Page 74 of Into the Dark
She shakes her head. “No. It wasn’t. Christ, Jake, I was sad okay. I was miserable and sad and I wanted to stop thinking about you. To forget about you, and he was just…there.”
It feels like a kick to the chest. While I was trying to remember everything about her, she was trying to forget everything about me. Well, that put things into fucking perspective, I guess. It hurts. Jesus fucking Christ does it hurt. It makes me want to hurt something in retaliation. I picture this French cunt’s face—he looks a lot like her ex from the hotel. Then I imagine smashing my fist into it over and over again.
Breathe. Count to ten.
“Did it work?” I ask. I’m not sure how stable my voice sounds.
“No. It didn’t.” She shakes her head again, sounding so fucking sad about it.
I feel sick. I need to get out of this fucking house. I don’t belong here.
She grabs ahold of me as I turn away. “Jake, wait. Don’t. Listen to me. I wanted to forget you, if even just for a night, because it hurt…” She searches desperately for the words, though all I want her to do is stop fucking talking. “Every day I felt sick and weak and tired, and it hurt so bloody much being apart from you. I just wanted it to stop hurting. But I told you… I couldn’t not think of you no matter how hard I tried. You were inside me.”
“Yeah, except that’s not true, though, is it, baby? ’Cause you had some French prick inside you.”
She drops her hands from me and steps back. “I really don’t want to do this here,” she says soberly. “Let’s go home. We can talk about it there.”
Downstairs, I realize Alex can put on a face like no woman I’ve ever known. She smiles as she hugs her parents, right after her mum hands her two bottles of the French cunt’s wine. Her dad tells me it was great meeting me, her mum only nodding. It’s better than I thought it was going to go, but right now it feels like a consolation prize.
At the door she hugs her dad—a longer hug than the one she just had with her mum—and he says something to her I can’t hear that makes her close her eyes and smile. It’s not a full smile. It’s kind of sad, and I think that’s most likely to do with me, which only makes me feel guilty. Her parents watch us from the door as she reverses out of her spot in the large circular driveway before waving at us and going back inside.
The journey back to hers seems to take double the length of time as the one out here. Every time I go to say something the words dissolve on my tongue, and instead all I get is the image of Alex being poured wine and then fucked by some faceless French prick, and I feel my jaw and fists clench all over again. The fuck did she say to him in French? For all I know she told him she couldn’t wait to see him again and hasn’t stopped thinking about him.
I know this is paranoia and rage talking because I know she loves me. I feel it and see it and she’s said it. Alex loves me. Unfortunately, it doesn’t make the fact she was with some other guy a few weeks ago in order to forget about me any easier to swallow. I still want to find him, break his jaw, and choke the fucking life out of him.
By the time we pull into Alex’s driveway, my knuckles are white and I’ve practically chewed a hole through my cheek. We haven’t spoken a word to each other for the past forty minutes. I follow her into the house and into the kitchen where so many of our face-to-faces seem to take place, but also the place where I had her screaming my name two nights ago. A memory that seems to be laughing at me right now.
How hard did she scream his name? Prick.
She moves across the kitchen to fill the kettle before going to the cupboard to take out a cup and saucer. I move from the doorway to the table, noisily pulling out a chair and sitting down. She turns to face me then, leaning back against the worktop with her arms folded across her chest.
“Okay,” she says after letting out a deep breath. “What do you want to know?” Gone is the soft, apologetic Alex from her bedroom; now she just looks annoyed at me. As if I’m the one who went off and fucked someone else.
I take my time answering. What exactly it is that I want to know? She clearly doesn’t want to talk about it, clearly wants to forget the entire fucking thing ever happened. But I’m a stupid, sadistic bastard, and I have enough shit eating me up inside without having to bury this down there too.
“Everything,” I say, fixing her with a stare. “I want to know every fucking thing.”
Of course he wants to know everything.
This thing may belong to a different time and place, a different me, but that hasn’t stopped it from barging its way in here. Now Jake is inviting it to sit down and have a beer with him.
I should have known he wasn’t going to let it go. Not as easily as that. He has this look about him now, impenetrable and cold. The side of him I don’t see often. The side other people see. It’s strange that these cold, hard edges of his only highlight the dark parts of him that have always made my blood heat and body weaken.
For so long I’ve tried to understand it, what it is about this side of him I always find impossible to resist. But there’s no real, tangible explanation for it. Some people are just drawn to others, moved toward them by a strong, invisible force that only exhausts them if they try to fight against it.
I know Jake isn’t having similar thoughts right now. He’s too angry, and he can rarely see past that black cloud when it descends—I’ve learned that much. What I still haven’t learned is how to dissipate that cloud. Sex sometimes works, but not always.
“Don’t feel like talking now, baby?” He glares at me.
“Nothing happened.”
“Let me be the judge of that, yeah?” he says—or rather, growls.
No doubt if I had slept with Laurent I’d be feeling entirely less indignant right now. I imagine trying to explain to him, in sordid detail, how I let another man inside me who wasn’t him. A cold, sudden rumble of terror rolls over my bones. Oh my god.
“I never slept with him,” I clarify.
His face softens a fraction, some modicum of tension lifting from his shoulders. “But you wanted to,” he says, still glaring. “To forget about me.”
