“I don’t think he likes being on the Health and Safety Committee. I think he’d rather be a carpenter’s apprentice.” That was when I’d noticed the shift in his behavior, when he’d started pulling away from me and doing more drugs.
“He did seem a lot happier when he was working on the stage,” Artemis said.
“Whenever I try to talk to him about it, he gets mad at me. And he won’t let me touch him. He’s isolating himself from everyone. He’s been using drugs more often too, not just to go to sleep, either.”
“Where is he getting the pills?” she asked.
“I don’t know. He won’t tell me.” I was unhappy about that most of all. He was lying to me, and I was letting him get away with it.
“That’s suspicious as hell,” Artemis said.
“You think you could talk to him about it? I’m really worried.”
She pursed her lips, considering it. “I can try, but knowing Cipher, he’ll probably shut down even more. You might have to be patient with him while he works through whatever this is.”
“The same way Macon is being patient with you?” I said because Cipher wasn’t the only one holding back.
She scowled. “Alright Mr. Busybody. I’ll have you know, I’m working on that too.”
“Good, because Macon is a nice guy and he doesn’t deserve to have his heart broken.”
She sighed and shook her head. “Nobodydeservesto have their heart broken, Kitten. Sometimes it just happens that way.”
It was the first time I’d ever considered the possibility that Cipher might break my heart.
* * *
“Where areyou heading off to now?” I asked Cipher when I arrived home later that day. We were supposed to go to dinner, our only time together these days, but he looked like he was getting ready to leave without me.
“I’m going to get in some target practice with Donnie before my shift begins. Make sure my aim is still good. I’ll eat something after.”
“Can I walk with you there?” I asked, desperate for whatever scrap of attention I could wrestle from him.
“Sure. Give me a minute.”
I waited for him to get everything he needed then followed him out the door. We didn’t talk much. There was a lot I wanted to say, but I didn’t want to fight with him, so I spent most of our walk biting my tongue and trying not to think about the growing distance between us.
It didn’t work.
“How’s work been going for you?” he asked after a while.
“Fine,” I said. I figured he was just asking to fill the silence, not that he really cared.
“And how are you?” he said, glancing over at me. I shrugged because I felt pretty rotten, but it didn’t seem like the right time to discuss it, if he even wanted to.
There never was a good time, it seemed, and our schedules made it nearly impossible to see each other. But maybe Cipher preferred it that way. When he’d said he was tired, maybe what he really meant was that he was tired of me. He probably just didn’t want to hurt my feelings by telling me the truth. It would explain why he’d been so withdrawn lately, why he’d been avoiding me, and why we hadn’t had sex in more than a week. Maybe I was bad at it and he didn’t want to tell me. Did this mean we were breaking up?
“Kitten?” he said in a voice that was so gentle that it made me want to cry.
“I’m not great,” I said. Maybe it would hurt less if he just ended things now, rather than drawing it out. I imagined my heart being dragged across the ground like an animal’s entrails. I’d rather it be stomped on than to bleed out slowly.
“Talk to me,” he said.
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Please try. For me?”
Well, what more did I have to lose? As soon as I opened my mouth, everything poured out in a rush. “I tell you I miss you and you blow me off. I ask you where you’re getting the pills, and you say it’s none of my business. You don’t want to touch me or even talk to me lately, which makes me wonder what you want with me at all, and if you’re going to break up with me, then just do it already because this feels cruel.”
