Amy had closed her eyes at some point during the story, but I could still see the tracks the tears had made down her face. The little light on her recorder still showed that the silence stretching between us was being documented, but I didn’t feel like turning the device off for her. It recorded all the things we wanted to say to each other, but couldn’t. I wanted to do some completely mature thing like demand whether she’d gotten everything she needed for her big tell-all. God only knew what she wanted to say to me after finally learning the truth that she’d known the truth about me all along.
What I didn’t expect, though, was for her to stand up, reach across the table, take my face in her hands, and kiss it. I spluttered against her lips, tried to demand what she was doing, but my body responded of its own accord, reaching back for her, tearing at her clothes, looking for comfort in a place I wasn’t sure existed for us anymore.
I’d had better, more fulfilling sex with Amy before, but this was different. There was savagery involved, for one nails raking down backs, half-moons pressed into forearms, hickeys that would be visible for days. It was both of us working together to make sense in a savage world; of course there had to be savagery involved. It was her showing me that, no matter where I was, she was right there along with me, every step of the way, because she was the one who’d forced me to return to that journey. Wherever I could go, she could go, too. We rose on the crest of that knowledge and settled back down on the other side of it. If we weren’t sated, we were at least calmer. It was simpler to try not to define it. I knew how I felt about Amy. If she thought she needed to comfort me like this, I wasn’t going to try and stop her. I’d missed this, the way our bodies moved together. I’d missed it a lot. If I was selfish for letting this door swing open again, then so be it.
After we were showered and dressed and sitting at the table again, the battery in the recorder having long died, it became less clear how we should proceed. My old anger and insecurities resurfaced through the stickiness of my afterglow, and they were even uglier than before. It wasn’t fair to Amy. She was doing the best she could do. I just couldn’t stop myself. I couldn’t keep that kind of thing bottled up anymore. Not after everything else I had decanted.
“So was that what you expected?” I asked her, hating myself, hating her, hating all of it. “Thought there might be more blood and guts?”
“I don’t know what to say, Sloan,” she said after an overly long period of silence. “I really don’t.”
“That’s not really good interviewing skills, is it?” I asked, aware that I was taunting her, aware that there wasn’t even the light brush of flirting that would soften that blow. But Amy took it like a champ, understanding that I was just throwing out punches to try and convince the referee I was still in the game. Everyone in the ring knew I was irredeemably out.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You’re right. It’s not.”
“You have something else to say?” I asked her, a little surprised that she was refusing to back down. “Maybe even a question? I remember very few questions. I think I did all of the heavy lifting for this thing.”
The questions had been there. They were few and far between, and mostly asked for clarification, but they’d been there, getting me back on track when I wheeled off course. I was just continuing to lash out at her like a dying animal might snap at someone trying to help it.
“What happened next?” she asked haltingly. And Jesus. What a question. What happened next was what continued to happen today. My past just never stopped hurting me. Not even for a second.
“What do you mean? We buried Margocremated her, actually, though I never found out where the ashes went and I lost my job. It went even more to shit than ever.”
“Why did you lose your job?”
“I was worthless out in the field, after that,” I said, the old shame rising up my spine once again. “They didn’t even try to put me back out there. It’s like they knew, saw right through me, that I wasn’t okay.”
“If you weren’t okay, they should’ve done something about it.”
“That’s not the way things work. I was no longer an asset. They shed me.”
“That isn’t right.”
“It’s what happened. You wanted answers, I’m giving them to you. It’s not my problem if you don’t like the way they taste.”
“You should’ve gotten counseling, at the very least,” Amy argued. “You should’ve been given some kind of skills or training to help you cope. And you should’ve been given a job, even if it was at a desk. You shouldn’t have been left behind, or forgotten. None of you should have.”
“Maybe you should write a letter, then.”
“Maybe I am. Maybe that’s what this is supposed to be a call to arms.”
“Stop.” I held my head briefly in my hands before pushing up from the table. “You don’t get to be some hero. You don’t get to ride on the backs of everyone who suffered so that you can complete this bullshit crusade.”
“I’m sorry,” she said. “You misunderstood me.”
I misunderstood all of this, but that didn’t keep me from being mean to her. “I’ve tried to look past your motivations this entire time, but I don’t think I can do that anymore,” I said. “It’s one thing to be curious. It’s another to be a monger for war and pain and suffering. You’re a monger, Amy. You only want the bad stuff because it’s salacious. Because it sells. Because it will make you a writer. There’s so much shit in the world I bet you could get rich writing about it, and I’m not going to enable you to be a part of that. I want nothing to do with it.”
“I’m not trying”
“Did you sleep with me to try to gain my trust?” I asked her. “I have to know the truth about that.”
“I didn’t. I wouldn’t do that.”
“Are you sure? Because you’ve been trying to get me to tell you that story for a really long time, now.”
“Any good writer would try to get their sources to trust them.”
“Uh-huh. Sure. I can understand that. But what I’m asking you is to what lengths you’d be willing to go to get a little of that trust.”
“Sloan, I had genuine feelings for you. I was ready to set the story aside. I didn’t sleep with you so you’d spill your guts. You did that on your own.”
“Because I had feelings for you,” I nearly howled. “Because you ingratiated yourself to me, and I developed feelings for you. I wanted you to succeed. I still do.”
“I’m not…I’m not going to do the story,” Amy said, her voice shaking. “I won’t write it.”
“Why?” I tapped my fingers against the surface of the table. “It’s what you wanted to do, isn’t it? You got the story you wanted. Go on. Sell it.”
“I didn’t imagine this,” she said.
“Why not? Why not this? I heard you on the phone with your editor. He called me a ‘baby killer.’ That was pretty reliable intelligence, wherever you got it. What did you think that meant?”
“I don’t know. I didn’t know what it meant.”
“It means I killed a child, Amy. That’s what that means. Baby killer.” I’d heard it so many times in my dreams, always in Margo’s voice, that it had become something of a companion over the years. Saying it aloud wasn’t so painful anymore. Especially when it was a fact of my existence and something Amy already knew about me.
She knew it, and still she’d been with me. Even if it bothered her this much.
“It’s a lot more complicated than that, though, isn’t it?” she asked. She was staring at the recorder, not me, and I knew she was visualizing having to relive this conversation again. It would probably be even more painful the second time, or the third, when she realized that I’d spoken in a flat monotone the entire time, that I had become that used to that story that I could recite it without losing a single tear down my cheek. I didn’t think I even had tears for it anymore. I’d cried them all, and now it was her turn to cry for the both of us. For everyone. Humanity.
“I won’t write the story,” she said. Her voice was decisive this time, and it infuriated me more than anything that had come before. She wasn’t about to get off that easy. Not with me.
“Do what you want with the story,” I said. “You know what? I’m done with it. I don’t care if you are, too. But it’s your story to worry about, now. Not mine.”
“Sloan…”
“No, I’m serious. You’re the one who wanted this story so badly. Now you have it. It’s yours. Good luck. I’m washing my hands of it from here on out.”
“I don’t want to write it. I don’t want to do that to”
“You know, I think I’m ready for you to write it. I think I’m ready for all my friends to know just who they allowed into their lives. Let the whole goddamn world know just what I did. What I am.”
“I’m not going to let you use me to punish yourself.” Amy drew herself up to her full height, even if she was still shorter than I was. “I won’t do that to you, Sloan. I won’t let you do that.”
God, even now she was kind. She was noble. She got things done no matter what it took. She was all the things I wasn’t. All the things I liked to see in somebody else. They were great qualities in the women I loved.
“You want to know the worst part of all of this?” I asked, barely registering the dullness in my own voice. This was going to be the nail in the coffin for us, and that was the way I wanted it to be. It was fitting, somehow.
Amy didn’t bother prompting me for an answer, so I just continued.
“Before I found out just what you were looking to write about my experiences, I realized you reminded me of Margo,” I said. “I realized it when you asked me who my best friend was among my team. You two don’t look alike, but you were similar in many ways. Not that it particularly defined either of you, but I loved both of you. I thought maybe it was a sign that you reminded me of her, that maybe you would do good work. Honor our story, even. But I was as wrong about you as I was about Margo being strong. I just wish I didn’t still love the two of you. It hurts too damn much.”
Amy was sobbing at this point, and I couldn’t stand to be here anymore. I couldn’t stand that I had disclosed every last dirty little secret, couldn’t stand the way she was crying, the way I had made her cry, the way I had orchestrated all of this to push her as far away as I could get her from me. It had all been self-preservation, but that didn’t mean I didn’t feel ugly about it. In fact, I didn’t realize I was weeping, too, until I felt the wet on my cheeks.
I turned to go, but she snagged my arm, gripped it by the hem of the sleeve, stretched it out as I attempted to pull away from her.
“Let me go,” I said. “I have to go.” I hated crying in front of her. Loathed it. I had already been so weak in front of her that I hated giving her this additional leverage over me. I wondered how it would turn out in story the baby killer wept, unwilling to face down the evils of his deeds. That sounded about right.
“You have to hear me out. You told me everything, and now you need to hear everything from me.”
“I don’t want to hear anything else.”
“Listen to me.”
“You have to let me go, Amy.”
“I never meant to hurt you,” she blurted out, her voice hoarse from grief, and I stopped fighting to pull away from her. “I never meant for any of this to happen.”
“You meant to write the story,” I said. “That was enough for all of this to happen.”
“You don’t understand,” she said, weeping openly, unashamed. “I never meant to fall in love with you. I never meant for that to complicate everything. It would’ve been easier, otherwise, for us both, wouldn’t it? I’m sorry, Sloan. If you’re as sorry as you say for loving me, I’m sorry, too. For loving you.”
I pulled awayor she loosened her grip and I was staggering toward the door, fighting through a haze of grief and regret so strong it was as if the incident with the armed child was yesterday, and I was losing Margo all over again. Only this time, the pain was sharper. It was fully and completely my fault that I was losing Amy, and she had just admitted that she was in love with me, too, and regretted it just as much as I did.