Admiring his handiwork for a second, he turns back to me, a challenge apparent in his gaze, “Why, you scared you can’t win?”
“Look, I don’t wanna win, all right? Let’s just go back before you start throwing up your organs.”
“No, I don’t think I will.”
Fucking Christ.
He’s really not giving me any choice, is he?
I don’t want to do it.
I don’tfuckingwant to do it.
But I will.
“So what, you’re gonna stay here and drink yourself to oblivion,” I say in a flat voice.
He doesn’t pay any attention to me as he replies, “That’s the plan.”
“And you don’t think you’re being kinda obvious right now. Kinda cliché.”
Fuck.
Fuck, fuck, fuck.
Don’t let me do this, Lucas. Don’t fucking let me do this.
But he does.
“You see her after two years and the first thing you do is get shitfaced and pick up two chicks, bothblondes, so you can get your dick sucked.” I watch his body grow tight in front of my eyes and I feel something black and sharp lodge beneath my rib cage. “And you do it so you can prove to yourself how okay you are with all this. How you saw your ex-girlfriend after a long time and didn’t feel a thing.”
His frame gets even tighter and that dark thing in my chest twists.
“Hate to break it to you though,” I continue, despite not wanting to, “that wasn’t even the right shade of blonde. And this is the exact opposite of what someone might do after seeing their ex-girlfriend that they’re still hung up on.”
There.
Now it’s only going to be a matter of seconds before it happens.
One. Two. Three. Fo —
His fist hits my jaw and my head snaps to the side.
The sting is sharp, throbbing.
So fucking unbearable that I have a strong urge to rub it away. But that’s how you know that you shouldn’t. You should let it hurt because you deserve it.
I’m hoping for another punch to rack my entire frame again — maybe it’ll be harder, sharper, stingier, with throbs like little earthquakes — but it doesn’t come and I look at my best friend.
My brother.
The guy I’ve betrayed.
He’s breathing hard. Any signs of his drunkenness are gone, leaving his eyes alert and full of anger. Full of hatred and disgust and yeah, disappointment.
I’ve been looked at that way all my life.
My father, my mother, my brother. Everyone I know and who knows me, has looked at me like this at one time or another. And I’ve always been okay with it. I’ve survived, reveled even, in being the bad guy, the train wreck.