Page 44 of King of Justice

You left something in my bedroom. Something I’m tempted to use.

Smiling, I hit ‘send’ and tossed the lip balm onto the bed before picking up my coffee, taking a sip, and heading into the shower.

An hour later, and after a run and a slice of toast, the headache wouldn’t go away. I took two pills of painkiller and just as I washed them down with a drink of water, my phone began to ring. It was Chad.

“Way too early,” I said when I answered.

“For me, maybe. You called it a night after the countdown.” He chuckled. “I’m disappointed in you.”

“For being an early bird?” I mocked.

“For blowing off my party to run off with… who did you run off with? All the hot pieces stayed until closing. Some of them behind closed doors!” He continued to laugh, pride dripping from his tone. According to Chad, the success of a party could be measured by the amount of occupied bedrooms the venue hosted.

“I—”

“Don’t even try to lie to me. I know you got laid.”

“Please tell me more.”

“Your lawyer friend, Frederick?”

“Hendrick,” I corrected him.

“He texted asking if you were still here. You weren’t.”

“Do you know how many parties I was supposed to be at last night?”

“Yet, you didn’t fess up about which one you’d ended up at. My reading of the situation? You’re secretly tapping ass.”

“I’m hanging up—”

“No! No, no, no, don’t you fucking dare. We’re doing chess like we always do.”

“Then get your ass over here and stop interrogating me.”

“Not for another few hours.”

“Why not?”

“I still gotta serve breakfast in bed!” he said in a meaningful tone.

“I didn’t need to know that.”

“Tough shit. Hey, want me to grab anything?”

“A new head? Mine’s about to burst.”

He chuckled. “That’s what you get for drinking whatever piss you drank in whatever hole you were at. Peace out.”

I pressed my lips together. “Goodbye.”

In an attempt to nurse my hangover, I went back into the kitchen and started making a smoothie. Coconut water, ginger tea, kefir apple, pineapple, and orange juice… now, blend. Needless to say, the sound of the mixer nearly reduced me to an anguished pool of pain on the floor.

For nearly two hours, I immersed myself in Jean-Luc Godard’s nineteen-sixty-three masterpiece, Le Mépris (Contempt) with Brigitte Bardot and Michel Piccoli. It told a tale of people who were simultaneously seduced and repelled. Infatuated and appalled. Falling in and out of love.

Love. What did I know of it? In my life, I had barely scratched the surface of matters such as love, compromise, or sacrifice. When a relationship got in the way of the bigger picture, I deemed it unnecessary and moved it.

But here I was, questioning the bigger picture for the sake of a woman. What was I doing so wrong that she couldn’t overlook?

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