I wake up with a start at 5:12 a.m., wide-eyed and completely sober. My mouth is so dry it’s sticky, and my head feels like it’s filled with cotton made of pain and a jackhammer, like a pneumatic press is squeezing at my temples.

I roll over and my stomach rebels, bile rising in my throat so fast that I clap both hands over my mouth because I’m afraid of what might happen. My arms and legs feel like they’re made half of cardboard, half of lead as I bolt to Liam’s bathroom, slam the toilet open, and puke my guts up.

It feels like I puke for an hour, I swear. By the end I’m just drawing up stomach acid, then dry heaving, retching with nothing coming up like a giant hand is wringing me out. Finally, it stops and I rest my forehead on the toilet seat even though I know it’s probably disgusting, trying to breathe and stop shaking.

What did you do, I think to myself. What the fuck did you do?

I’m freezing. My whole body is quivering, and I feel worse than awful. Slowly, I uncurl from where I am, sit on the ice-cold tile floor, lean back against the wall. I swallow convulsively, again and again, because my mouth tastes beyond foul.

The past few days are a blur, like a film with a broken projector that speeds up, slows down, speeds up. My memory is either too slow or two fast, time bent and broken. I reach out and flush the toilet, watch my former stomach contents swirl downward because I’m too exhausted to look away.

I left Alistair.

Right. I know that. That part’s kind of unforgettable.

I left him in a letter, leaving my ring behind, probably the shittiest possible way to leave someone you’ve been with for three years. Jesus, someone you were engaged to.

And got drunk and fucked someone else. Not two hours later. Oh God.

Who the fuck does that?

Not me. I mean, even in my less-than-pristine current state I know that I did do that, but thinking about it is like thinking about another person. Someone more daring than me and more fun than me who does crazy things like go on a two-day bender with a hot English guy she barely knows.

And I don’t feel good about it. Maybe I will someday, but right now my mouth tastes like vomit and all the distances in this tiny bathroom seem wrong, not to mention that my stomach is still rolling and I feel like someone’s stabbing an icepick into my cerebellum.

I force myself off the floor before I freeze to death, wash my hands, splash off my face. I walk back to the bedroom and peek around the door frame, looking at Liam, uncovered to the waist since the heat in his room must be turned all the way up.

I have no fucking idea what the truth of the matter is. Everything is too tangled up in my head for me to make sense of it, here, in some strange cottage at five o’clock in the morning. Deep down, I know that everything’s not resolved with Alistair — I left him a damn letter, it can’t possibly be that easy, it’s never that easy — and I feel like now I’ve dragged Liam into this, the day after he got fired for being nice to me.

Jesus. This is going to get around too, and then I’ll really have fucked him over.

I rub my eyes, another wave of shivers and nausea passing through me, and suddenly I know exactly what I want.

I want to go home.

I need to go home. I’ve been gone for a long time, and nothing here in this stupid country makes any sense, least of all me, and I’m tired of it. I’m tired of trying to figure out whether British people are joking or not, whether I’m being made fun of, or whether they’re just like that.

I’m tired of driving on the wrong side of the road. I’m tired of calling fries chips and chips crisps, and I’m tired of everyone here acting like the thing they call biscuits are in any way equivalent to cookies.

They’re not. Biscuits are fine, but cookies are amazing, and England is really missing the fuck out.

And most of all I’m sick of not knowing myself, because I didn’t think I was the kind of girl to jump into bed with a guy she barely knew after breaking off a three-year relationship, but I think we may have set some sort of sex record in the past few days, so here I am.

Liam’s eyes flutter half-open just then and he looks at me, unfocused.

“Come back,” he mumbles.

“I gotta pee,” I say, and that seems to work because he goes back to sleep.

I duck around the corner and put my hands over my face.

What am I doing? I think to myself, over and over again.

This isn’t right, it’s not normal, it’s not what I do.

The thought leaves a sickly, sticky feeling in my chest. A deep feeling of having done something unnameably wrong.

I can’t bring myself to get back into his warm, cozy bed. Not in the harsh, excruciatingly sober darkness of nearly-morning, when I feel like everything I’ve done in the past two days has somehow been monstrous and wrong.

Even though he’s strangely beautiful when he sleeps, the lines of his muscles and tattoos fading softly into the deep shadows of the blankets. Even though this was amazing, and even though the amazing part wasn’t just the sex. I think I might like Liam, for real, but whatever I feel about that right now is overridden by everything else.

I grab my clothes, dress in his cold hallway, try to convince myself that I’m doing this for Liam. That I’m going to leave because he deserves better than my miserably confused self, that he needs someone nice and tidy who won’t clutter his life like I would.

Yeah, it’s bullshit, and I know it’s bullshit even as I tell it to myself. I’m leaving because the strongest impulse in the tangle of my heart right now is to go home, go where I feel like I know what I’m doing and I can start from there.

I want my apartment, my bed, my sewing machine, my friends. I want to drown in work again and see my parents every other week and avoid weirdos on the subway.

I’m not even telling him goodbye. I don’t know how to explain that this was great but I’m at the end of my rope right now, I don’t even know what I’m doing.

I slip on my socks and shoes in the kitchen, find my jacket, pull it on quietly. Before I leave I glance one more time at Liam through his door, still sleeping, and it feels like a lead ball rattling around in my heart.

There was one bright spot here, and I’m leaving him while he sleeps?

His kitchen’s got a sideboard, and on it there’s an unopened envelope and a marker, so I write him a note. I leave my phone number, and I put it next to the sticky, dried wine that I spilled last night.

Then I leave Liam’s cottage, the sun not even close to up yet.

* * *

I leave the Toyota in the car park at the Brougham train station, then haul both my huge suitcases onto the first southbound train that’ll be making a stop at Manchester International. In the meantime, I discover that there’s a massive red wine stain on my jeans where I sat in it two nights ago.

It makes me pause. It makes me consider getting off the train, going back to Brougham, driving back to Liam’s cottage and crawling into bed with him. Maybe he’s not even awake yet.

I don’t. I remind myself that he has my phone number, and maybe he’ll call.

Even though he’s kind of an asshole, he’s probably going to be pissed that I didn’t say goodbye, and I’m perfectly aware that our drunk-and-stoned sex bender might have been just that and nothing more, maybe he’ll call.

I tell myself that over and over — he’ll call, phones work across oceans, if you end up wanting this to work out maybe it will — but I also know how fucking unlikely it is that we’ll be anything other than increasingly distant friends. That’s just what happens, even if he calls in the first place, and my heart sinks just knowing it.

To distract myself, I pull out my phone, thinking I’ll go ahead and find a flight now, on the way to the airport, but it’s dead. Of course it’s dead, I was way too wasted to remember to charge it at Liam’s, and the train doesn’t have an outlet.

I wake up a few hours later, when we finally get to Manchester Airport, and it takes me way too long to remember where I am.

Then I throw up a few more times in the airport bathroom.

* * *

The flight I get has to be the worst possible flight. It changes planes in Frankfurt, Germany, the opposite direction of New York, and then again in Atlanta, but as I pay two thousand dollars I don’t have for the last seat, I don’t even care. I just want to get home and out of this rainy nightmare country.

I’m somewhere over the Atlantic when I jolt awake in my seat with a realization.

Once we got high, we forgot to use condoms.

I throw up in the plane lavatory. It’s the worst place of all.