“That doesn’t mean you can go through it!” he says, his pitch rising to match mine. “You offered to let me charge it, I didn’t know that you were going to go through it.”
“It’s not even locked!”
“I thought the people in my life were trustworthy, not backhanded sneaks,” he says, and steps forward again, hand out, the veins in his forearm practically jumping.
I whisk the phone behind my back.
“Did you fuck Stacey?” I ask.
More tears. My voice is shaking. I bite my lips together, trying to win back some kind of control, but it’s pointless.
“Yes,” he growls. “Give me my goddamn phone.”
The word feels like a punch, right below my sternum. Seth knocks the wind from me without so much as a touch.
“When?” I whisper.
Seth shrugs, the movement cruel in its carelessness, his hand still out for the phone.
“A few weeks ago, maybe? I don’t remember.”
“She sent you her tits today!”
“Then maybe I’m gonna fuck her again tonight.”
Behind my back, I try to snap his phone in half with my bare hands. It doesn’t work.
“What about Jenna?” I demand, naming another girl from the texts. “You fuck her?”
“Yes.”
I’m silent a moment. I thought he’d say no. For some idiot reason, I thought he’d say no.
“Amber Stremp?”
“Yes.”
“Lindsay Colber?”
“Yes.”
“Alexis Minton?”
“Yes.”
That’s five. Five other women and I barely scrolled down, five women in a matter of what — weeks, months?
“Are you kidding me right now?” I ask.
Before I can react, Seth steps in, reaches around me, snatches his phone back.
“Hey!” I shout. “Don’t touch me, don’t you dare fucking touch —"
“Don’t look through my phone!” he shouts, turning away, crossing the hotel room.
Suddenly I feel naked, more naked than I’ve ever felt in my entire life. I grab a pillow and hug it in front of myself, so at least he can’t look at my tits while I scream at him.
“Tiffany Finley?” I say, still half-shouting, still out of control.
Seth is facing away, doing something on his phone, doesn’t answer.
“Seth!”
“Yes!”
I squeeze the pillow a little tighter, knuckles white.
“Who else?”
“It’s none of your goddamn business,” he says, turning sideways to me, still looking at his phone.
“Who haven’t you fucked, then?” I snap, nasty and vicious.
Finally, he tosses the phone onto his bed, turns to me, paces forward.
“Your friend Lainey,” he says, bending to grab his boxers from the floor. “Your sisters. Most of our high school teachers. Anyone currently married, though I’m more than happy to fuck a divorcee. Obviously.”
He pulls on his boxers, grabs his jeans, pulls them on.
“You think you’re the first woman coming out of a bad marriage in desperate need of a good hard fuck?” he asks.
I watch him pull on his clothes in stunned silence, teeth clenched against the big, ugly, angry sobs threatening to break free.
“What the fuck?” I finally ask, my voice a frantic, high-pitched whisper. “How could you?”
Seth stops, his shirt in his hands. He looks at me in disbelief. Turns. Takes three steps forward so full of menace that I nearly fall back.
“You got married,” he says.
His voice is pure vitriol, so toxic that I close my eyes.
“So you fucked everyone I kn —”
“You broke up with me,” he says, voice rising, louder but less venomous. “Out of nowhere you broke up with me in the most careless, brutal breakup and then not eight months later you were engaged.”
I say nothing, because there’s nothing to say.
“You said you loved me and then less than a year later you let someone else put a ring on your finger and you married him and now you’re mad that I fucked someone else?”
“Everyone else, apparently,” I say, quietly.
“I’ll fuck whoever I want. You made it pretty clear I’m no concern of yours.”
Seth turns away, his shirt balled in his hands, shakes it out, pulls it over his head. I shift my stance and wipe my eyes on the pillow I’m still holding and then the stickiness between my thighs reminds me of something.
A new spike of horror drives itself through me.
“We just barebacked all fucking weekend,” I say, and my voice is shaking again. “Seth. You goddamn asshole, you’ve been fucking anything that moves and you thought it was okay to just go ahead and —”
“I used condoms with everyone else,” he says.
“That’s not foolproof!” I say, pitch rising again. “You can’t just go fucking people and not say a single goddamn thing before I let you fuck me bare. Jesus, I’m going to have chlamydia and the clap and syphilis —”
“It was your idea!” he shouts. “You’re the one who was all Seth, fuck me ba—"
“I didn’t know everyone in town had taken a ride on your dick!” I shout.
I throw the pillow back on the bed. I’m crying again, still fighting sobs as the hot ugly tears run down my face and I don’t bother getting them off.