Page 118 of A Ballad of Betrayal and Beauty

Her eyes narrow and it’s as if the electricity in the room flickers. “Yes, Key! I’m a stripper at a sleazy, bullshit club in Vegas. Why the fuck do you care anyway?”

“Why do I—why do I fucking care?”

But she just stares at me hard. Waiting for my answer.

“Because we were supposed to be together. We were going to be a family and make something of ourselves and instead you left me to do this shit? And the b-baby?” My voice cracks and her face crumbles. “For fuck’s sake, was there ever even a baby to begin with?”

She stumbles back half a step. “How dare you!”

“What am I supposed to fucking think? It seems like I never really knew you at all.”

“Don’t!” she yells over the music. “Don’t you dare come in here and judge what I do with my life.” Her entire body is vibrating with fury and her lips tremble with every syllable. “Of course there was a baby. But it’s gone now. I never had it. Happy?”

Some of the rage subsides, replaced by the unsatisfied feeling of a long-awaited question not being answered the way you wish. I never realized until this moment how much I wished our baby was born. How the finality of its existence hurts me deeper than I ever thought it could.

I’m going about this all wrong. Why am I so angry with her? I reach out for her again and gently touch her arm, the familiar feel of her skin like a drug relapse after being sober for years. I shouldn’t be angry. It’s not her fault—it’s mine. “Dusty, please—I couldn’t take care of you properly then, but I can now.”

“Key, don’t?—”

“I’m sorry I yelled. Just—” I shake my head. “Come home with me. You don’t have to stay here,” I say, moving toward her, my hands tracing up her shoulders until I’m cupping her face. “You don’t have to do this anymore. I can take care of you. Let me save you.”

The moment the words leave my lips I wish I could take them back. Tell her I didn’t mean it the way it came out, but there’s fire in her gaze and she pushes me hard in the chest.

“Save me?”

She laughs. An unrestrained, maniacal sound that sends a chill down my spine.

“That’s all this ever was, wasn’t it?” she says, wiping the mirth from her eyes. “It was always about saving me. Saving me from my trashy parents, from my abusive dad, from myself, from ourmistake.”

My heart splits in half. “Our mistake?”

“I suppose I can’t be mad about it. It’s how you were brought up. Jesus saves Mary Magdalene too, right? The good boy who saves the whore.”

I can barely breathe. “No! No, that’s not—it was never like that for me,” I say desperately. Pleadingly.

She shakes her head and backs away, and I see the tears trickle down her freckled cheeks. “Don’t feel bad for me, Keith. I never wanted your pity.”

“But how could you choose this?” I ask, throwing my arms out wide. “How could you end up here instead of . . .”

With me. Just say it.Say it.

“I won’t apologize for the choices I made, because they were mine. And whether they were good or bad, I won’t stand here while you make me feel guilty about them.”

“Dusty . . .” I reach out for her and touch her arm, and for a moment I can see the way it calms her. The tension easing in her muscles.

“Hey, man, hands off!”

A thick, muscled bouncer grasps my arm and twists it behind my back. I grunt in pain, and my knees buckle as I’m hauled away from her. I fight against the man, but another one joins in and soon I’m being dragged away. Surely she won’t let them take me. Surely she won’t . . . but she’s backing away, shaking her head.

“No! Stop, I need to tell her,” I beg.

The bouncer turns to her. “This guy bothering you?”

And with a coldness I never believed she was capable of, she nods. “Yes.”

The breath is knocked out of me with that one word.

“All right, pal. You’re done here,” he says, pulling me away.

---