I smeared away the condensation on the mirror. The face looking back at me made me regret that I'd cleared the glass. Two jobs and constant auditions were making me look old and tired. I heard Brock's footsteps in the hallway. He barged right into the bathroom without knocking, one of a million annoying habits on a growing list.

I leaned forward to put on my mascara. "I told you to knock first."

He spun the broken knob on the bathroom. "Why don't you get that lazy ass apartment manager to fix this door and all the other crap that's broken?"

"That's not the point. I need privacy in the bathroom, and it's not the lazy ass manager who keeps bursting in on me."

He stood directly behind me and wrapped his arm around my stomach, holding me tight against him. "I've seen every inch of you. What privacy could you possibly need?" He lowered his head to kiss my neck, but I leaned away from his mouth.

"I need to get ready."

He lifted his arms away with a dramatic flourish. "Fine. Fuck, you didn't want me last night either."

"I was asleep, and I didn't even know you were coming. You scared the crap out of me when I woke to a tall figure looming over my bed. So I'm sorry if nearly dying of fright didn't put me in a romantic mood."

He turned to the toilet to pee. Another annoying habit.

"I'm almost done in here. Can't you wait?" I turned to look at him, and that's when I noticed them, four faint red lines on his shoulder. I put down my mascara and walked over to him. My touch startled him.

"Shit, Jane, I nearly just pissed all over the wall."

"What are these red lines from?" I was pushing every possible scenario through my mind. Maybe he squatted down in front of an angry cat, or a garden rake fell against him, or he leaned up against a sharp fence. But none of those outlandish excuses seemed as plausible as the obvious. They were scratches from a woman's fingernails.

He craned his neck as if he could possibly see his shoulder blade. "What red lines?" he asked, and there was a certain amount of alarm in his voice. Which brought me back again to the fingernail conclusion.

"Look in the mirror, and maybe it will jog your memory."

I walked out of the bathroom, no longer wanting to stand in the same room with him. Anger, hurt and jealousy were the emotions I should have been portraying. If I was on stage or lucky enough to be cast in a film or series and the same scene had just played out, I would have been upset, frozen by despair at the thought that my lover had cheated on me. But I wasn't feeling anything but a cold chill.

Brock came into the bedroom and pulled his shirt on quickly, as if that could make me forget the scratches. "It's nothing. I must have rubbed up against something."

I pulled on my work shirt. "Looks to me like you rubbed up against a woman's fingernails." I picked up my phone off the nightstand. There was a text from Russell, my agent.

"Sorry, Jane, you didn't get the part. The casting director said you did a great job."

Russell always tried to end the rejections with a positive note. At first I'd taken those little encouragements as a sign of hope. But with each rejection, I felt my dream of acting floating entirely out of my grasp.

Brock came up behind me and put his hand on my shoulder. "Another rejection?" There was just enough lightness in his tone to assure me that he wasn't feeling any empathy. The opposite, in fact.

"Look, Jane, the company really wants me to manage the Midwest branch. You could find a steady job. Just think how nice it would be to not have to wake to these rejection texts from your agent."

I looked up at him. "I'm not going anywhere with you, Brock. You've got another woman's fingerprints on your shoulder. As far as I'm concerned, this relationship ended a few minutes ago in the bathroom, a fitting place for it."

"Come on, baby, you can't be serious. I don't know where those marks came from. Look, I'll pick up some food on my way home from work tonight, and we'll talk about it over dinner."

"No, I'm getting my new script for the murder mystery weekend today, and I have to study. Let's just give all of this a break. I need it. And it seems you need it too."

Brock was good at looking kind and pleading one second and angry the next. He should have been an actor, I thought wryly. His softened brows sharpened to a point, and that little muscle in the side of his face began to twitch.

"Fuck, you overreact to everything," he snarled.

"Seriously? You have four fingernail marks on your back. Now, I can use my vivid imagination to figure out how that came to be, or I can just face the fact that you are sleeping with someone else. Which means I don't want you in my bed anymore."

He stared down at me, his nostrils wide with rage. "I've got to get ready for work." He stomped down the hallway into the bathroom and slammed the door shut so hard, the broken doorknob popped off.