I know things have to be bad if I’m Attenboroughing myself. Dazed and dizzy from three solid hours of sobbing, I manage to fake my way through dinner and homework with Jax, and then I collapse into a fitful sleep. Tomorrow is a double shift at Tesco, and the day after will be Tesco plus a catering gig, and I don’thave timefor Church to be in my thoughts like this. For his words to be swimming through my veins and crawling inside of my heart.
Since the day I met you, you’ve been it for me.
Do I believe that? Does it matter even if I do?
I am your temple no matter what.
When you need me, I’ll be there.
Liar. He’s a liar. He wasn’t there when I needed him, he wasn’t there when he said he would be.
Except you never gave him a chance to be after the day of the wedding,a voice reminds me.You made sure he thought you were gone—you made sure he couldn’t be there for you at all.
Well, I refuse to feel bad about that. He did the worst thing, and when someone does the worst thing, they don’t get second chances. Especially when that worst thing was to save their career.
And yours, the voice says. Which makes me scowl. My career was lost anyway, and besides, I’m not interested in forgiving him for choosinganythingover me. Not when there were seventeen thousand other ways he could have handled things. Number one of which was to have told the director to fuck off and then shown up to our goddamn wedding.
But you know what it means to him. His job is the literal manifestation of his desire to find God. Can you really blame him for that?
I want to. And I think I do, but in order to keep the blame bigger than the sympathy, I have to forget what an amazing teacher he was. How carefully he mentored all of his students and the pains he took to help each one of them improve. I have to forget about how he lit up on a dig site, becoming smiley and boyish and excited; I have to forget the awe in his voice and the humility in his face when he cupped fragments of forgotten worlds in his hands.
But I will forget it. I will if it’s the last thing I ever do. I’m not going to forgive him, and I’m not going to keep thinking about his cruel mouth and glittering eyes and smoky voice. I’mdefinitelynot going to remember the jolt of pure rightness I felt when he told me that he belonged to me, that he wanted to be my temple again. I won’t remember the gouging agony in his expression as I told him exactly how hard the last four years have been, and I won’t remember his stern words when he refused to let me hide my pain from him.
I won’t apologize for having the audacity to be right, little one.
Nope. Not interested. Still a mean little bunny. Still smarter than falling in love with a broken, miserable god. I will forget the last two nights ever happened and go back to the safer—if lifeless—way things were before, and that’s just how it’s going to be.
***
Except the next morning,I wake up with a tender pussy and my heart in my throat. I wake up with Church’s words still whispering in my mind.
Am I cursed? Is this what a curse is?
It feels very Greek to me, very much like I’m the victim of some capricious divine whim. Doomed to long for someone who fucked me over.
Hungry for the touch of someone who thinks me worthless.
Okay, maybe that’s not...entirelyfair.
Church was never the kind of man to be interested in something inferior; he didn’t waste his time with anything cheap or dull. He thought me brilliant and adept andhis. And I know all that because he told me so. And the only time Church ever lied was the day he failed to show up for our wedding, and even then, he didn’t lie with his words, only his actions. In fact, for all his cruelty, all his arrogance, and all his ice, Church was always unfailingly, painfully honest.
Maybe he’s being honest now?
I’m so sorry, little one.
I am your temple no matter what.
It doesn’t matter, I tell myself. It doesn’t matter how sorry he is, it doesn’t matter how right and alive I felt with him yesterday, it doesn’t matter how he sees me exactly as I need to be seen.
Because I’ll never forgive him for not seeing me when it mattered.
I get dressed with a huffy forcefulness, as if that will prove to some invisible audience that I’m really done thinking about Church and not at all noticing how my well-pleasured body twinges with every movement. I see my brother off to school, and then I stop by the landlord’s flat on the ground floor to drop off this month’s rent before I go in to work.
Roksana, my landlord, narrows her eyes when she opens the door to me. “You can’t take it back,” she says with a sniff. “I’ve already started spending it. Repairs, if you must know.”
“Uh,” I say, glancing behind me to make sure there isn’t some other tenant she’s talking to. Seeing no one, I decide to pretend the last ten seconds didn’t just happen. “I brought this month’s rent for you. I’m sorry I didn’t get it to you on Friday, but I got home from work so late, and I didn’t want to wake you—”
She doesn’t take the envelope from me. Instead she sniffs again. “You can’t take it back.”