Your friend, always,
Dom
I place the note back at the bottom. I pick up all the pieces of us and place them back into the box. Eventually, it’s all inside and I put the first note back on top. I close the lid. I trace over the leaves in the wood.
This belonged to my mother. It’s one of the few things left of her.
His mother, who had died so unfairly at the hands of his abusive father. Dom tried to stop him. Had even stabbed him a few times. But it was already too late.
He’d screamed then. He’d screamed for hours, until he could scream no more, his vocal cords ruptured. It went on for hours and hours. He only stopped when it became physically impossible for him to continue.
And now he’d given part of me to her. Her name had been Crystal, I think.
I don’t… no.
It doesn’t matter now. How I feel. How I don’t want to feel. What I did. What he did. What we didn’t do. None of it matters.
He’s Dom. I’m Ty.
We’re inevitable. That’s all that matters.
Part Three: Just Breathe
I took a deep breath and listened to the old bray of my heart:
I am, I am, I am.
—Sylvia Plath
19. Where Tyson Goes to Helena Handbask
et’s Sex Dungeon
“YOU SURE you have everything?” Bear asks me for the billionth time. He looks into the back of Otter’s SUV worriedly, apparently sure he’s going to see that I’ve somehow missed a pair of socks or one of the four hundred tiny little bottles of travel shampoo he thought I needed for some reason. “You don’t want to forget something on the road. Who knows when you’ll be able to stop next?”
“Because there are obviously no stores between here and Tucson,” I tell him. “I don’t know what on earth I’m going to do when I find out I don’t have enough shampoo to last me for the next fourteen years.”
“You’re not helping,” he says with a scowl.
“You had to get a completely separate bag just to hold all the shampoo,” I remind him.
“This should probably stop before it escalates,” Otter suggests. “Because, knowing you two, it will.”
“He’s the one who made me take all of it!”
“Oh sure! Blame me for wanting to make sure you had clean, shiny hair that didn’t flake! I’m so sorry!”
“And it escalated,” Otter sighs.
“You can come with us,” Corey says to him. “Leave those two here. Are they really arguing about shampoo?”
“They’re just going to miss each other,” Otter explains. “This is them showing it.”
“Oh gross,” I moan. “That’s not even remotely close to what’s going on right now. This is about my American right to not take six thousand shampoos with me on a week-long trip.”
“Miss him?” Bear says incredulously. “For the first time in I don’t know how long there’s going to be an empty house with just the two of us, and you think I’m going to miss him?”
“I give it an hour before he starts bitching how quiet it is in the house,” Otter says.