Flies buzzed around my head like I was already dead and rotting. My clothes were like Saran Wrap against my body and the fan I was holding in front of my face wasn’t doing a thing.
Hair hung in limp waves around my face, falling heavily below my shoulders. He shouldn’t see me like this, sweaty and tear-stained.
“I… tried to call you.”
He couldn’t think of anything more original? A lie would have been better than that. This wasn’t a goddamn movie.
I could see him looking at me and trying to convince himself that he’d caught me at a bad time. That this wasn’t “normal” for me.
“Is there something wrong?” I asked him finally. He shook his head. “Stop,” I told him. “You’ll get whiplash.”
He covered his hands with his eyes. His brain was so transparent. I could see his wheels turning and his eyes rolling towards Heaven. ‘God help me,’ he was saying.
“Don’t use the lord’s name in vain,” I said automatically. See, mom? You did teach me something.
He looked at me again, confused. I smiled for the first time all day. “Never mind. What were you saying?”
He stared at me for a while. I kicked off my sandals and poured the rest of my water over my feet. He watched in distaste. At a strip club, pouring liquids over your feet would have been sexy. It just went to show how much of a lie “attractiveness” was.
“You tried to call me,” I prompted. “But you couldn’t?”
“Yeah,” he said vaguely. “The line was busy.”
I looked at my feet and wiggled my toes. “I didn’t talk to anyone last night.”
“Well it was busy.”
It wasn’t busy.
“It wasn’t busy,” I said loudly, finally looking up at him.
He rolled his eyes. “Grace, it was busy.”
“Jay, I don’t really care that you didn’t call. I don’t even give a fuck that you’re lying. You’re staring at me like I’m a dead person and I don’t care about that either.”
“Then what--”
“I cared about you, Jay,” I interrupted him and looked back to my feet. Pretty feet. I’d always liked my feet. “And that’s saying something. But I cared about you because you cared about me. And I’m upset that I’m just figuring this out now. Because why did you care about me?” I watched his face. He was trying so hard to keep his expression blank. “Because I didn’t look like this.”
He wasn’t looking at me. His eyes had slid off me and were resting on something over my shoulder.
I closed my eyes and tilted my head back to soak up the sun. When I opened them, he had gone.
