To say I’m fucking pissed as hell at 11:25 p.m. is the fucking understatement of the century.
Countless calls to Cara’s phone have gone unanswered all night long. I didn’t bother sending a text or leaving a voicemail.
It became clear she was avoiding me when she never answered, and it became really fucking clear why she was avoiding me when Stella showed up after going out to get food, it taking her longer than an hour, and I know it was because it took her that long to stop being pissed at me.
When she returned to MadInk, after my fifth unanswered call to Cara, she didn’t just have a bag of Imperial Chinese food with her.
She had a photo on her phone of Cara, her arms wrapped around some asshole’s neck, her cheek on his shoulder, and both of them were fucking laughing. She had a photo of that same guy with his shirtsleeve rolled up. Cara’s finger on that man’s forearm, tracing what looks like a script tattoo and the way she’s looking at the ink, then looking at the guy in a fucking third photo…it’s the same look she gives me after she comes. The same look she gave me this morning when she said she’d be home. My home. Our home.
Stella was no longer pissed, but smiling, pretty damn vindicated. Even when I took her phone, sent myself the pics, and then hurled hers across the entryway at MadInk, crashing her phone into my favorite portrait of the Caribbean Sea, she still wasn’t pissed.
So, yeah, I came home and have spent the last two hours drinking. Heavily. I rarely drink, much more rarely drink to excess, but tonight fucking calls for it.
I don’t know who the fuck he is. All I know is that the asshole she was out at a bar with, leaning on him on a barstool, is not her fucking father. And since her brother is dead, it’s most definitely not him either.
Lucy is already kenneled for the night because the last thing I wanted to see was her jump for joy at seeing Cara whenever the hell she decides to come home.
I’m sipping on a glass of Scotch when I hear the clink of my door. The catch of the lock follows as she locks it behind her and then the clipping sound of her heels on the floor as she enters.
Then a thud, followed by another one that’s deeper as she kicks off her heels and one hits a wall.
It’s dark in the room, because I can’t be bothered to lean over and switch on a lamp. And in those few seconds, all the shit, all the anger I feel, hurls into my chest at a thunderous speed.
Just this fucking morning we were talking about being in this together. And I don’t know if it’s the shit with Stella, the fact she’s right and Cara does belong in a different world from mine, or the fact she fucking lied about having dinner with her parents so she could go hang out at a fucking bar with some guy who looks like the exact kind of guy I’m certain her parents would choose for her. But as Cara walks into the living room and flicks on a light, I don’t even flinch at the brightness.
“Hey,” she says, having the nerve to walk toward me. Clueless. Totally fucking clueless, I know. “What are you doing here sitting in the dark?”
She stops when I don’t answer, but I’m too fucking stunned to speak. And maybe too drunk. I set down my drink just in case.
Her hair is messed, flyaways at her temples and around her ears and she has the rest pulled back off her neck and shoulders. Her cheeks are flushed, her mascara slightly smeared beneath her eyes.
Beautiful, glorious, and completely uninhibited. She looks exactly like she does after I’ve made love to her.
“Braxton? You okay?”
“I called you.”
“Oh. Yeah.” She dips her head and digs into her purse. She pulls out her phone and gives me a guilty look. “It died at some point. I guess I forgot to charge it earlier. I’m sorry if I worried you.”
“I wasn’t worried.”
She takes a step forward, hesitantly this time, and tilts her head to the side. “Are you mad at me? I’m sorry I didn’t call, but I said I’d come right home after dinner.”
Her voice trails off and I laugh coldly.
“Was worried about you when you didn’t answer my first few calls. Then I got pissed when you didn’t answer my next few. Then, I saw you were in good hands and stopped being worried and just stayed pissed.” While I’m talking, I pull up the photo Stella took and when I’m done, I lean forward, sliding my phone across the coffee table. It lands just on the edge of the table closest to her.
“I don’t understand—” She glances down and her lips part, forming a circle. Her eyes go round and her fingers go to her ears, brushing back some of her flyaways. “Oh.”
“Yeah. Looks like a fun dinner with dear old Mom and Dad,” I sneer. I’m unable to stop it. Hours of being anxious about her dinner, worried how it was going, that I wasn’t there to protect her from her parents, then pissed, not only that she’s all over some preppy little asshole, at a bar no less, but the fact there’s a bubbling glass of what looks like champagne in her hand.
She’s fucking pregnant with my kid. Drinking. That might be the thing that has me pissed most of all since she knows who I came from and how I was brought into this world.
“Wow. Okay, Braxton, there’s an explanation for all of this and if you calm down for a minute I’ll explain.”
“You’re fucking drinking alcohol with my kid in you, Cara. You have your fucking hands all over some other guy after having your hands all over me this morning and yesterday and the day before.”
Hurt splashes across her face but I’m too pissed, both with anger and the Scotch to give a fuck.
“And you think there’s an explanation that will help calm me down? Go ahead, give it.” I wiggle my fingers. I’m being an asshole.
It registers, but there’s too much other shit shouting at me to do any good. Stella’s inside my head, telling me she’ll go back to high-class when she can. My mom is there, on her knees, giving some damn guy a blowjob to pay for more drugs, not giving a shit I haven’t eaten in days. Cara’s there, telling me fucking me is a disaster.
All of it’s slamming around at some high damn decibels, I scratch my fingers across the back of my head and almost miss it when she wipes a tear off her cheek.
“Don’t be a dick, Braxton. This isn’t what it looks like.”
“Looks to me you caved to Mommy and Daddy and got with a man they approve of. They happy with you now for once? They proud of you finally?”
She steps back quickly, almost tripping over the side table behind her and even in my drunken state I think of her falling to her ass. Of getting hurt.
I reach for her and she smacks my hand away, then smacks my bicep.
“Don’t you dare touch me,” she hisses, scrambling to regain her balance and moving back quickly. “Don’t you ever touch me, never again, you asshole. I’m leaving and I’ll call you when I can stand to even think of talking to you again, but this…what I thought we had, Braxton. We’re done.”
“We never had shit,” I snap back at her. “Not if you can turn away from me that quickly.”
“I don’t know if you’re drunk or if you’ve lost your mind, but this conversation is over.” She turns and hurries to her room, a room she hasn’t spent any time in in a week except to get dressed and showered, and I should have known then, the other day when I told her to move all her stuff into my room, and she refused saying she thought it was best we still had our space, that she still had one damn hand up, holding me back while barely letting me in.
Now I know why.
I’m still standing, glaring at the spot she was in before she went to her room, when she returns. In the distance, Lucy’s whining, this sad, soulless moan, but all I see is the bag in Cara’s hand.
“Sober up and when you realize how big of a dick you’ve been to me tonight, maybe I’ll talk to you. But don’t you ever think you’ll get anything from me again, unless it has to do with the baby. You can go to hell, Braxton, you jumping to your worthless conclusions tonight tells me one damn thing.”
“What’s that?”
“That I’m glad I realized you’re the asshole you are when I’m only starting to fall in love with you, not after I’d completely fallen, because the pain I feel right now, listening to this bullshit, would tear me to shreds if it happened later.”
I slam back on my heels. Love? Fucking love? Bullshit. Before I can call her on it, she closes the space between us, not because she wants to be close to me, but because I’m blocking her way to the door and her freedom.
And it’s only then, as she gets close, that I see the devastation on her face, in her eyes.
She’s not fucking lying.
I’ve destroyed her.
“Thank you for showing me that the words you told me about treasuring me were just a bunch of bullshit, just like every other man I’ve ever known, except for Jimmy. Thank you for showing me who you really are now, before I was in too deep to get out.”
“Cara,” I say, my voice ragged. My tongue is thick. Holy fuck. How much Scotch did I down tonight?
I reach for her but she slides by me.
I’m too slow to move, and all I see is her backside, her beautiful ass in that dress that in any other circumstance, I’d want to tear off her to get to the prize beneath, and I must be drunk, and stupid, because even now, as pissed as I still am, as hurt as she is, I still want to do that.
“Cara.”
She pulls open the door, and then turns, giving me a blank expression. I haven’t seen it since the night I first brought her here. And it kills me.
Kills me like a damn knife to my chest.
“Graham…that guy I was with tonight? He’s gay. He’s been my friend since we were kids and I’d tell you why I was out with him tonight, instead of with my parents, but you don’t deserve an explanation. Fuck you for not thinking better of me.”
The slam of the door behind her is almost as loud as her parting shot.