Matt

“It’s okay, just take a breath. You don’t have to think of everything at once,” I tell her, worried. Her entire body is wired and the tension is just radiating off of her.

“I remember the attack,” she says, looking past me, over my shoulder, at nothing.

I inhale harshly. “He’s in jail. You’re safe.”

“I thought I’d die. The pain was too much.” She just continues to stare blankly. “I wasn’t sure if I was sticky from blood or the ice cream.”

“Let’s go home.”

“Home? I don’t have a home.”

“You do. You have that apartment.”

“I lived in it for two days before I was attacked. I haven’t even unpacked.”

“You have my home. Come home with me—we’ll deal with all of that later.” I try to help her up, but she looks to the side and her eyes narrow. “What?”

She stands, as if on autopilot, and goes straight to one of my father’s old photos. It’s the one of him and Madonna that she admired back then. She takes it off the wall and starts to feel around the frame until she pulls out a small square thing.

“What is that?” I ask, walking to her and plucking it from her hand.

“A bug.”

I run my palm down my face. “You bugged my office?”

She throws it down and steps on it with all her might, then runs out of my office and heads to my brother’s office. Without bothering to knock she barges in.

“What the fu—” my brother yells, startled by her sudden intrusion. She goes behind his wooden desk, forcing him to move over, and starts to feel around the edge of the desk. She takes out another bug and proceeds to destroy it.

“Matt, what is going on?” Nick asks, standing up, utterly confused. But before I’m able to say anything she leaves and heads to my father’s office, which is locked. We’ve been keeping some of the stock of alcohol there since it’s vacant.

“Open it,” she demands.

“April—” I begin. My brother’s right behind me.

“Open it!” she yells hysterically. Tears are streaming down her face. “Now. Open it!”

I look over my shoulder at Nick, who shrugs.

“Open it!” she screeches, and I fumble in my pocket to find the key and open the door for her.

She goes straight to his landline phone, which has been disconnected for the past year, and like a professional takes the phone apart and takes out a bug. Then she kneels behind the desk and takes out another one and puts it on the desk with the first one. Then she goes to the Picasso, feels the back, and takes out a third. She drops the three small mics on the floor and stomps on them over and over, tears running down her face, grunting as she destroys them.

“Sweetheart?” I say cautiously. That startles her as if she had been in some subconscious daze.

“Sweetheart?” she repeats. “I had your club bugged! How can you call me sweetheart?”

“Calm down. It’s okay.”

“No, it’s not okay. Nothing about this is okay!”

Then she looks at me. “Drugs. You snorted cocaine in front of me. Are you still on drugs?”

“Mateo?” Nick hisses from behind me in a tone I’ve not heard come out of his mouth in a long time.

I ignore him and focus on April. “I haven’t touched the stuff since that day. I was pissed. I am so damn sorry about that. That’s not me. Not anymore.”

“You hate me. You said so,” she chokes out as I approach. Her hands are up defensively. “Why did you take care of me all these weeks? Why are you being nice to me? Is this some sort of game? Payback? Oh my God, you called me a whore!”

“What? No! Of course not. I got to know you. The real you. You promised we’d move forward and forget the past. Stay with me here in the present, April.” I approach her slowly. “I like you. I never hated you.”

She collapses to her knees on the floor of my father’s office and begins to cry, big gut-wrenching sobs that tear my heart in half. “Take her home, Matt,” Nick says softly, his voice filled with concern, and tosses me the keys to his car.

I bend down to her and pull her to me. “It’s okay,” I assure her. “You’re okay.”

“It’s not okay. I screwed up your life and my life, and it’ll never be okay.”

“You’re overwhelmed. Everything just rushed in all at once. Let’s go home. Get some sleep. Things’ll feel better in the morning.”

She’s hysterical, and I’m not sure how to calm her down. I lift her up and carry her out. My brother comes to help by pressing the elevator door. Then he clears the way so that we can leave through the back door of the club.

By the time we make it to my house, she’s passed out. I carry her inside and lay her on the bed.

I grab a bottle of water and sit on my couch, shaken by what just happened. What’ll things be like in the morning? My thoughts are all over the place. When she was having her breakdown, my only concern was her well-being. I barely reacted to what she was doing or saying because I was so worried about her. But now it’s crashing down on me. She had my club bugged. I mean, yeah, I understood she was undercover, but it didn’t occur to me that we were bugged. And, Jesus, we had sex in my office. I’m so disappointed and so upset that my hands shake, and the rage I buried begins to bubble back up.

Where else are there bugs? Did she bug my fucking home?

My keys…the ones that went missing one day. I thought I’d just dropped them. She likely took them. And those bugs, were they only audio? After the arrest, did they continue recording?

I walk around my home, completely paranoid. I guess seeing the proof of her deceit with my own eyes was like a bucket of cold water. There’s no denying it—she bugged me and had us arrested. She lied. I knew that already, but damn…

Maybe it’s hitting me so hard because I haven’t had an opportunity to give the feelings any kind of closure. She came back into my life, we fought, then she was injured and moved in. There’s never been a real explanation.

I watch her breathe in and out on my bed, exhausted by the breakdown she just had. I’m feeling so confused. I want to want her, but then the anger comes back and I can’t help but wonder if my house is bugged. How many times did she come in and out of here?

Standing up, I go into the living room and start to pace. I feel around my television set and the few scattered photos I have on a small mantel by the television. Then I go to my bedroom and feel around everywhere. If she bugged my room, the room she slept in with me, I will never forgive her. The intimate things we talked about. The things we did.

Was nothing sacred?

I’m checking everything now, looking behind frames, moving things around. I even flip over the cushions.

The kitchen.

We spent a lot of time cooking together and eating. I open all the drawers and feel around. Nothing. I’m out of breath, heaving, my anger now at a level ten.

Your house needs color, she said once.

The art she gave me. It easily takes up half the wall. I unmount it off the wall and start to feel around the frame for a bug or a camera. Something. There’s nothing attached to it, but I can’t help but feel that this is some sort of set-up.

Why would someone who wants to pump me for information give me an expensive piece of art? Did she really love art, or was it just an act?

I feel the canvas itself. Nothing. I set it up against the wall and sit down on the floor, breathless and just stare at it.

No!

I grab a knife from the kitchen and tear the canvas off the frame—carefully at first, but then I get angrier and tear it until it’s in tatters. And there’s no bug.

A small hand on my shoulder jolts me out of my haze. I back away.

“What happened?” she says, looking around at the mess I’ve created. “What’s going on?”

“Tell me everything, April. All of it. I need to know.”

“You know everything.”

“No. I know you left. That’s all I know.”

“The stuff they had on the club was bad. Seriously, it was bad.”

“But Nick and I had nothing to do with it.”

She flinches. “You were in the club day in and day out—a club that was involved in drug trafficking. Looking at it from the outside, it’s kind of hard to believe you weren’t aware of it.”

“We weren’t!”

“I know that!” she yells back. “And I made sure everyone else knew that. I couldn’t say we were dating, because they’d have thought I was covering for you. So I took another case in order to stay away from you, so no one would question why the charges against you were dropped. To show the captain that you were just another mark and I was ready to move on to another case. I was tired of living a double life, but I did it for you, so that you could be free. I was only supposed to be gone for a month or two, and then once you were completely in the clear, I was going to come back and tell you the truth. But the case took a lot longer, and for a goddamn year I was undercover. And not the way it was here, where we had nice dinners and went to nice places. No, I had to hang out at seedy strip clubs and swinger parties, and see drugs being exchanged, snorted, and shot up. I had to pretend to like being groped by old drug lords. It was horrible, Matt. Fucking horrible, and it left me with a grimy feeling that didn’t come off no matter how many times I showered.”

“Groped? So you had sex with others? For work? It wasn’t just me?”

“No! God, no! I would never. I shouldn’t have even fallen for you. But I did. And I’m sorry for leading you on and lying, but Matt, I’m not sorry I fell in love with you. What happened between us was unexpected, not something I planned.”

“I don’t think I can do this, April. I look at you and all I see is betrayal. I’m so goddamn angry at you. I swear to God, I’ve tried. I’ve tried to separate you from June and I thought it was all working fine, but today, seeing the bugs…I just, I just can’t.”

With tears in her eyes she looks around. “You have every right to be angry, but I didn’t bug your house. I didn’t have a mic on me whenever we were together. After the second date I refused to wear my mic. It was just you and me most of the time. I tried to protect you as much as I could, Matt.”

“Most of the time. But not all the time.” I shake my head. I can’t even look at her right now. “I gotta go.”

“Where? I’ll go. This is your apartment. I’ll leave.”

“Do whatever you want. I need to go.”

“Matt, please,” she sobs. “Don’t run from me. I still love you. I never stopped. That was never a lie.”

With the keys biting my hand and my jaw twitching, I tell her, “I can’t forgive you, April. I just…every time I look at you all I’ll ever see is what you’ve done.”