Chapter Eighteen - Tyler
“You’ve got like twenty different kinds of whiskey, ten different kinds of beer, but no bottles of water…”
She’s looking through my refrigerator and cabinets. I’m sitting on a stool at the island watching her. We’re both still naked. She’s so pretty.
“The fridge has a water thing in it—”
She grabs a glass and goes to press the water button.
“—but I can’t get it to work. Think it’s broken. I need to call a guy.”
She stares at me, smiles and shakes her head.
“The sink works fine,” I tell her.
“Gross. I’m not drinking tap water.”
“You drank my come, but you won’t drink tap water?”
“I don’t know where the water’s from. I got the come directly from the source.” She opens the menu/condom drawer. “But I could be persuaded to boil some… I saw a couple of tea bags when you had the drawer open, and… aha.” Indeed, she pulls out two tea bags. They must have been included with one of the Chinese food deliveries.
“You want a cup of tea?”
And suddenly, I’m having a very uncomfortable moment of déjà vu.
“Hey…” She waves her hand in front of my face. “Tea?” She holds up the bags.
“You sure you don’t just want some whiskey? Beer?” I ask.
She laughs. “No. Normally I would. Usually I do. But I’m trying to… I think I’m gonna lay off drinking for a while. Fresh start. Tomorrow’s gonna be a new day.” She smiles. It melts me.
“Joy cometh with the morning,” I mutter under my breath.
“What’s that?”
“Hm? Oh. Nothing.” Then I add, “But you’re sure you don’t want, like, just some plain old dirty tap water? Anything at all other than tea, maybe?”
She smiles again, but while making a tiny frown with her eyes. “Weirdo,” she mumbles at me. She’s right.
She fills up the electric kettle with water and hits the button to turn it on. “So what happened there?” she asks. She’s referring to the charred toast briquette which I still haven’t bothered to remove from the see-through toaster.
“Oh. Uh, toast. Is. Y’know. Tricky.”
She turns to face me and eyes me with suspicion.
“What? It is,” I say. “Plus, like everything in this apartment, it’s all too fuckin’ fancy to figure out. I think the settings on everything are metric or something.”
She saunters across the narrow channel between the cabinets and the island where just a short time before she was suspended in the air, held aloft by my cock, and leans in across from me. She rests her elbows on the counter and I very cautiously place my forearms down and allow the tips of my fingers to touch hers. She doesn’t pull away. Which makes me happy.
Then she takes a deep breath and says, “So… like, serious question?”
I tap my fingers on hers and nod, “Sure. OK.”
“What do you do to afford this place?”
“The lumberjack game is crazy lucrative,” I say.
“Seriously, dude. Are you, what? High-stakes poker player? Drug trafficker? Please don’t be a fucking drug trafficker. I don’t need that shit right now.”
“No.” I laugh. “I’m not… uh… I kind of helped invent a thing that we… or I… was able to sell to the government for a shitload of money, but like also I kind of was able to hold onto the patent so that I could sell it to private corporations for their own applications and shit and I also got to keep an ownership stake and royalties and blah, blah, blah, whatever, I made a bunch of cash.”
She nods. “What is it?” she asks. “What’d you invent?”
“Just… me and this other guy, Nadir, we… do you know what EOD stands for?”
“Um… Excited Orgasmic Dicks?”
God, I think I love this girl.
“No.” I laugh. “I mean, yes, but in this case… Explosive Ordnance Disposal. It’s like a job in the military that’s there to keep shit from blowing up on people.”
“… OK.”
“So, yeah, so it’s a fucked-up, dangerous job, and me and this other guy invented this, like, Artificial Intelligence Augmentation—or, like, I kind of thought of it and then he figured out how to actually make it work—but this thing that could be applied to the robots they sometimes use to make ’em more, like, intuitive and reliable and whatever, and help eliminate the risk to, y’know, human people. Whatever. It’s not actually all that exciting.”
She’s very, very quiet for a moment. I see her looking at my scars.
After a second, she asks, “Where’s Nadir?”
I don’t answer. Or I do. Just without actually saying anything.
“Yeah,” she says. Then, “So why Vegas?”
“Why—? You mean why’d I move to Vegas?”
“Yeah.”
I shrug. “Dunno. Tried other places. Lived in New York for a while. Kicked around. But I grew up here, so I figured I’d just come home. Plus, y’know, there’s no corporate income tax in Nevada, so… Actually, I don’t really understand that part, but my business manager told me it was a good thing.”
She laughs. Kind of. Then she gets serious again.
“So you grew up here? In Vegas?”
“Yeah. Yeah, ’til I was eighteen and then I split.”
She nods, again, kind of. Then she pulls her hands away from mine so that our fingers are no longer touching. Which makes me not happy. She stares off.
“What?” I ask. “What’s up?”
“I—Nothing,” she says. Then she asks, “Hey, how old are you?”
And suddenly I start to feel hot and a little panicky. “Oh, shit. Fuck me. How old are YOU?” I respond.
She half-laughs. “Relax, man. I’m twenty-five. I’m a big girl.”
“OK. Cool. Sorry, I just—”
“No, I get it, but maybe you should have asked sooner.”
“Well, hell, I dunno. I just figured you work in a strip club so you must be at least—”
“Yeah, no, I got it.”
All of the sudden, it’s awkward. I’m not completely sure why. But it’s gotten quiet and it feels like it’s hard to talk. I’m not sure what to say. But I try.
“So where are you from?” I come up with.
She eyes me, still with some reservation. “Vegas,” she says, finally.
“No shit,” I say. “Where’d you go to high school? I mean, we probably would’ve missed each other, but—”
“What did you mean, you dreamed about me?” she interrupts.
Things are very testy all of a sudden and I don’t like it. I also wish that I hadn’t told her that I dreamed about her. Because I cannot tell her what THE DREAM is all about. Best-case scenario, she thinks I’m crazy (I AM, of course, crazy, but I don’t want HER to think that) and fucking takes off on me. Worst-case scenario, even just talking about THE DREAM brings it into reality somehow and it plays out in real life, here in my kitchen. I don’t know the metaphysics of dream-to-reality science, but I don’t need my whole world going up in flames. Especially not tonight. Not on this night of all nights. Not on this night where for the first time in years, I feel something other than shame, and misery, and regret. So I decide to see if I can get this train back on the tracks.
“I didn’t mean anything. Hey, how long you been stripping?” I say. (Smooth, Tyler. Nice work.)
She squints. Like she’s sizing me up. Like she’s trying to figure something out.
“Not long,” she says. “So where were you headed when you picked me up?”
I pause. Then, “I dunno. Just driving. I was maybe gonna get out of town. Fuckin’ hate Halloween.”
She shifts her neck back. Like she’s pulling away. “Why?” she asks.
I don’t understand why things are weird, but something inside me is telling me that too much truth right now would be a bad thing. I want to tell her the truth. I do. I want to tell her everything about me, but she’s getting skittish and I know exactly what the air feels like before a bomb explodes, and that’s how the air in this room feels right now, so I’m keenly aware that I should move ahead carefully.
“Just, you know,” I start, “Halloween just feels like an excuse for idiots to play pretend that they’re something they’re not. Dudes get to act like superheroes even though they aren’t and girls dress up like whores and prance around like it’s funny or…” Shit. That seems to make her bristle a bit, so I add, “Present company excluded.”
She still very much does not smile but we’re in Vegas, so fuck it, I double down.
“I mean it! You look like… well, shit… you look like an angel. You’re just… you’re beautiful, and you’re kind, and you’re smart, and you’re funny, and when I saw you standing in the road like that, you really did look like an angel fallen from Heaven. And, I dunno, I probably sound hokey, but whatever. I think you’re amazing. And so, y’know, thank you. Because you helped me hate Halloween just a little bit less.” I smile.
She sighs, bows her head, and peers up at me through her eyelids.
“Listen, it’s true. And you know what? You can believe that or not if you want, because…” I put on what can only be described as a fucking terrible Rhett Butler impersonation and say, “Frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn.”
She half-smiles, half-looks confused.
“It’s from Gone with the Wind. ’Cause, y’know, ‘cause you’re Scarlett, and—”
“Yeah, I, I get it,” she says.
She still seems annoyed. I shrug, “Sorry. I like movies.”
I stare down at the floor. I feel like a little kid who got his hand caught in the cookie jar. I’m trying so hard not to fuck everything up but somehow, I’m failing. And I am immediately hyper-conscious that we are both still naked.
She takes a long breath and then slowly approaches the counter again.
“I’m sorry if I’m being weird. I just kinda hate Halloween too.”
“Yeah? Why do you?”
She takes a long pause, studies my face, and then says, “Same reasons.”
The bell on the kettle dings.
“Top shelf, bottom left cabinet,” I say, meaning that’s where she can find a mug.
She turns, pulls a mug from the shelf, places one of the tea bags in, and begins pouring the hot water. The steam rises up around her head, creating the illusion from behind of smoke coming off her fiery red mane. Then she places the kettle down and continues holding the mug. She doesn’t turn around. Her shoulders lift as she takes in a deep breath, and then fall as she releases it. Then she asks…
“What’s your name?”
My heart starts racing. Fast. Like real fast. Like holy fucking shit, I’m having a heart attack fast. Then I wonder if I am having a heart attack. Maybe I am. But they say that when you have a heart attack you’re supposed to smell the smell of toast. And I don’t. Smell toast. Or is that for a stroke? And does it matter? Because there’s burnt toast still in the toaster, so couldn’t it just be that I’m smelling that toast? Which I’m not. Smelling toast, that is. So I can’t be having a heart attack. Unless that’s not the smell. Fuck!
“Sorry. What?” I ask as calmly as I can.
“I said… what’s your real name?”
I don’t know why this is freaking me out. This is what I wanted. I’ve wanted to know her and to have her know me. I think. No. I know it. I know I have. I really, really, really like this angel. Shit, maybe I love this angel. I don’t know if that’s possible, but it’s the feeling I feel. I think. Fuck. A. Duck. OK. She’s asked a simple question and I should just give a simple answer. It’ll be awesome. Now she’ll know me and then I’ll get to know her, and we can start building our perfect life together. Because that’s how this is supposed to go. Because it has to. Because I’ve earned it.
Because I’ve earned it.
“… Um… Tyler,” I say. “My name’s Tyler Morgan.”
— There’s a famous moment in the movie The Usual Suspects. It’s right at the very end. It’s the moment where Detective Dave Kujan, played by Chazz Palminteri, discovers who the mysterious Keyser Söze is and that he’s been talking with him, alone in a room, just the two of them, for the whole movie. He realizes suddenly that this entire time, he’s been conversing with an entity of pure evil. An unrepentant, unforgiving, unconscionable myth of a demon whose only function here on earth is to hurt and punish and to serve his own base, selfish wants and desires. He has been communing with the devil himself. And that moment of realization is symbolized by the coffee mug Detective Kujan has been holding, slipping, in slow motion, from his grip and falling to the floor where it shatters into pieces just as his understanding of reality and the world he occupies shatters along with it. —
That exact thing, to the letter, is what happens now, in my kitchen.
The mug goes crashing to the floor, spilling hot tea as it shatters around her feet. I jump up from my stool.
“What! What’s wrong? What happened? Are you OK?”
She places both hands on the edge of the sink in front of her and her shoulders begin heaving and convulsing. I can tell she’s hyperventilating. I jump up to come around and see if she’s OK. She raises her right hand in the air, palm toward me, and shouts, “No!” I stop in my tracks.
“Don’t!” she yells. “Don’t you fucking come near me!”
I think I am having a fucking heart attack. For real.
“I—I—” I stammer, like an idiot. “I don’t—What’s wrong?”
I can sort of see, as I try to peek through the shroud of red hair that drapes her face, that tears have started streaming down her cheeks. She’s attempting to get her breathing under control, gasping air and swallowing.
She wails, “Oh, God. Oh, my God. Oh, dear fucking Jesus God, WHY!!!???”
I’m seriously about to lose my shit. I’ve never felt like this in my life. Not even in combat.
“Please,” I plead, “Please, please, please tell me what’s wrong. Please…”
She takes two more short, sharp breaths, and then she turns to face me, eyes filled with tears, cheeks as fire-red as her flaming hair, and she screams right in my face…
“IT’S MADDIE! I’M FUCKING MADDIE CLAYTON, TYLER!”
—There’s a reason I’ve watched a lot of movies. Escape. As a kid, after my mom died, I needed to get away sometimes, so I’d escape to the movies. Evan, Scotty, and I could sometimes sneak from one theatre to the next and spend all day there. And then when I was deployed, we all would watch movies a lot. Same reason. When you’re not on patrol or on a mission, there’s not always a fuck-ton to do so watching movies is a good way to escape your shitty situation and kill time. So now, all these years later, I still think of things kinda cinematically from time to time. And there’s an effect they use in like horror movies and stuff, especially older ones, where they’ll like move the camera backwards while pushing the lens forward and it makes it feel like the character on screen is being pushed and pulled at the same time or falling away and getting closer all at once. It’s always that moment when someone’s world has just been turned upside down… I can’t see my face right now, but I know that’s what’s happening to me.—
“Oh, fuck!” I scream. “What the fuck?”
“Oh, God, oh, God, oh, God,” she keeps saying. And the worst part about it is that I heard her say those same words a little while ago, but with a very different meaning.
“Oh, fuck,” she goes on, “oh, fuck, oh, fuck, oh, fuck.” And then she starts coughing. And then she leans over my beautiful, fancy, industrial-looking, stainless-steel sink… and she throws up.
Maddie Clayton. Maddie Clayton, the kid I last saw when she was thirteen years old and I was driving out of town. Maddie Clayton, the adorable, fresh-faced little over-achiever I used to marvel at because she was smarter everyone else, even then. Maddie Clayton, who always looked at me like I was the coolest guy on the block, and who you could just tell was gonna do great things one day. Maddie Clayton, WHOSE HAIR WAS LIKE MORE OF A REDDISH-BROWN! WASN’T IT?
Maddie Clayton. My dead best friend Scotty Clayton’s baby sister.
Here.
With me.
Caught in an eruption of flame that consumes us both.
“What the FUCK?” I exclaim, over and over—and over—as I pace frantically but aimlessly, both hands running through my hair, trying to pull my brain from my skull.
Maddie has finished throwing up and is now sitting on my kitchen floor. I approach her. “Don’t you fucking come near me!” she lets out. I stop. Again. I put my hands out in a gesture that says, ‘I’m staying here, see?’ as I lower myself to the floor in kind.
We both take a moment to try to figure out… fuck… anything. After what feels like a while, she goes first.
“When the fuck did you come back?”
“I… few months ago.”
She nods her head and gives an air-snort-laugh kind of a thing.
I decide to keep talking. “I didn’t know you were still here. Evan told me you guys moved to, like, Monaco or something a few years back.”
She shakes her head. “Mom and Dad. I stayed.”
“Fuck me. Evan said he hadn’t talked to you in… and that he thought that… Shit. I didn’t know.”
She looks at the wall. She looks back. After a beat she says, “You’ve seen Evan?”
I nod. “Yeah. He’s pretty much the only person I see. Him and my shrink. That’s it.”
“Fuck you,” she says over a bitter laugh. And now all the things that I liked when they were exclaimed at me sound harshly different.
There’s so much, I don’t know where to start. I go with, “What the fuck are you doing working at a strip club?”
I wish I hadn’t started there.
“Oh, Jesus, fuck you. Go fuck yourself,” she responds. Which seems fair.
“Dammit,” I say in return, “Maddie… I… look, there’s clearly a lot to… but… listen, are you in like trouble or something? Those guys who were—?”
“No!” She stops me. “No. You do not get to ask me questions. You get that? You do NOT.”
I nod. I’m stumped. I don’t know what my next play is here. So I just wait. Finally…
“What happened to you?” she asks.
I look up. “What? Whatayou mean? All this shit?” I point up and down at my scars.
“No. I could fucking give a shit. I assume you must’ve almost gotten killed. Which would be a much better sentence if I could take the word ‘almost’ out of it.”
Ouch.
“I mean… you know… one of the things I remember about you most was how goddamn rah-rah you were about loyalty. You remember that shit? How you and Scotty and Evan were the fuckin’ Three Musketeers and how loyalty is the most important thing in the world and how… what was that shit you used to talk? All that hoorah, military bullshit about like, ‘be whoever you are, just be there for me when I need you’ or whatever it was?”
Hearing my own bullshit mantra thrown in my face like that hurts worse than any goddamn explosion could ever feel. I’d take getting blown up a hundred more times over what’s happening to me right now.
“So,” she continues. “So. What. Fucking. Happened?”
I have nothing to say.
“You were family. And you just… you were a ghost… in the wind. I sent you emails. I tried to call you on a damn sat phone. I wrote letters! Like actual fucking letters to a dude at war like it’s 1942, and I never heard back from you. I don’t know if you can even start to get your head around how fucked up that is, but it’s pretty damn shitty. So it’s a simple question. What happened to you?”
Here’s what happened. I felt guilty. I felt like a piece of shit. I felt like it was all my fault and I was too ashamed to tell you all. I felt like I could’ve saved Scotty and I failed. I felt like I would have to answer questions and own up and be responsible. I felt like my life was over too and so I threw myself headlong into work, hoping I could make it a reality. I became reckless. I tried to get myself killed. And then instead I got even more people killed. That’s what happened.
I’m sorry.
But, of course, I say none of that. Instead… I shrug.
She goes stock still for, I’m not exaggerating, ten full minutes. Then…
“I gotta get the fuck out of here.” She stands. And—and I know this is fucked up, I do, but—she looks so sexy, naked, and angry, and spent, standing there in front of me. I just want to grab her and fuck her and pretend none of this is real, and that what is real is that she’s Scarlett and I’m Ford and we can live happily the fuck ever after.
But that shit ain’t the truth. The truth is… I’m fucked.
“I need clothes,” she says. “Gimme some goddamn clothes.”
I nod slightly and stand up. “Bedroom,” I say.
I walk into the bedroom. She stops outside the doorway. I reach into a dresser drawer and toss her the first t-shirt I find. A white Reservoir Dogs t-shirt. One of the ones with all the characters wearing their suits and walking and smoking.
“Really?” she says. I shrug yet again. “Fuck it. Give it to me.” I toss her the shirt.
“Pants?” she asks.
“Um,” I say, “Shit. I dunno if—” I start looking through drawers trying to find anything that might fit her. “Uh, I don’t think… I might, um—” Suddenly I find a pair of women’s yoga pants in my hand. “Oh. Here,” I say and toss them to her.
“What the hell are you doing with these?” she rightly asks.
“I dunno. Not sure. Somebody musta left ’em, I guess.”
She takes them and, with disgust, puts them on. Then she heads for the front door.
“Wait,” I say, following. “You don’t have shoes and you can’t—Where are you going anyway?”
She turns, fiercely. “I’m gonna go see if my car is still there, which I’m sure it isn’t because I left my bag in it and my keys inside, which is perfect because that means my house has probably now been robbed too, but you know, Tyler? Even with all this…” And then she points me up and down. “I mean even with ALL this, this isn’t the worst Halloween I’ve ever had.”
I know what she’s going to say. Of course I do. The worst Halloween she had was seven years ago, when Scotty died.
“The worst Halloween I ever had was six years ago, the year after Scotty died.”
Oh. Guess I didn’t know.
“Because, and there’s no way you’d know this, I guess, but…” She takes a breath. It’s clear she doesn’t want to say whatever it is she’s thinking.
I tell her, “If you don’t feel like—”
“Shut the fuck up,” she says. I do. She stares at the floor, fills her lungs with oxygen, and begins.
“I don’t know how I made it through that first year. I really don’t. Partially because I was drunk and high for a lot of it. But I did. I muscled through. Even managed to pull a 2.5 GPA, which… I mean not flunking out was a miracle in and of itself.”
“Why didn’t you just take some time off? Don’t they let you—?”
“I said shut. Up.” I do. Again. She continues. “And I figured all I had to do was take the summer after that first year of school, pull my shit together, and then I could go back the next fall, kick ass, and show myself what I was made of. Because that’s what Scotty would have done, right? That’s who my brother was. He never quit. He never backed down no matter how hard something got. He never gave up.”
She pauses, I’m assuming to give me a chance to say something stupid again, but I refrain. She resumes.
“I had no idea if you were aware of any of what was going on at the time because all my calls were unanswered and my emails and letters didn’t get responses, but I kept writing them and making the calls and trying, because I felt like I was at least sharing with somebody. Somebody who could maybe understand. Somebody I—Whatever. You know how my parents are, so…”
I’m getting the sickening feeling that I know where this is going and I’m starting to feel very, very ashamed right now.
“So even though you never responded or tried at all—and I didn’t know then if you were reading the letters and just choosing not to respond, which is shitty, or ignoring them altogether in the first place, which is worse—but even though I never heard back, it made me feel OK to at least pretend that there was someone out there helping me through. But. That illusion got dispelled for me on this day, six years ago. Because on that day, the one-year anniversary of my brother’s death, I came home—I was living back at home—to be greeted with the news that Dad had accepted a new job and that my parents were moving to fucking MONACO. Which, I’m sure you’ll understand, was quite a shock. And I think I was still a little in shock when I went to the mailbox to find that the last letter that I ever tried to send to you had come back to the house marked ‘Return to Sender.’ With a handwritten note on the back—in, I presume, your handwriting—that read, ‘Please stop sending me letters.’ This sound familiar at all?”
She’s trying to look me in the eyes, but she can’t because they’re facing the floor, my chin buried into my chest.
“Yeah. And for whatever it’s worth, I poured my guts out in that letter. Oh, man, I really did. I said all kinds of shit. Shit about how I was feeling then. How I had been feeling for the last year. How I felt about YOU. How I had felt about you for a long time. How—even though I was a kid when you left—I had kind of always thought I loved you—”
That snaps my attention back up.
“Oh, yeah. Oh, yeah. I said ALL that shit. And I meant it. I meant every word of it. I don’t wanna brag, but as letters to soldiers at war go, man, it was right up there with the all-time greats. Shame you never got to read it.”
And this is how the world ends. This. Is how the world. Ends.
“And so…” She keeps going. “So that was the night that I realized, ‘Oh, shit. Wow. I am really and truly ALONE in the world.’ And y’know what?”
She takes a long, long breath.
“I guess I kind of have to thank you. Because tonight…” She shakes her head. “Tonight could’ve been really, really awful, but THIS doesn’t even compare to THAT. Oh, it sucks. I mean, sure, it sucks, because I thought maybe I’d met this weird guy who I had some kind of strange, inexplicable connection with and that maybe, just maybe, things might get be getting better for me or they may start turning around or becoming, like, y’know, tolerable. And that, gee, maybe I won’t have to keep rumbling along all by myself, just bouncing off wall after wall until I become numb to the pain. But then it turns out that it wasn’t a real, like, decent human man hiding behind that beard… but you.”
Ouch. Again.
“And so yeah, this BLOWS, but it’s nothing new. I didn’t learn a single new thing. This just reinforces everything I’ve known since that night six years ago…”
She gets close. So close that I can smell myself on her, still. And just like before, it’s fucked up, but my dick twitches a little. And she says, “I’m the only person in this fucking world I can count on.”
She turns.
“So I will.”
And before I can say a goddamn word, she has her hand on the doorknob.
“Maddie, please! Wait!”
And I don’t know why, but she does. She pauses. Head down, hair covering her face, but she pauses and I take my Hail Mary shot.
“I’m sorry! I’m so, so, so, so, so, so very sorry. I was scared. OK? I was scared and I was destroyed, and… and… you talk about being alone? Yeah, I get it. I fuckin’ get it. I feel that way too. Felt that way the whole time I was gone. And I never knew if the next day was gonna be my last, and I was so scared that if, y’know, something happened to me that you—and your mom and dad too, but mostly you—wouldn’t be able to deal. And I did read your emails and your letters. I did. But they were hard. They were hard for me. Because I was over there and you were here and I hadn’t seen you in so long, but I could hear in the writing and in the things you said that you had become this amazing, special, really cool woman and it hurt. It hurt my heart for you because I knew you were hurting and I… I know me, Maddie. I do. I know myself. There’s no way that I wouldn’t make you hurt worse. Because that shit is what I do. Best case: I die and you have to deal with that loss too. Worst case: I live, show up back in your life and fuck it up some other, terrible way, because that’s what I’m known for. Ask anybody.”
I take a breath so she can say… something, but she doesn’t.
“So, I mean, look, this is obviously some bitter fucking irony here, because what’s happening RIGHT NOW is the very thing I was trying to avoid, but… I’ve changed. Or… AM changing. Am trying to change. And I can make it right. I know I can. I swear. Please. Because everything that I have felt for you over these last couple of weeks have been real. Even though I didn’t know it was you. And you didn’t know it was me! And when you didn’t know it was me, you felt it too! I know you did! So let’s just be those people. Or… those versions of ourselves. Because—and it makes so much sense now!—because I think I may love you, Maddie. Like, I think I’m falling in love with you. YOU. Because, because of course we knew each other. Of course we did. That’s why this feels like it does. Because we have known each other since our old lives, since before all this broken reality for both of us began. So we are connected. Pure. Real. On a cellular level. Somehow, this is what was supposed to happen. I did dream of you. I did. And in my dream you were so ethereal and kind and wonderful. Just like you are now. Just like the real you is now. And I’m SO sorry. And I’ll never be able to say it enough, but we have connected and I think we need each other and better late than never and please just give it a chance. Please. Please… Because I do. I think I love you. I… think I love you, Maddie.”
That’s it. That’s all my inside voice spilling out in an unedited torrent. I have laid myself bare in all ways, and I stand here naked and stripped in all ways, prostrating myself before her. Begging forgiveness for my sins. Asking for her grace.
She continues staring at the floor. Then, out of seemingly nowhere, she says, “Do you know how Scotty died?”
“I—” I do, but suddenly I find myself questioning. “I—I mean, I think… Yeah, I mean, he died trying to save that guy, the other hotshot guy who he pushed out of the way of the falling tree or whatever it was… right?”
A beat as she twists her head slowly back and forth in a tiny shake, before she sighs out and says, “Fuck, man. It’s funny. Some people, y’know, like Scotty? They do all the right things, live with as much integrity as they can muster, try to stand for some kind of… I dunno… principle? Give of themselves to others, sacrifice, live a righteous life, and then at the end of it all they get handed the most horrible kind of fate imaginable. And then other people, shitty people, people with no true north, no guiding principle, no reason for you to believe anything they have to say, and who just kind of do what they want, when they want, how they want without thinking about how it’s affecting other people, people they claim to have love for…” She sniffs a bitter little laugh. “Shit… they get to go to sleep tonight in this fucking penthouse.”
She twists the doorknob, opens the door, steps into the doorframe, and—silhouetted by the shadow of the door on her face, trapped between the light from the hall and the flickering neon lights of Vegas shimmering through the windows onto her cheek—she turns her head enough for me to see her profile, sighs a small sad sigh, and almost inaudibly, she lets free her final, parting words.
“Why did it have to be you?”
And as the door falls softly shut, I close my eyes knowing…
There will be no joy. There will be no morning.