Page 31 of Love is Angry

I keep a bottle of single malt on ice, just in case. I haven’t had a drink of it since last week, but dealing with Madison today suredrained the life and the energy out of me. I need a little pick-me-up.

Or I might as well be honest with myself and admit the truth. I need something to dull the pain. I went overboard with Madison. I shouldn’t have done that to her. My lips are still numb, the tip of my tongue itches for more. She tasted amazing. No matter how much I want to deny it, I can’t.

“Fuck!” I snap and yank the bottle out of the freezer.

Two triple shots later, and heat spreads through my stomach, making its way into my chest and up my throat. Slowly but surely, my muscles begin to relax.

I take off my clothes and slip into a pair of shorts, then walk over to the living room window. I’ve got a decent view of the north side of Ithaca from here. Those lights twinkling in the distance, just above the ridged horizon where the orange of the sunset begins to darken against the earth and the forest; that’s the campus area. In an abstract way, I can see Madison from my living room window.

A little further to the left, there’s the forest and the frat houses, each with their manicured driveways and brainless dickheads who take too much pride in three Greek words randomly strung together. It’s the one thing I never understood. You don’t need a tribe to be an asshole. You can be like me, an original asshole.

“Fuuuuuck.” I am really hating myself tonight, it seems.

I need another shot. One that will wipe away the memory of Madison’s breath and the way it sent trillions of electrical impulses across my whole body. One that will expel her fragrance, that intoxicating white lilac that makes me just as angry as it makes me hard. And there it is again, a cock that wants what a cock should not want. I’ve been hard, off and on, for the better part of the day. They didn’t call her Blue BallMaddie for nothing. This is my mistake, though. My sin to atone for.

She almost trusted me. She wanted the nightmare to be over, and I made her believe it was. Oddly enough, I think maybe a part of me believed everything I told her. That it wasn’t really her fault. That my dad was the prick and my mom had her issues. It was the truth, no matter how much I’d like it not to be. It was the truth. In the end, I didn’t really lie to her. Not with that, anyway.

And then I kissed her. I felt her melting in my arms. Felt every hitch of her breath and every ounce of desperation on her tongue.

I imagined us hidden beneath the covers of my bed, legs tangled, sweat dripping and moans reaching for the ceiling.

I wanted it to be over, then, as much as she did. I wanted the war to end so damn bad. I wanted her and my dad to be a fucking lie, to be my mind playing tricks on me, a fucking nightmare. I wanted her to not be the girl I saw in the bed that day. But the fact that she was –– the fact that she will always be –– that’s what made the animal in me come out.

“I’m the piece of shit,” I say to myself. Laura would probably agree. If Madison tells her about it, my sister will give me an earful and then some. I now wonder how friendly those two are, and what the odds are that this won’t reach Laura at all.

A fourth drink goes down, and I’m starting to relax a little. Or maybe I’m getting drunk. That would be a more correct term, probably. I barely ate anything today. Madison’s kiss obliterated my appetite. Or maybe it was my guilt. Either way, I’m getting wasted tonight. I’m numbing myself until I can’t even feel my fucking body anymore. Or my conscience, for that matter. There has to be a way to extricate that, otherwise I will shoot myself in the foot with this revenge bonanza.

Its appeal faded the moment Madison looked into my eyes and realized I wasn’t done tormenting her. The moment I toldher to turn around and bend over so I could give it to her like my dad gave it to her. That was ugly, even for me. I see my reflection in the window glass. It’s a horrid creature that looks back at me.

A monster. That’s what I am. A fucking monster. Like father like son, I guess.

The rage comes so fast, so unexpectedly that I don’t even register what I’m doing until it’s too late, and the tumbler smashes into the window. It’s glass on glass, and the tumbler loses, splintering into hundreds of crystalline shards. I can’t stand the sight of myself.

I’m ugly.

I’m fucking heinous. Madison was right. I have become something far worse than my father. I have become the worst version of myself and… my eyes sting. Tears are coming up. I punch the window hard, but it’s solid stuff. All I manage to do is bruise my knuckles. I punch it again. The skin breaks. There are only faint scratches on the window. That’s fucking pathetic.

Everything turns red. My reflection dissolves into this crimson expanse as I allow the anger to consume me. I’m crying. I can feel the tears rolling down my cheeks. Madison said my mom would… fuck, she was right about that, too. This would’ve broken my mother’s heart. What the shit happened to me? How did I become this cesspool of toxic fury and misery? All because the woman I liked let my father take her.

How much of this is really about breaking the sanctity of marriage? How much of this is really about how it hurt Mom and broke my family, when I know exactly the filthy stuff that Dad’s made of? And how much of this is truly about rejection? Well, about how poorly I handled the rejection, in the end.

I remember that day like it was yesterday.

Parts one and two in their entirety, for that matter. I remember the kiss that Madison and I shared. A smile tests my lips as I sink onto the sofa and wipe the tears from my eyeswith the back of my sleeve. I am such a piece of shit. We were something. We were becoming something. And yeah, we never finished what we started. I caught her with Dad, instead. I can’t think of that moment for too long, though. The nausea will return with a vengeance.

Shaking my head slowly, I try to imagine Mom.

What would she have to say about all this? In her pain, in her crippling pain, Madison found the strength to raise Mom from the dead for me to deal with. She’s the one ghost I have not dared to disturb. The one person I have avoided thinking about for more than a minute and always outside the context of that wretched day. What would Mom say if she saw me right now?

I find the bottle and chug directly from it. The kitchen feels too far away.

“Rhue Hector Spaulding-Echeveria,” she’d say, using my full name. “You never go after the woman that the husband cheated with. It is the husband who bears the blame.”

And I’d say, “Yeah, you’re right, it’s his dick that’s in motion. It’s his brain making his decisions for him. The woman, well, she’s just a hole.”

My mom would slap me for this. “Shame on you! A woman is a woman. You must always see things from her point of view, too. Did she know he was married?”

Yes.

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