“If we’re getting on a plane, we’re going to do it looking hot. And I don’t mean in a trash fire kind of way,” I say to Winston as he stares at me, seemingly disgruntled that his warm human bed has moved.
I head to the shower, turn it up until it’s scalding. Every one of Rowan’s products goes down the drain, because my fucking psycho energy is real in the moments when I’m not a snotty, sobbing mess. Then I dry my hair, do my makeup, promise myself I won’t cry again so I don’t ruin the best eyeliner job I’ve done in a while. I even put on some fake lashes, because fuck it. If I’m going to be a psycho, I’m going to be the hottest damn psycho Logan International Airport has ever seen.
Of course, some of that perseverance ebbs away when I book the next flight out of town and pack up my shit.
By the time I call Lark, my determination is nearly gone.
“Hey, Gold Star Tits, how are you?” she asks, her voice a chime of bells.
A deep breath streams through my nose. “Um. I’ve been better.”
“Why? What happened?”
“Rowan,” I say, blinking back the tears. “He broke up with me.”
“What?” There’s a long stretch of silence. I nod, even though I know Lark can’t see me. “No…”
“Yeah.”
A sound of anguish bleeds into the line from Lark’s end of the call. Whatever glue holds my heart together enough to keep it beating softens with the sound of Lark’s distress on my behalf. Jagged points of pain lance me from the inside out, scoring muscle and bone.
“He couldn’t have… You can’t be serious…” Lark whispers.
“Dead serious, unfortunately,” I reply, putting the phone on speaker as I sit on the couch and pull Winston onto my lap. “I just booked a flight back to Raleigh. I want to get out of Boston right away. Can I stay at your place for a little bit until I figure out what the fuck to do with the tenants in my house?”
“Of course. Always. As long as you want. Text me your flight details and I’ll change my flight so we can leave together.” A string of swears and disbelief flows from Lark as I text her my flight number. When the details come through, she repeats the information before she heaves a long sigh. “Oh sweetie, there has to be some kind of mistake. That man loves you.”
My huffed laugh is bitter and sardonic. “That’s what I thought too. But he made it pretty clear that he doesn’t. I’m a ‘fucking psycho’， apparently, and therefore can neither love nor be loved. I guess that’s not news. Turns out, I’m too psycho even for him.”
“That’s what he said to you? And you didn’t pluck his eyeballs out and flush them down the toilet?”
A faint smile passes over my lips and fades away just as quickly as it appears. “I probably should have.”
“What else did he say?”
“I dunno, some weird stuff,” I reply, trying to remember the recent details that already seem hazy beneath the pain. “He said I needed to go home, and at first I thought he meant here, to the apartment. But then he said ‘no, to Raleigh’。 When I asked why, he wouldn't give me a reason at first, just that it wasn’t working between us and that the restaurants had to take priority.”
“But I thought it was working.”
“Me too.” I pick at Winston’s fur, replaying every word of our breakup, even though I’d give anything to forget them all. “I asked him to talk it through together. That was something he’d said at Fionn’s place, that we would talk about stuff like normal people do.”
“That sounds reasonable and pretty non-psycho to me.”
“Yeah. Same. Then he said something kind of strange.” My brow furrows as I open the search function on my home screen and type in the word ‘lobby’。 It brings up a message from Rowan as one of the options, and I press on it to open his text. “He said that he ‘never wanted to be like everybody else’。 He claimed specifically that he’d told me that on the way to the Best of Boston gala on April tenth.”
“Okay… what’s weird about that?”
“I don’t remember him saying that. Not ever. And the gala wasn’t on the tenth.”
Lark pauses. She’s probably thinking I’ve lost my shit, and she might be right. “Maybe he got the date wrong?”
“But the gala was two days before his birthday, on the twenty-seventh. Don’t you think that’s kind of strange that he wouldn’t remember that?”