Page 112 of Counterfeit Connection

“Care for a glass?” I ask, holding up the bottle.

“I’ll pass, thanks.”

I wave him over. “Are you going to sit before killing me?”

“Absolutely not.”

Jason winds back and, with little warning, cracks me right across the jaw. Stunned, I stumble back a couple of steps. When my eyes attempt to focus, I see him coming at me again. His fists take hold of both sides of my shirt. “Is that all you’ve got?” I slur.

“On the contrary, I haven’t even begun.”

My body is flung against the wall outside my kitchen. The glassware hanging over the bar rattles, one glass even falls to the countertop, shattering into pieces. One of the things my brother taught me was how to fight. I know I should have my hands up to protect my face. I also know, him beating me is giving me a different pain to focus on.

My hands that were once up, palms out to resist, fall to my sides in resolution. Jason shoves against my chest with all hismight. The force blows me back onto the kitchen tile. The back of my head hits the floor with a thud. The stars I was seeing before from the alcohol have now multiplied.

“Fight back, you piece of shit,” Jason growls.

With little air in my lungs, I manage a reply, “No.”

He grabs my shirt once more, part of the fabric giving way, tossing me through the other entrance to the kitchen and back into my entry hallway. Stumbling from side to side, I finally catch myself with a hand on the console table. I’m frozen by the image I see in the mirror above it. Blood trickles down the corner of my mouth. My shirt is in tatters. My eyes look like they’ve been dragged open by sliding face down through a desert. If this is what little more than a week without her looks like, I can’t imagine a month or a year.

“Bastard. I did the one thing I promised my wife I wouldn’t do, even though I knew I couldn’t keep that promise. I asked you to do one thing. Just one.”

“I know!” I yell. “Don’t you think I fucking know?”

While I’m holding myself up, barely, at the console, it takes every ounce of self-control I have not to ask about her. I want to ask if she’s okay. I want to know where she is. I want to know what she’s doing. Has she been eating? Is she taking care of herself? Has the media stopped harassing her and her family? I mean, that was the whole point of letting her go. I don’t open my mouth though.

My legs use what little strength they have left to pass him to enter back into my dining room. The music feels ten times louder than before. Maybe the rest of the alcohol is kicking in. Maybe it’s the growing knot on the back of my head. Maybe it’s all of it. Does it really fucking matter?

The weight of my body collapses back into the same chair Jason dragged me out of. A couple of the drawings I’d made of Kaitlyn have fallen to the floor. I pick them up carefully like theirprecious, fragile things and hold them in my fingers. As I watch them, even through blurred vision, I can almost feel her skin, hear her laugh, and see the glimmer in her eyes.

The hard soles of Jason’s shoes appear in my line of sight at my side. “If you’re going to hit me again, make sure you knock me out this time. I want to stop thinking.”

“Cut this shit music off, would you, so I can hear myself think?”

I sigh heavily and sit back, leaving the bottle on the table. I pull my phone from my pocket and I feel sick immediately. A picture of Kaitlyn lights up as my background. Fuck, she’s beautiful.

I shake off the impending nausea and press the pause button on my music. The entire flat falls eerily silent. I haven’t allowed it to be silent since she left because it reminds me all too well of how empty everything feels.

“Now that I can focus,” he mutters.

“Why are you here? I can’t believe you’d fly all this way just to beat me senseless,” I say bluntly.

“Then you don’t know me very well. I always follow through. Also, I wanted to see what you’d do. Honestly, I’m surprised. That rarely happens.” As I reach for the bottle again, Jason stops my hand with his firm grip and a stare that could freeze water. “Enough.”

I flip my phone over so I can’t see her eyes judge me before I make a second attempt for the fresh bottle in front of me. Jason’s sober reflexes are far superior to my sloth-like ones and he reaches the bottle first. The legs on his chair scrape back across the tile. The sound rattles through my body as he brushes by me to the kitchen sink. I watch him as he stares me in the face as he pours the whole bottle down the drain before smashing the bottle. “Fucking hell,” I holler. “Seriously, stop breaking my shit.”

“It’s either that or your being. Take your pick.”

“I’d prefer it to be me.” I sink farther into my chair. “I’d fucking deserve it. This is all my fault.”

He leaves the pieces of the empty bottle in the sink before stalking back to sit across from me. “I know where you are,” he says simply. “I know what’s going through your head.”

I scoff, “You have no idea what is in my head.” I can’t hold back my curiosity any longer. “How is she?” I whisper.

“She’s…surviving. She left New York, at least for now. She’s with Sam. We tried to get her to come to Boston, but she didn’t want to.”

“Surviving? She deserves better than that. She could have survived with me.”

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