The ice-cold beer froze my throat as it trickled down into my stomach. Fall was starting to descend onto the bustling town of San Diego, and even though it had been a month since I’d figured out the deceitful little girl Hailey was, I still couldn’t get my mind off her. The beer wouldn’t wash her memory away, and the hot showers I took wouldn’t scrub away her touch. She’d betrayed me. She manipulated me to gain my help to quell her own guilt for being a bystander while my brother fucking died on the street.

I trusted her with my life, and she threw it back in my face.

Why the hell hadn’t she told me it was her at the bar? What did she think I was going to do, get angry with her? That mass of purple hair came wafting back to my memory as I chugged my beer, choking on the foam it caused and closing my eyes tight. Construction on her gallery was finished, and I never had to see her again, but when I closed my eyes at night, I could see every inch of her, every crevice that shouted its lies to me.

She’d used me for her own healing. She’d used my darkness against me. For all I fucking knew, she could have tracked me down once she got to San Diego. For all I knew, she’d manipulated me to gain my favor and try to help her close her own damn chapter without giving any thought to how she might be making me feel.

I threw the bottle across the room and into the trash can before I reached for another one from the cooler at my feet.

Drew had stopped by not too long ago to brief me about shit with the business. He talked me through the new sites that were starting up and asked me if I had ventured out into the homeless community yet. I told him I still had a couple of weeks to make that happen, but right now, all I wanted to do was finish this cooler of beer and go to sleep.

I figured if I drank myself into a heavy slumber, her body wouldn’t appear below mine in my dreams anymore.

Hailey had tried calling me and texting me. She left voice messages and video messages. She sent me moving pictures that pleaded with me to pick up her calls. She tried everything she could do to get in touch with me, so I blocked her fucking number. I didn’t want to be reminded of the woman who betrayed me. I didn’t want to be reminded of the woman I’d poured my soul out to while she held her deck of cards close to her chest. I didn’t want to be reminded of the woman who overtly won over my heart without giving me a lick of hers, all the way proclaiming from her lips in the throes of passion that she did.

That she had.

She was the ultimate manipulator, and I couldn’t trust a word she’d told me during our relationship.

I cracked open another beer and took a long pull from it. The ice ached my head as I grimaced in the dim lighting of my home. I should’ve never brought her here. I should’ve never fucking let her step foot into this house. Something deep down in my gut screamed the entire time that it was too good to be true and that no woman had ever been as free and happy as Hailey had been without some secretive bullshit underneath. I came with baggage, yes, but I was upfront with that baggage. The moment I was comfortable with her, I’d told her everything about my brother and about how it had torn apart my family. I’d told her about how I held onto guilt that I could’ve done something.

She was the one who could’ve done something, and she fucking let him die anyway.

I closed my eyes and sighed as I settled back on the couch. Nighttime had officially blanketed my side of San Diego, and the only thing I could think about was her. I hated it. I hated all of it. I hated that I wanted to know how she was doing. I hated that I wanted to know how she was feeling. I hated that I still wanted to call her, to hold her, and to writhe above her and listen to her lies flow from her lips. Lies of loving me and cherishing me and proclaiming I made her stronger.

I was nothing but a means to an end for her. A cheap way to get her art gallery up and going so she could showcase some dumbass paintings and quell the pathetic guilt that ravaged her black soul.

Every time I walked into my house, I could smell her. Every time I laid my head down at night, I could feel her. As the beer continued to drip down my throat, I was convinced I heard her voice in my ear. I was convinced her lips were ghosting my earlobe, millimeters away from kissing my cheek.

I love you, Bryan.

“No, you don’t,” I said to the fantasy. “You never did. You used me. You used my guilt and my skills. You used my kindness against me. You used your curves and your eyes and your wild purple hair to draw me in before you trapped me in your grasp.”

I took another long pull of the beer before I threw the glass bottle across the house.

It shattered with an alarming sound against the wall. I reached down for another one and popped it open as tears welled in my eyes. I couldn’t get rid of her no matter how hard I tried. She couldn’t call, and she couldn’t text. She didn’t dare come over, though there were mornings I could’ve sworn I heard her voice outside my front door. She couldn’t reach me in any of the ways she needed to in order to communicate, but she was there every single fucking time I closed my eyes.

I could see her sparkling eyes and the way they melded with the ocean. I could see her bright pink hair beckoning for my fingers. I could see her lips, wanton with a desire for me to kiss them. I could feel her body writhing against mine as I woke up with erection after erection, trying to think of anything but her so they would go away.

That’s when I realized I had to cut all of her out of my life. I had to get rid of everything that made me think of her. I replaced the carpeting we fell onto when we’d first made love in my house. I replaced the couch I’d kissed her on time after time. I replaced the mattress and sheets we’d repeatedly fell into so we could savor each other’s bodies.

I bought wax warmers for every single room of this gigantic, lonely home, trying to erase the ghost of her scent from my nostrils.

I even gave up my drawing. I couldn’t delve into it without thinking of her. I couldn’t start drawing a pattern without wondering what she would’ve thought about it. I couldn’t even begin to think about colors without automatically wanting to incorporate purples and pinks and browns and oranges, all the colors that reminded me of her while she’d fluttered around and bulldozed my entire life.

As I drained my third beer and let the bottle slide to the ground, I picked up yet another one as my mind drifted back to our last conversation when the truth had poured out while she sobbed at my feet. I’d felt no compelling pull to lift her off the ground. She’d collapsed at my feet with her head in her hands, sobbing her apologies and trying to tell me what had happened. She’d concocted some story about my brother being killed or some shit, but I knew that wasn’t true.

My brother wasn’t capable of pissing people off like that.

Everything that had come from her mouth had been a lie. From the moment I first met her, our entire relationship had been founded on shit that didn’t exist. I had no precedent that told me she could’ve been telling the truth. I couldn’t trust the way she begged me to come back, the way she begged me not to leave. I had no choice but to believe that she was simply feeding me more lies, so I would stay and continue to help her.

My brother wasn’t capable of pissing someone off so much they’d want him dead nor was he clean when he died. I’d seen him three months before when I was trying to convince him to move back to San Diego and move in with me so I could take care of him and help him get back on his feet. It was the only time we’d ever had a shouting match about anything. My brother was boisterous but never angry. Even with the parents who’d raised him and cast him out when he first started doing and dealing drugs, he’d never held outward animosity toward anyone.

He hadn’t been murdered, and he hadn’t been clean when he died.

It’d taken me years to come to that conclusion and to accept that he died face-down alone in an alleyway with heroin coursing through his veins. No matter how far he’d run from his demons, they always seemed to catch up with him. Through the course of my brother’s life, I’d watched him get clean three times.

I was well aware of what he looked like when he was clean, and three months before he overdosed, he was definitely not clean.

Hailey’s last-ditch effort to save our little tryst had been pathetic. On her knees in the fucking dirt, unable to admit what she’d done while looking me in my eyes. After all the manipulation and all the bullshit, she was still unable to look me in the eye and admit when she had been caught.

Found out.

Defeated.

She was weak, and I didn’t need anyone like that in my life.

That’s what Hailey was for me. My heroin. A drug I had to get out of my system. I’d lost myself in her like John had lost himself in his own drugs. I swam in her eyes the way he swam in his high. I melted into her and thought she could heal me like John thought that needle could heal him. I allowed the beer to flow along my tongue as my body detoxed from her, flushing her from my system while replacing her memory with another sensation, a dull sensation that relaxed my body the way she used to.

And what if Hailey had been telling the truth? What if she had been there? Holy fuck, if her words were true, then that meant she was standing right around the fucking corner while my brother had struggled. All this time, I’d convinced myself my brother died alone. Without anyone to help him or surrounded by anyone he loved. If Hailey was telling even a partial truth, that meant she had fucking been there.

That meant she held his hand while he’d died alone and suffering, and she never once stepped forward to contact us.

I drained my beer and threw it behind me, listening to it smash along the tile flooring of my kitchen as I groaned. I had no more energy to be angry. I had no more energy to fight this. I had to let the memory of Hailey run its course. I had to flush her out of my system, and then I could get back to business as usual. I could be done with this leave of absence Drew insisted I take, and I could get back to running my life the way I saw fit.

But a knock at the door pulled me from my swirling thoughts, and I got up and stumbled toward the door.

I looked through the peephole and saw a mound of jet black hair. I sure as hell wasn’t opening the door for anyone tonight, but I was curious. I didn’t know anyone with hair like that. But as the figure stepped back and the face of the person came into view, every single atom of my body vibrated with fury as her eyes connected directly with mine.

Hailey was standing on my fucking porch.

The nerve of that woman to come here, thinking I’d open this door for her. The balls it took for her to just waltz up here and knock on my door like I wasn’t actively attempting to avoid her. I’d blocked her number, what fucking larger sign could she need from me?!

“Bryan!” she called out as she knocked on the door. “I know you’re in there.”

I backed away from the door and dragged myself back to my couch. I sat down while she tried peering through the windows, squinting to see if she could catch a glimpse of movement behind the curtains I’d drawn. I’d cut out everything, all the sunlight and all the noise from the city of San Diego. I didn’t want a bit of the outside world touching me while I tried to cope with all the shit that had gone down between me and her, and here she was shouting her beautiful voice and filling the corners of my house even as she stood outside.

“Bryan, we really need to talk. Please open up.”

I cracked open another beer and sank heavily into the couch. I guzzled it down, no longer tasting the burning sensation of alcohol as it rushed down my throat. I could feel my eyes growing heavy as she continued to knock and shout, but her words were fading into the background while sleep slowly overtook my body.

Her incessant knocking wouldn’t stop, and I couldn’t slip into my drunken state of sleep until she left.

Finally, she stopped knocking. I heard the rustling of paper behind the door before she walked off, and I waited until her car drove away before I got up. I tossed the empty beer bottle into the trash can as I stumbled over to the door, opening it up to see what the hell that sound was. I breathed a sigh of relief at the absence of her presence, but as I looked down at my feet, I took in the sight of the brown paper.

Judging from the size of it, even in my drunken stupor, I could tell it was a painting.

I picked it up and took it back into the house. I crunched over the broken glass that would be left there for me to clean tomorrow morning as I made my way into the kitchen. I set the wrapped painting down on the kitchen island and slowly began to unwrap it. Layer by layer, I peeled back the brown paper to reveal the one picture that had started this all.

The picture my brother had painted of our cabin in the woods.

Suddenly, I felt tears dripping down my cheeks. I didn’t know where they came from nor could I feel my chest lurching with sobs, but as they fell onto the painting I closed my eyes. My mind threw me back to the summers we spent at the cabin, summers my brother and I spent exploring the woods, running from snakes, and eating fresh blackberries from our own personal, secret vine we found. I smiled at the image of John with blackberry juice on his face, his hands covered in black and purple stains as we made our way back to the road.

I didn’t even know if that cabin was still there anymore, much less if anyone ever used it.

This cabin was my link to John. This painting, it was how I wanted to remember him. My fingers danced along the two boys playing in the shadow of the cabin as my heart clenched with sadness. Sadness and anger and despair and fury. If she thought this was somehow going to smooth things over, she was sorely mistaken, but something inside of me was happy I now had this painting.

I wasn’t exactly sure what to do with it. I pushed it off to the side as my mind finally began to slow down, the alcohol in my system dulling my senses. I went back to the couch and flopped down, pulling a blanket over me as I kicked off my shoes. I didn’t know if I should keep it, hang it in the office, or try giving it to my parents.

I wasn’t sure why I was still trying to smooth things over with my parents anyway. They were lying, pompous assholes, but at least they were forthcoming about it. You always knew what you were getting yourself into with them. They were unapologetically dickish.

But Hailey had been a surprise.

She had been a manipulative liar underneath all those layers of freedom and spirit.

I felt my stomach rolling with sickness as I closed my eyes and took deep breaths.

But instead of seeing her body tonight, I saw John and me at the cabin, running around outside and chasing lightning bugs as we tried to catch them in our hole-punched jars.

I didn’t wake up with an erection, but I did wake up with tears in my eyes and glass glistening on the floor, mocking me as if my entire life was a joke.