Which I guess works out, because he can’t forgive me for fucking Mateo. He can’t even forgive me for being raped by Mateo, and how the fuck does that even require forgiveness? But it does with him. Because it’s Mateo. And I could get past that, I think, if I loved Vince.
But I’ve realized I don’t.
I mean, I do.
But not the way he loves me.
Not the way I love Mateo.
Not in the way that I want to wake up next to him. That I would sell my soul—and I would have to sell my soul, because there’s no way anyone could be with Mateo without doing that first—to have a life with him. I don’t even know when that happened.
Well, Meg.
A life with Mateo seemed daunting. Exhilarating, probably, but fucking terrifying. How do you build a life with a natural disaster?
But Meg seems to have found a way.
And she lets me have a taste sometimes, because she’s the best friend in the whole world. I know she realizes I have feelings for him that a woman should not have for her best friend’s fiancé and baby daddy, and instead of being mean and jealous, like I would, she lets me come over more, she lets me spend time with him, she lets me spend the night, she lets us have friendship, at least.
I’d take anything with him.
Anything that didn’t hurt her, anyway.
I may be desperately in love, but I’m not a monster.
Vince probably thinks I am.
But I think he is.
Because he tried to kill Mateo.
And I’ll never forgive him for that. Not ever.
But I have to stay. I don’t think he still loves me, but he still wants me, and it’s the only way I know to make sure he doesn’t do something drastic. Vince has made it clear to me since we met that he doesn’t fear death. Adrian’s wrath isn’t enough to keep him from killing Mateo.
He has to keep me.
So I’ll stay.
I’d walk through the underworld to protect Mateo.
I don’t know why.
“Are you drinking again?” Vince asks, kicking his shoes off.
I laugh. It isn’t funny, but I’m wasted in more ways than one. “Yes. Wine makes me happy.”
“Yeah, you look real happy.” He drops onto the couch next to me. I don’t want him to be that close, so I scoot into a sitting position, moving away from him.
Of course he notices.
“Really?” He glances over at me, almost smiling.
Yeah, he’s definitely been drinking.
“You’re gonna move away from me?” he demands.
I don’t even answer. It would start a fight, and I don’t feel like fighting. I feel like wallowing.
Only he’s apparently feeling ornery. He’s not aggressive; his tone is even, but he asks, “So you’re just going to ignore me?”
“Stop being so needy, Vince.”
He laughs. “Needy. Right.” He catches my ankle, tugging me down the couch, onto my back.
There’s something wrong with me, because I don’t want him, but it makes me excited.
He climbs on top of me and I smile up at him, thrusting my hips. “You want to fuck me, Vince?”
“You know I do,” he says, almost like it aggravates him. I get it. It aggravates me, too.
Since he’s more full of resentment than desire, as he unbuckles his belt and unzips his jeans, he tells me, “Don’t worry. You can pretend I’m him.”
I reach for his now-free cock, stroking his aroused length as I tell him, “Don’t worry. I will.”
This pisses him off, which is what I want. He pushes my arms above my head with one hand, yanking my panties down with the other. “You really piss me off, you know that?”
As he pushes his cock inside me, I groan and close my eyes. “I don’t care.”
He tries to make me care, but he can’t. He can’t reach me, and that pisses him off more than anything.
He can get inside me, but he can’t reach me.
Not like Mateo can.
—
As the sun streams in through the window, a bright, unavoidable sign that it’s morning, I brace myself for the fallout of last night. Not the empty wine bottle that I’m pretty sure we left in the middle of the floor. Not the unoffending stack of laundry I had been working on folding before I had too much wine and got lost (luckily just towels, so it won’t matter that they’re wrinkled to shit now).
I can smell food cooking. No one else lives here, so that means Vince is making breakfast.
Which kind of surprises me, because he usually only makes breakfast when we’re having a good day.
That’s the frustrating part. Last night obviously was not one, but there are good days. Before I learned what he tried to do to Mateo, we had a lot of good days.
Vince tries. I know he tries. Sometimes I wonder if it’s just me, or the combination of us. I’m not completely sure what about us doesn’t work, but there’s clearly something. Our once-salvageable relationship is snowballing hard and fast into an unapologetically dysfunctional one.