Page 43 of Alone With You in the Ether

She’d used atone, and he knew the warning signs. He considered her sudden shifts in mood to be part of the eccentric package, probably lamenting it over drinks in her absence.

Women, she imagined him saying,am I right?

“Don’t be like that,” he said. “I’m not accusing you of anything. I’m just asking.”

Regan bristled; he hadn’t askedHave you taken your pills?but she could hear it, the implication that she had not. “I’m fine,” she said, returning her attention to the process of packing. Shewasfine, minus Marc’s unwelcome hedging. She wassurprisinglyfine, actually. She was feeling something akin to excitement, in fact, which was an astounding but highly welcome alternative to the usual existential dread at the thought of facing her family. “Aldo’s, you know. A friend,” she reminded him. “A buffer, really.”

With Aldo there, Regan doubted her parents would press her much about what she was up to. More likely they’d be stiff and formal, unwilling to venture anything beyond Midwestern politeness. Marc, who had a tendency to be fleeting in conversation, was never so reliable; hemingled. He was amingler. Aldo, on the other hand, would be a fixture at her side.

“You like him,” Marc observed.

“Isthatan accusation?” she asked, glancing at him. He didn’t answer.

In approximately the same moment, Regan suddenly remembered a dress she hadn’t worn in years, turning to her closet to find it. She’d lost some weight in recent months but she figured it would still fit well enough. She’d been thinner in her criminal days; sleep had been something of a rarity at the time, and her tendency to focus on a given task meant she’d skipped a fair amount of meals.

“Regan,” Marc said again, “if this guy is… I mean, if he’s just something you need to get out of your system—”

He’d trailed off, and she turned to face him after pulling the dress free from the back of her closet, frowning. “What?”

“I wouldn’t mind. I mean, I’d like to know,” he amended with a dry laugh, “but, you know.”

Something in her stomach twisted. This was happening entirely off schedule. Marc wasn’t supposed to lose his possessiveness over her until at least a year into marriage.

“I hope this is some kind of weak attempt at reverse psychology,” she opened testily.

He shook his head. “It’s not. It’s just, you know.” A shrug. “I know you, Regan.”

A nice sentiment, or it would have been, only it didn’t sound intimate at all. It sounded like a taunt, and Regan folded her arms over her chest, facing him. “Would you give up speaking in riddles, Marcus? Just tell me whatever it is you want to say.”

Probably a little too defensive.

“Yeah?” he said, his voice a little too mean. “Fine, Regan. Here it is, no bullshit: Fuck him if you want to.” She tried not to flinch, though she was certain she’d recoiled to some degree. “You know why it doesn’t matter? Because you’ll come back to me,” he said, and again, it was a disconcerting mismatch; soft words, hard intentions. “Because I know you. Because Igetyou. You think you want excitement, you think you want new and interesting, but babe—”

He stepped towards her, coolly brushing her hair away from her face.

“You know he’ll see through you eventually,” he murmured to her. “You’ll put on an act for him, won’t you, the way you do for everyone—but it just exhausts you in the end, doesn’t it?”

She bristled, somewhere between slighted and caught.

There was nothing worse than being predictable. Nothing smaller than feeling ordinary.

Nothing more disappointing than being reminded she was both.

“We’re the same, Regan,” Marc reminded her. “It’s not pretty underneath, is it? But you don’t have to be anything else for me. You can be your fucked-up self,” he said with a laugh in her ear, lips brushing her cheek, “and I’ll still be there, even when everyone else turns away.”

His sweetness was always moderately bitter. His candor was never without some bite. It was what she liked about him, really; his sense of power. Marc Waite was always prettily aloof.

There was a perpetual imbalance between them that she knew they both understood. She’d been so close to nothing when he’d found her that she would spend their entire relationship owing him something, or everything, just for staying when any reasonable person would have left. It wasn’t wholly unromantic. Actually it was, perversely so. Even when the heat of sex died away there would still be some underlying sense of kinship; an understanding that Marc was shitty with his charming flaws of vice, but Regan would always be shittier, selfish and mercurial and vain. Complimentary pieces in a perfect, shitty puzzle, where she was the broken one and he was normal. She would always be sick and he would always be fine.

“So you’re satisfied with winning by default,” she said, glancing up at him. “Is that it? I’m allowed to fuck Aldo because he’ll leave me in the end?”

She wished he’d flinched, but he hadn’t. She hadn’t really expected him to. Do enough drugs and nothing could faze you; choose a woman who gambled on her shock value and eventually you went numb just to cope.

“That,” Marc said, “or I love you.” He released her, shrugging, and turned away. “Whatever works for you, Regan. However you have to justify it.”

He left her holding the dress, the material folded over on itself in her hands; much as she might have preferred to throw something after him, instead she watched him go.

She hated the view of his back. It did something to her, diminishing her to inconsequence, insufficiency, insignificance. She could slip through the cracks in the floor like this, vanishing into nothing for her smallness, and he knew it. An old thud of hurt wrenched in her chest, and seeking reprieve, she glanced down at the dress, fingers tightening in the fabric.

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