I peel the paper off. Hold it in my hands.
This is it. My lifeline. One piece of paper with one man’s phone number and the promise that he’s ten minutes away.
I put it back. Smooth the tape down carefully.
Then I walk to the bathroom.
I don’t mean to look in the mirror again, but I’m me. I specialize in self-inflicted emotional wounds and poor impulse control.
Blonde hair. Shorter than I’ve ever worn it. My mother’s color, gone.
The thought breaks me.
I sink down onto the bathroom floor, back against the tub, knees pulled to my chest. The tiles are cold through my jeans. The light’s too bright. Everything’s wrong.
And finally, finally, I let myself cry.
Not pretty crying. Not cinematic crying. The ugly kind. Snot and hiccups and sounds that come from somewhere deep and feral.
I cry for my apartment. For the empty chocolate box and the cookie containers and the kitchen that smelled like butter and sugar and obsession.
I cry for my name. For Stevie Reeves who noticed too much and loved too hard and couldn’t stop watching a man eat pasta even though she absolutely should have looked away.
I cry for Dario.
For his dark eyes and his careful hands and the way he smiled at me in that courtroom like I was doing something brave instead of something that destroyed us both.
I try to remember his eyes. Almost black. The kind that made you forget survival instincts and credit scores. The kind that made you think yes, destroy my life, I’m flexible about career paths.
But it’s already fuzzy. Already fading at the edges.
I’m losing him and that’s bullshit because I cataloged everything. I could describe his napkin folds, his wine-holding technique, the exact angle of his jaw when annoyed, but his eyes are going soft in my memory?
My brain is a broken filing cabinet that only works when it’s inappropriate.
“Please,” I whisper to no one. To the beige tiles and the florescent lighting and the universe that keeps taking things from me. “Please don’t let me forget.”
But there’s no answer.
Just Beth Taylor, alone in a bathroom that smells like industrial cleaner, crying for a man she barely knew and a life she’ll never get back.
Eventually the crying slows. Quiets into something smaller.
I notice things because that’s what I do. The grout is surprisingly clean. The toilet paper is the cheap kind that disintegrates if you look at it wrong. There’s a water stain on the ceiling shaped like Florida.
I pull myself up. Splash water on my face. My eyes are red and swollen and the blonde stranger in the mirror looks like she’s been through some shit.
She has.
I walk back to the living room. Stand in the middle of this beige nowhere and try to figure out what the fuck I’m supposed to do now.
My body knows.
My body has ideas.
I’m wired and exhausted and my skin feels too tight and there’s this buzzing under my ribs that needs out.
I walk to the bedroom.
