“No.” I told her, still engaging.
“You say horrible things and then act like honesty excuses them.”
I watched her drink and not just for the drink itself. I watched the way her shoulders moved when she swallowed and the way her eyes kept coming back to mine even when she wanted to look away. She was already a little emotionally lit up. The wine was just helping her say it.
“My problem,” I said slowly, “is that nobody ever listens the first time.”
That made her look at me even harder and I let my eyes scan over the room once more while she sat there trying to figure out what that meant. The terrace doors were still cracked open enough to let the night air in. Upstairs stayed dark except for one little wall light over the landing. The whole house was just too lit and too private. She had really built me a gift and wrapped it in candles.
“You know what I used to hate most about Carmen?” she suddenly asked.
I looked back at her and waited. She smiled, but it wasn’t pretty now it was more of a bitter smile. “That she never even looked threatened. She always knew she had you.”
I stayed quiet and let her continue.
“She looked at me like I was some little problem that would pass.” She took another sip and sat the glass down a little too hard causing the bottom to click against the table. “And maybe she was right, because here I am. Still talking about you and still wanting something that was never really mine.”
That was closer to the truth than she had been all night. I leaned back and watched her. She was crying without really crying now but she had that gloss in her eyes and that tightness in her mouth. It was that place where women still tried to hold onto their beauty even while they were breaking.
“You should’ve let this go a long time ago,” I said.
That hit her hard and her whole face changed, and she looked at me in a way that finally had some real understanding in it. “Is that why you came?” she asked quietly.
I didn’t answer right away and that was all the answer she needed. I went into my hoodie and pulled out a bottle of Fentanyl pills sliding them across the glass coffee table with my eyes locked in on her the entire time. Victoria’s eyes looked from the bottle to my eyes, and it wasn’t a disbelief behind them. She knew exactly what this meant, she could take herself out of her misery on her own, or she could really suffer but either way, she wasn’t making it out of this alive.
Victoria’s hand hovered over the pill bottle for a second, but she didn’t grab it. That was the first thing I noticed because for all the crying, all the liquor, and all the heartbreak spread across her face, she still wasn’t gone go out sad in front of me that easy. Her fingers touched the bottle, rolled it a little across the table, then pulled back. She looked up at me again, with her mascara smudged under her eyes now, and I could see it all over her facethat she was still trying to figure out if there was some part of this she could fix.
That was Victoria’s problem, she always thought if she stayed in it long enough, if she looked pretty enough, cried soft enough, loved hard enough, she could pull something out of me that wasn’t there.
“You really came all the way here just for this?” she asked.
Her voice was rougher now and that seductive little tone she had earlier was gone. This was stripped-down Victoria feeling hurt, humiliated, and drunk enough to feel everything twice as harder, but not so drunk she couldn’t still see me clearly.
I stayed where I was, with one shoulder angled toward the counter, and my glass still in my hand even though I hadn’t touched it in a while. The music was still playing low in the house, and that made the whole thing feel uglier and more dramatic than it had to be, like all this softness had been waiting here for a man who never planned on giving her what the fuck she wanted.
“I came because I had to know, for myself, I had to see in person.” I told her.
“Know what?”
“If you was ever gon’ stop.”
She let out another laugh that sounded more like a breakdown. “Stop loving you?”
“Nah, stop wanting more than what it was. You ain’t never loved me cause it wasn’t shit to love. I never gave you nothing to love… I did my job cause I had to and after that, I gave you a chance at freedom when I could’ve buried you.”
She took another swig of wine. “What was it, Dom?” she asked, finally looking back up at me. “Since you always so honest, tell me. What was I to you?”
The truth sat easy in my mouth. “I just told you… a responsibility.”
I saw it all over her face, it was the way her eyes got wide followed by her hand coming up slow to press against the center of her chest like maybe that would stop what she was feeling from getting worse. She was so dramatic, I promise she was. If I had one wish, it would’ve been that El Blanca didn’t deprive her of the love she was looking for.
“A responsibility,” she repeated.
“Yeah.”
She nodded like she understood, but the tears came harder after that. “Wow. I understand at first that what it was, but I just thought after that, the way you cared for me… I just…” she stopped herself.
I looked at her and didn’t move because that was part of it too. She needed to sit in everything happening right now and accept it. She need to sit in every lie she told herself. Every little fantasy she built around a man who never belonged to her. She needed to feel all of it before the end came, because that was the only way any of this would make sense once she was found. Victoria had to look like a woman who had finally given up. Not a woman caught off guard by violence, and not a woman who fought or was silenced. I need this shit to look like a woman who broke.
