I went home to try and write my damn article, so I wouldn’t lose my job and starve to death. But as I worked my way through the second glass poured from the bottle of painfully cheap vodka I picked up on the way home, my efforts were becoming increasingly weak. In my drunken stupor, I’d taken to writing dirty limericks about Angelica instead of the panegyric I was supposed to be composing.

Gold-digger Angelica Hunt,

Who pulls the occasional stunt,

and thinks that she’s royalty,

and lives so flamboyantly,

Is really a thundering cunt.

A knock on the door shook me loose from my stupor. I glanced over at the clock on my oven. The little glowing, green numbers said it was eleven pm. Aside from pizza, nothing good ever shows up at your door at eleven on a Tuesday. I hadn’t ordered any pizza.

“Go away!” I yelled from my position at my dining table/desk. Sometimes the heroine junkies that lived down the hall forgot which apartment belonged to them. I knew for certain there was no one I wanted to see right now. And there was one person I definitely didn’t ever want to see again.

My phone started ringing a second later. I almost knocked the notebook I was scribbling in to the ground in surprise. It was Nathan. I stared at the door, then back down to my phone, feeling trapped. He could probably hear it ringing, so now he knew I was in here. The call rolled over to voicemail, and the knocking started again.

I let the cycle of knocking and calling repeat three times before I reluctantly got up to open the door. At least I was drunk enough that I was no longer actively hurting, I just wanted to be left alone. Hopefully this would be brief.

“What do you want?” I snapped, flinging the door open so hard it hit the wall and bounced. On the other side of it was Nathan, standing with an enormous bouquet of white, yellow, and pink flowers in my hallway. “Don’t you know what time it is?”

Instead of answering, Nathan stared at me up and down in surprise.

I was wearing my unsexist pajamas: short shorts and an oversized T-shirt. My makeup was an absolute disaster, with destroyed mascara drawing livid black streaks down my face and eyeshadow smeared all around from trying to wipe away the tears. I wasn’t wearing a bra, but I was wearing a pair of pink fuzzy bunny slippers. The point is, I looked good.

“Can I come in?” Nathan asked, glancing nervously down the hall at a few of my sketchier-looking neighbors who were peeking out of their own doors. They were actually harmless, but he didn’t know that.

“Why the hell not?” I said recklessly, as much to myself as to him, “it’s not like you could make this night any worse.”

I turned around and let him follow me in, grabbing my vodka glass and sitting down on my teeny-tiny loveseat.

“Do you have a vase?” Nathan asked, looking confused about what to do with the flowers now that he was inside.

“No, but the trash can is under the sink. Why don’t you just help move this along and put them there? I don’t want your fucking flowers, asshole.”

Nathan set the flowers on the counter and came over to kneel in front of me. I watched him warily and tried to look confident and uncaring when what I really felt was desperate and vulnerable. Still, despite how I was feeling, if he touched me I was going to punch him.

“Zoey, I’m so sorry,” he said sincerely, “after you left we found proof it wasn’t you. I never should have accused you like that. I should’ve told you everything last night and I realize that. It was wrong to lie to you by omission.”

I absorbed his apology in silence. When he was finished, I nodded and then shrugged.

“Ok,” I said, smiling at him tightly, “I’m glad you apologized. I still don’t forgive you and never will. Now leave.”

His lips parted in surprise at my order. What, did he think that would work? That if he came over here with flowers and apologized I would just forgive him and he could feel all better? Fuck that. This isn’t a Disney movie. I wanted him to be miserable with guilt, and then I still didn’t want to forgive him. He tricked me.

“Zoey,” he continued while I sat fuming, trying to ignore him, “you’ve got to believe me, I didn’t want to do any of it. I didn’t really believe it was you. This company means everything to me, and I just didn’t know what else to do. You were the only suspect we had…” He trailed off into silence.

“Whatever Nathan. There was no excuse for pretending like you liked me just to see if you could figure out if I was the hacker. That was cruel. And it was even worse to drag me into that trap tonight.”

Nathan looked completely shocked.

“I wasn’t pretending to like you, Zoey,” he said, and it made me start to leak tears again, “I do like you! I like you a lot… that’s why I couldn’t go through with it last night and ran off. I couldn’t take advantage of you. My intentions weren’t honest, and I panicked.”

I tried to wrap my mind around what he was saying. It made a certain sort of sense. But this explanation relied on Nathan not being a liar, and he’d already lied to me once. I couldn’t just believe that he really cared about me. Maybe everyone with lots of money was as cruel and unfeeling as Angelica.

“Is this how you usually treat women you like? How’s it working for you? Because that’s the most fucked up version of chivalry I’ve ever heard.” I still didn’t believe him. The flowers were nice, but the pie last night was nice, too. Nathan wasn’t trustworthy, and I wouldn’t be lied to by him again.

“No,” he said haltingly, “look, I don’t really know what I’m doing. I haven’t dated anyone in a very long time. I haven’t wanted to. My work has been all-consuming. You have every right to be angry at me. You have every right to hate me. But I wish you wouldn’t.”

I stared at him kneeling on my floor in the middle of the night and wished I could believe him. His blue-green eyes were so wide and earnest, and he had his hands spread out, palm up in desperation. Did he really care? Was he really attracted to me? I shook my head. This was clearly just another trick.

“I’m so glad you believe that I didn’t hack you now that you have proof that exonerates me,” I told him, “but like I said, I don’t think I can forgive you. You should leave. Obviously, I don’t have a lot in this world, but I’ve still got my self-respect.”

I’d started crying again, and I hated that he could see it. My legs had gotten cold without fury to keep me warm, and I pulled a blanket down from around the back of the loveseat and wrapped it around myself. If it had been socially acceptable, or if I’d been just a little more drunk, I’d have burrowed down underneath it and hid my face. As it was, I had to keep on looking into his stupid, handsome one.

“Zoey,” Nathan pleaded, reaching out to touch me but pulling back when I recoiled from his hand, “what would it take for you to forgive me? I don’t want to lose my chance with you.”

I barked a bitter little laugh through my tears. Nathan frowned.

“Lose me? I was never yours to lose. We’ve known each other for all of two days,” I whispered through my tears, “can’t you see I’m exhausted? I don’t feel well. Please just go. Let’s go back to being strangers.”

“Do you want me to make you some tea?” He offered softly, and my heart squeezed painfully in my chest. He looked pained, but it was probably all an act. I wanted to believe him so badly I could practically taste it. Even now, I wanted him to hold me in his arms. I wanted him to want me back.

“You should just leave,” I said, but my heart wasn’t really in it. Sometimes being an optimist really messed with my head. It let me believe things that weren’t really true.

“What if I make you some tea first? Then if you want me to go, I will,” Nathan offered.

I sighed deeply, and he took that as a yes. In truth, I was just too tired to argue. While he was fussing around in the kitchen, I set my head down on the loveseat and watched him. A billionaire astronaut was making me tea in the middle of the night after begging my forgiveness for accusing me of hacking his commercial spaceflight company. Oh, and yesterday we had sex while I was supposed to be interviewing Angelica Hunt. My life had gotten very strange, very quickly. My heart was going to get broken. I just knew it.