Suddenly, I was six again. My family was cleaved apart, my twin gone, and I felt like parts of me at been amputated, my tongue cut out, all because I’d reached for the wrong person.
What have I done? What have I done?
I pushed my thumb into the phone screen and deleted the app. If I saw my name pop up in the notifications, I was going to be sick.
“Dove?” Shawn’s voice. Calling me back to bed.
I swallowed. My mouth was thick with saliva. My heart felt like a fist punching through my chest.
“I’m going to get coffee,” I called back, doing everything in my power to make my voice soundnormal. “Want some?”
“Yeah. Sure.”
“Be right back.”
But I wasn’t.
I grabbed my keys and didn’t look back.
I went straight to Ophelia’s apartment. By the time I knocked on the door, my eyes were already heavywith tears and I was doing everything in my power to keep them from spilling over.
She opened the door, standing there in a loose shirt and boy shorts, looking half-asleep herself. Her frizzy hair was an explosion around her head. When she saw me, her eyebrows pulled into a concerned furrow. “You okay?”
“I’m…”
Sorry. But I couldn’t get the words out. It didn’t feel like enough.
Nothing felt like enough. My throat was tight with the guilt and shame of it all.
“I fucked up,” I said. My voice shook. “Really badly. I know I did. It’s my fault and I can…I can survive it…but not if I don’t have you. Not if I don’t have my sister.”
I didn’t deserve her forgiveness. I didn’t deserve her friendship. I waited for her to push me away, to call me out for being a push-over and a coward.
Instead, her expression softened. She stepped into the hall and put her arm around me.
She smelled like warm sheets. I choked back a sob.
“You’ll never lose me,” she said. “Especially not over some fucking man. C’mon in. I’ll put on some coffee.”
5
THE DICK PIC THAT BROKE ME
Dove.Then.
Ophelia let me stay with her. “Until I found my own place.” I was a woman unmoored. I hadn’t only lost my boyfriend—I’d lost myself. It was going to take months to pull myself back together. I couldn’t bring myself to go back to the Seekers’ Club. I was convinced that Shawn’s outburst at Ophelia’s party had ruined me in their eyes forever and I was probably on a black list somewhere. The community I’d worked so hard to build now cut off from me completely.
A couple days dragged into a week and then a month. I was surviving on the kindness of Ophelia and a lot of comfort cheese. I couldn’t play. I couldn’t paint. It was like someone had sucked all the joy out of the world.
I wasn’t comfortable in my own body. So I reinvented. I let my natural auburn hair grow back out and, as soon as it bobbed around my ears, I cut off any last traces of blonde. Ophelia suggested we get matching tattoos, so we did—she got a dove on her shoulder and I got a sprig of rosemary upthe back of my arm, one of Ophelia’s flowers from Hamlet. It’s true what they say about tattoos—once you get one, you’re hooked. It wasn’t as good as the pain I got from my Friday night spankings at the Club, but the jab of a needle lacing through my skin made me grit my teeth in a way that I liked when I was in need of a fix. I got a job at a cheese shop to supplement the income I’d lost from my lack of new paintings. I stopped looking at apartments when Ophelia and I decided we were better together than apart.
I still couldn’t bring myself to join Ophelia on her Friday night ventures to the club. But every now and then, I gotthe itch.
It was a sticky, sweaty night in July when I finally re-downloaded the Seekers’ App. Our AC was out and I was lying couch, readingDamaged Heartsfor the thousandth time while Ophelia did her makeup across from me, getting ready for the Club.
“You should come out tonight,” she said. “Lady Nine is doing a wax play demo. Should be fun.”
“Cool.” I turned the page. Poe was spitting between Quinn’s legs and calling her filthy names. There was probably something wrong with me, that I could read this much smut with a straight face.
