She wanted to stay in her apartment until she died. Or until she felt the waves of humiliation pass her. She felt confident that death would come first.
Her intention was not to hurt Matteo. Anything but. She knew it hurt him when she didn’t pick up his calls, did not reply to his texts. She had promised to not do this again. Knew it could be perceived as cruel, after all these weeks—no, months, she realized—to go completely dark. But she loved him too much to lie and she could not bear to tell him the truth, and for once, she could not pretend nothing was wrong.
She hadn’t, she kept thinking—in those moments when she couldn’t stop herself from thinking—ever really said the word “no.” Had she?
Dick had been right. She knew what he was expecting when she reached out to him. She didn’t correct his assumption because she wanted something from him. When he invited her to his house instead of the restaurant, she knew he assumed they were going to sleep together. She went there almost convinced she could will herself to sleep with him if that was what it took. She had just changed her mind. But the intent was there, wasn’t it? The intent to betray Matteo’s trust. To fuck up the first real thing she’d had a chance at in ages, to poison the first joyful feeling she’d felt in years. She disgusted herself.
She cataloged all the times she had fucked Dick in that exact same location, in the exact same position, as well as their variants—different homes, bathrooms instead of kitchen, bent over, belly up. She recollected all the occasions she had been mentally absent during the act, her acquiescence driven less by physical desire than desire to shut him up, to get to sleep, to get back to work. She remembered all the times Dick had pulled her ponytail or slapped her ass or spoken about her cunt, and how she had enjoyed it then. Why had this instance hollowed her out in such a gutting way? What variant made this instance feel like poison in her mind and body? Humiliation. Humiliation wielded violently.
* * *
THE FIRST TIME Matteo came by the apartment he was angry. In a way that surprised and also scared her, though everything was scaring her just then. He was banging on the door and screaming her name. He said he knew she was in there. That the doorman told him she hadn’t left the house in days. That she had promised she wasn’t going to do this to him again. Her neighbors came out to tell him to keep it down and he told them to fuck off. Then, later, she could hear him knock on their doors to apologize. The second time he came （she’d begun to lose track of how many days she’d been in the apartment by this time） he rang the bell and simply left flowers with a note apologizing for whatever thing he didn’t realize he’d done. Telling her that whatever was wrong, they could work through it.
The third time he came, he had just called out her name and started to play her songs. “A House Is Not a Home.” “I’m Not in Love.” “Sometimes It Snows in April.” The sounds of the recordings coming through the door. She cried and cried and she was pretty sure that he could hear her. When she could hear him crying, too, she could barely take it and scribbled him a note and slipped it under the door.
I’m sorry, it said. I told you I’m a terrible person.
“Olga,” he called through the door. “Nothing can be this terrible.”
She didn’t know how long he sat out there after that.
* * *
HE WASN’T THE only person she was ignoring, of course. Her brother. Mabel. Her aunt. Igor. Fucking Igor. She missed an appointment with him and he got pissed and she was terrified. She begged forgiveness and from then on he was the only person whose calls she returned. She wanted to die but not, she realized, get killed.
She didn’t hear a peep from Reggie, or Karen, or her mother. She had fucked up. Had been given a chance to do something important and hadn’t come through. Still, it stung to be deemed so immediately useless. To feel so disposable. To know that the love she had hoped would fill the hole in her heart was conditional. To know her birth defect would remain unrepaired.
After, immediately after—in the car ride home, in fact—she texted Reggie to say it hadn’t worked out. He replied right away that he’d let Leadership know. She couldn’t bring herself to actually say what happened, but she wrote more: Things got ugly, he was very angry, I can never see him again. Reggie never wrote back. If she was being honest, she had hoped he might ask or guess. Had hoped her mother would want to be sure she was all right.
* * *
SHE HAD BEEN so stupid. She thought she was so clever, but she had been truly stupid.