“Just, please, let me handle this! I’ve handled it this long.”
I took her face in both my hands and tilted her head up to look straight into my eyes. “And that’s too fucking long.”
I started to walk forward but she pushed back on me.
I gripped her wrists as softly as I could. “Little one, I can’t let you handle it the way you have been. You get that, right? You get that I can’t let him off so easy?”
“I still want this to work, Jay. I stayed. I chose to be a part of this life. Me. That’s not anyone’s fault but mine. I have to figure out what works for me. That might not work for you, but at the end of the day, it isn’t your relationship. It’s mine. You and I are friends, not lovers. We’re colleagues, not partners.”
Her words hit me harder than they should have. “You might not be my girlfriend, woman, but you’re definitely my partner. You have been since the day I met you.”
I rubbed my thumb up and down, remembering how soft her skin was. She leaned into my touch, and I wondered if I was the last thing holding her up. I wondered if anyone else knew, if anyone else had tried to talk her out of staying. I wondered if she’d lost friends over it and knew I couldn’t have her lose me when she needed me most.
She sighed and her long lashes swept down onto her cheeks as she closed her eyes. “You’re right, okay? But Dougie and I have been a team too. I have to just… I get that we need a break. I get that things aren’t right. I’m accepting that leaving for a month will be good for everyone. I just need to handle it my way.”
She could reason her way into anything. But she agreed. She was coming with me.
I would make sure she wasn’t coming back too.
“I’ll fall back and take your lead. But I’m still coming up with you.”
She rolled her eyes. “Fine.” She didn’t move her hands from my chest or turn around. She stared at me for what felt like a minute or more. As she did, her eyes filled with unshed tears, ones I knew had probably resurfaced again and again in the last two months I’d been away. “Thank you, Jay.”
She turned then and walked up the cement steps. After she unlocked the door, we strode in. I was shocked to see that nothing was askew. I expected shattered vases, smashed-in walls, something to showcase that they were living in hell with one another.
Her home looked as it always did, though. The white countertops were clean, the porcelain vase was intact with fresh pink flowers in water. The beige throw was folded neatly on her linen couch. Everything was white, spotless, almost innocent-looking.
At first, I thought we’d missed him but Mikka turned to me and lifted her index finger to me to motion for silence. I glanced around and spotted her bedroom door ajar where he looked like he slept heavily.
I nodded and leaned a hip against the kitchen table as she buzzed into her bedroom where I saw through the doorway that she was collecting items. She moved with quiet precision. As someone whose childhood friend was abused, my eye was trained to see her practiced cautious movements. It wasn’t just that she tried to be quiet, it was that she winced a bit when the sound was too loud as she set her suitcase on the hardwood floor. As she unzipped the bag, her fingers shook.
Mikka was afraid, and she’d never been afraid of anything.
She inhaled deeply before she zipped her suitcase. We both held our breaths as she walked through the doorway, but the hinges creaked as she bumped it open a little further.
His body stirred. “Baby, you home for the day?” I heard his groggy voice ask her.
It took a new determination, one I’d found in rehab, to stand back, to not burst in and beat him within an inch of his life.
Her soft response just beyond the wall felt smaller than usual. “No. Jay’s in the kitchen if you’d like to say hi, but we have to take a trip. The agency wants us to do a stay in his hometown.”
He grunted, still not moving from the bed. “For what? They paying us extra for that?”
She sighed. “Dougie, you know I’m salaried.”
When I heard the rustling of the sheets, I tried my best to trust her, tried not to barge in, tried to give their relationship the benefit of the doubt.
“They pay you a salary for when your actors assault you?”
Before I could even contemplate his words, I heard her hiss, “Douglass, I told you that was just as much my fault as it was his.”
“Maybe we should ask him, huh?” I saw him finally stand as his words shifted the situation into place. I’d been drunk and high. And dumb. So dumb. I should have known our kiss would send that selfish prick into a violent rage. He’d always had a look in his eye, especially when he drank around us. I knew something was off and it took our kiss to confirm it.
Dougie stormed out with Mikka after him, her suitcase in tow. Her brow was furrowed and it finally looked like she might not be able to stand another moment with him.
“You got some nerve stepping foot in my home after the shit you pulled on my girlfriend,” the asshole spit at me.
I wanted to correct him. Mikka paid the rent—I knew that for a fact. I’d been shopping with her for the picture she hung on the wall and picked up the vase for her flowers one day. She’s what made the house a home. Her home. Not his.