The good news was that I did finally get some sleep.
The bad news was that all that sleep had completely replenished my tear supply.
Thankfully, no one ever shopped in the Urban Street Wear section of Macy’s on Tuesday mornings because, if they did, they would have left with black mascara smeared all over their new Sean Jean jeans, receipt, and shopping bag. With the entire department to myself and nothing to take my mind off my shitastic situation, except for the ten Christmas pop songs that had been playing on a loop since fucking October, all I could do was think and fold. And cry.
When my manager came over to check the supplies at the cash stand, she took one look at my face and sent me home.
Home.
Like I even had one.
I’d been wearing the same clothes for going on three days, so I decided to go by the apartment to pack up my stuff. I grabbed some empty boxes from the Macy’s loading dock on my way out the door and prayed that Hans wouldn’t be home. I figured the odds were in my favor. He was never around when I lived there, so why should he suddenly turn into a homebody now?
As I drove toward the Midtown Village apartment complex, I cranked up the heat in my car and tugged on the zipper of my flight jacket, even though I knew it was all the way up. I was trembling, and it had nothing to do with the weather. I tried to calm myself down by chain-smoking and visualizing Hans being gone, but when I pulled up to the building and saw his black BMW parked in front, half-lurched up onto the sidewalk with the front windows wide open, I knew all of my positive affirmations had been for naught.
On the verge of a full-blown panic attack, I considered just leaving and trying again later. I wasn’t strong enough to handle another fight. I wasn’t strong enough to handle the one we’d just had. But when I went to shift my car into reverse, the clock on my car stereo told me to stay. It told me that the universe had delivered me to that exact spot at that exact time for a reason, and all I had to do was take the final steps. It told me that it was 11:11 a.m.
Showtime.
I parked and walked over to my door in eerie silence. The birds had all flown south. The crickets and cicadas had hunkered down for the winter. The kids were at school, and their parents were at work, and the autumn leaves that used to crunch underfoot had all been turned to ash. It felt like the entire world was holding its breath as I fumbled with my key and opened the door.
And once the door was open, once the secret was finally out, the earth let out a collective sigh behind me. Car alarms and barking dogs and highway traffic roared to life as I stared at a pair of black patent-leather high-heel boots lying in a heap at the bottom of my stairs.
I’d never truly lost control before. No matter how drunk or high or upset I got, there was always some small part of my brain that stayed awake to babysit the rest of me. To take my makeup off before I passed out. To bite my tongue before I said anything too hurtful. To tell me to pull the car over before I killed somebody.
Evidently, that bitch was off duty.
I raced up the stairs and stopped at the top, swinging my head from left to right. The place was quiet. There was no one in the kitchen or living room. And my art installation of lies had been pushed to one side of the coffee table to make room for an overflowing ashtray, a dozen empty beer cans, and my now-empty bottle of Jack.
That only left the bedroom.
I turned left and darted into the open door a few feet away, then stopped dead in my tracks when I saw my worst fear, played out in black and white. Black hair—his shaggy, hers long and straight, fanned out over her creamy white skin. My black comforter draped haphazardly over their sleeping bodies. Our generic white apartment walls glowing in the mid-morning sun. And his ripped black jeans in a pile by the door.
The sight of Goth Girl in bed with my boyfriend hit me so hard and so fast that I felt as if I’d been physically assaulted. Everything hurt. Everywhere. Shock socked me right in the gut. Rejection delivered a roundhouse kick straight to my head. Betrayal stabbed me in the back, as it does. But it wasn’t until I saw Hans, surreptitiously peeking at me from under his long black lashes as he pretended to be asleep, that outrage cut open my chest and surgically removed his very presence from my heart.
Rushing over to the bed, I yanked the comforter and sheets off in one motion and slapped Victoria as hard as I could on her bare thigh. “Get the fuck out of my bed!” I screamed.
Her dark brown eyes popped open just as I hit her again. Smack! My hand left a satisfying red welt on her ivory skin.
She sat up in a panic, flailing as she tried to scoot backward, clearly not problem-solving well in her hungover, half-awake state.
“I said, get the fuck out of my bed!” I reared back and got one last good hit in, turning her milky thigh into ground beef, before Hans’s strong arms clamped down around mine.
He dragged me, literally kicking and screaming, out of the bedroom, then turned the lock on the doorknob and shut it behind us. I was locked out of my own bedroom. And Goth Girl was locked in.
I don’t know if he even spoke to me. If he did, I was too far gone to hear a word of it. All I remember is screaming obscenities and chucking everything I could get my hands on directly at his head. The heavy crystal ashtray. The remote control. A candleholder. A bigger candleholder. A framed picture of us standing in front of Bigfoot’s tire. Hans’s textbooks. My empty Jack Daniel’s bottle. My ring. I completely destroyed the apartment I’d spent so long cleaning, and Hans just stood guard in front of the bedroom door, deflecting the flying objects with his hands.
Once everything had been thrown and every glass had been smashed and every insult had finally been flung, I collapsed in a heap on the couch, clutched a pillow to my chest, and cried.
Slowly, the rush of blood in my ears subsided and words began to filter in again. The same words, over and over.
“Nothing happened. Nothing happened. I swear, BB. Nothing happened.”
He didn’t call me baby. I wonder if he calls her baby now.
“Hey, will you look at me? Please?”
I peeked over the top of the throw pillow I was hugging. Hans was sitting on the couch next to me and looked me straight in the eye. He hadn’t shaved in days. His eyes were sunken and bloodshot. And he smelled like the bottom of a whiskey barrel. But the emotion pouring off of him was pure and sad and sincere.
“Nothing. Happened.”
“You expect me to fucking believe that?” I pointed in the direction of the bedroom door. “Y’all talk on the phone all the time while I’m gone. Why not fuck while I’m gone, too?”
Hans kept his voice calm and steady, as if he were negotiating a hostage situation with an escaped mental patient. “Victoria and I have been friends since middle school. She and Steven broke up a few weeks ago, and she needed somebody to talk to.”
“I’m sure she did,” I huffed, turning my head away from him.
He was so fucking naive. Goth Girl wanted somebody to talk to, so she called Hans almost every day for two months instead of me or Juliet? Yeah, okay. She clearly wanted his cock, but Hans only ever saw the good in people.
Especially attractive female people in distress.
“BB, look at me.”
“Stop calling me that!”
“You told me to stop calling you baby. Now I can’t even call you BB? What the fuck do you want me to call you?”
“You can call a cab for the fucking whore locked in my bedroom!” I cupped my hand around my mouth and shouted that last part at the locked door behind him.
“BB…”
I glared at him for using my name, and he put his hands up in surrender.
“Nothing happened. I swear. I went to a bar where my buddy works and got hammered. I called Victoria for a shoulder to cry on since she’d just gone through a breakup, and she came up there. We both drank way too fucking much, so I told her to crash here and I’d take her to get her car in the morning.”
“You expect me to believe that a girl who’s been secretly calling you for months got drunk with you, came home with you, and didn’t try to fuck you in my bed?” I yelled that last part in the direction of the bedroom too.
“Look at me. I still have my clothes on.”
It was true. He was wearing boxer shorts, a T-shirt, and even socks. Everything but the jeans that I saw on the floor. Hans never slept with clothes on.
“I gave Victoria a T-shirt and a pair of shorts to sleep in and we passed out.”
Just then, my bedroom door opened a tiny crack, and a pair of raccoon eyes peeked out. “It’s true,” Goth Girl rasped, her voice sounding like glass over sandpaper.
She opened the door a little more, and I saw that she was, in fact, wearing one of Hans’s old T-shirts and a pair of his boxer shorts. Her eye makeup was woefully smeared, she appeared to be even paler than usual, and her thigh had a raised purplish-red patch emblazoned across the front and side of it.
She looked like she’d had an even worse morning than me.
Good.
Goth Girl took a hesitant step out of her prison, then another, then another, until she was standing right in front of me. Kneeling down so that we were eye-to-eye, Victoria took my hands in hers, kissed my knuckles, and began to cry. I didn’t know if it was out of remorse for trying to steal my boyfriend, sympathy for the excruciating pain I was in, or out of mourning for the friendship she’d just fucked beyond all recognition, but I was in desperate need of comfort, so I took it.
Slipping off the couch, I sat on the floor next to Victoria and let her hold me, and together, we wept.
Once we were all cried out, I lit a cigarette and noticed Hans pacing back and forth behind the couch with this thumbnail in his mouth. He looked miserable and confused and utterly fucking useless.
“Why don’t you take her home now? I’m gonna pack up,” I said to him.
Hans looked up with his eyebrows pulled together. “What do you mean, pack up? What are you taking?”
“Um, my shit. I’m moving out. I’m taking my name off the lease too, so you can do whatever the fuck you want with the place. I don’t care.”
“You sure you don’t want some help?” I could tell by his tone that when he said help, he really meant supervision. Hans’s eyes darted all around the room, taking a mental inventory of what was his.
“I’m sure I want you to get the fuck out,” I snapped.
As soon as Hans and Victoria were gone, I picked up my phone, dialed Jason’s number, and told him I needed to borrow his truck.
My only regret is that I wasn’t there to see the look on Hans’s face when he came home to discover that he no longer owned sheets, pillows, lamps, light bulbs, a shower curtain, shampoo, toothpaste, toilet paper, pots, pans, plates, silverware, food, or remote controls.
Fucker.