, I look up at him slowly, noticing how small he looks despite how tall he is.
“When was the first time that you slept with Sarah?”
He licks his lips, tears gathering in his eyes again. Lincoln swallows hard, staring down at the carpet at his feet, anywhere but at me. But then he forces himself to look up, meeting my eyes.
Maybe he figures he owes me that much.
“Th-the day after I dropped her at her apartment,” he says, his voice cracking slightly under the strain of simply speaking.
“You mean…” I start, emotions threatening to spill over once more, wounds that barely begun to coagulate. I take a deep breath, my body threatening to break into a quaking mess. “The day that she called you to pick her up from her ex?”
“Yeah, the day after that,” he answers quietly.
I scoff, almost laughing to myself. “The day…”
Breathe.
Breathe.
“…the day after you made love to me… right after that day when you went back into work?”
Lincoln’s whole body shivers. “Uh… the day after she wasn’t feeling good, so I took the shuttle with her to her apartment… and I… um—” he licks his lips, trying to stave off tears. “She told me how she felt about me.”
“What do you mean how she felt about you?”
“She said she had feelings for me. That she touched herself to me.”
My heart shatters into a million pieces all over again. I don’t want to be affected by this, but my body is still wounded and hurting, and every word he speaks is another betrayal.
“I… I was… I told her I did too.”
“You told her that you touched yourself to thoughts of her too?” I ask, a lump in my throat.
“Yeah,” he says, meeting my eyes momentarily before looking back down at the ground. A tear from each eye spills down his face before he breathes in, trying to steel himself, using his forearm to wipe them away.
“She was saying how… we shouldn’t… pass work… um…”
