Luce smirks.
“Anyway, if he’s really still dating her, then he won’t be interested in you, and if he is interested in you…”
Her smirk stretches wider. Luce has always loved a challenge—especially a sexual one.
I pour and hand her two shots of absinthe, nodding in Falco’s direction. “May the best woman win,” I joke. But I mean every word. Because the best woman has always been Beth and she will win here, one way or the other. She will either know for sure that she’s wasting her time with a piece of shit who never deserved her, or that piece of shit will man the fuck up. But as I watch Luce approach Beth’s boyfriend with the two shots I handed her, I can’t help but wonder who the piece of shit really is, and I toss back a double shot of my own.
Chapter Seventeen
Beth
Present Day
Hours pass, but still I don’t fall asleep.
I didn’t bother to draw the shades before I finally gave up on waiting up for David just before three in the morning, and the nearly full moon casts soft, pale light through the otherwise darkened bedroom.
It’s just as well. There’s no chance for sleep, anyway. Not with my mind racing like it is.
It isn’t the first time my brain has refused to shut down at night—demanding instead that I fixate on some seemingly innocuous moment and analyze it half to death—but tonight my usual demons are off the hook. My current thoughts aren’t fueled by irrational anxiety. I’m not lying in bed cringing over something I said, or trying to figure out the hidden meaning behind someone else’s casual comment. No, tonight my thoughts echo my heartbeat, which pounds to a rhythm as familiar as those demons.
Da-vid—Da-vid—Da-vid.
The events of the night replay on a loop in my head like a series of gifs in a Buzzfeed article.
David… Dancing… David dancing with a girl… Steven—David shoving Steven… David dancing with me. Brian—David hitting Brian… Arguing with David.
David pinning me to the bed.
Arguing again.
David kissing me…
Kissing him back.
Years of almost-moments and delusionally hopeful maybe-somedays all culminating in a whirlwind of passion I was lost to the moment his lips touched mine. One that, even now, I can’t be one hundred percent sure was even real.
But the evidence is there in my telltale swollen lips as they silently beg for an encore, and I wonder if it was really just the alcohol, or if there’s even the smallest possibility that David is finally seeing me for the woman I am and not the girl I was.
Still, as much as my stupid, naïve heart would love to read more into it, I’m deferring to my brain these days, and rationally I know there’s no point in searching for greater meaning when a drunk, horny guy hooks up with the girl he finds in his bedroom.
It would just be so much easier to dismiss if it hadn’t been so…so…explosive.
I sigh out loud as the memory of his kiss alone sends a rush of wildfire through my veins, my thighs pressing together to try and ease the ache between them. And my heart twists with regret, even as my stomach refills with righteous indignation, when I once again reach the part of how the night ended.
More arguing. And David storming out.
I don’t do well with yelling and shouting. Especially not from men, and certainly not from six plus feet of lean muscle I happen to know has plenty of experience throwing punches. Theoretically, at least. Because I may shrink away out of habit when David raises his voice sometimes, but I hold my own with him when it counts, and perhaps most telling—never has he once made me feel an ounce of fear.
But there is something that’s far worse than yelling to me. Something, incidentally, I have my father to thank for as well—but not only him. Because if there’s anything that traumatized my formative years more than my father’s rare but brutal alcoholic outbursts, it was when he walked out our front door, and didn’t come back for six years. It was when Brian took my virginity, and disappeared from my life the very next morning. Abandonment issues, indeed.
The view of David’s back as he disappeared out the door—even in memory form—hits me in the gut like a sucker punch, knocking the air from my lungs without fail, no matter how many times I see it in my mind. But that doesn’t stop me from hitting replay, again and again and again.
More than an hour after I went to bed, I’m still staring at the shadows on the far wall when a muffled bang travels through the apartment, and I startle. But I don’t move.
My body registers it before my mind does—the too-loud slam of the door, the aggressive movements around the kitchen, and the harsh footfalls that sound so unlike David’s. My pulse takes off like a rocket and by the time my brain catches up, I’m already covered in a cool sheen of sweat.
He’s still angry.
