Page 38 of Maverick
I don’t get despairing. I make a new plan.
Even if that new plan is stupid.
Chapter Seven
Maverick
I’m losing it. I’m fucking losing my mind. I know that leaving her there like that was a shit thing to do, but I couldn’t stay. The buildup of emotion inside of me is just too much. I can’t cope. As I drive back to the house, that echoes in my head. I can’t deal.
I’ve finally reached the end of my shitty coping mechanisms.
I’ve been cruising on momentum for these last five years, and it’s been careless momentum, but it’s been movement. Now I feel like everything is just… shattered.
Why did I do that?
I wanted her. I wanted her so badly that I couldn’t think straight, couldn’t see straight. I wanted her so badly that I was willing to fuck all the consequences so I could fuck her. But what about her?
She was avirgin.
She’s eleven years younger than I am, she’s…
I wasn’t careful with her. I didn’t think about how to change myself to be what a virgin might need, what a woman in her twenties might need.
I was like an animal. I gave in to every baser instinct. I don’t do that. I never did it with Sadie.
Ever.
I feel guilt. Just this mass of generalized guilt that I don’t know what to do with. Is it guilt because I was with another woman? Maybe. It doesn’t make sense. But I wouldn’t be surprised. Because guilt is reliable in how fucking stupid it is. Guilt over taking advantage of her, certainly. Over making her the object of all this pent-up sexual need.
That’s not how you treat anyone. Much less a twenty-four-year-old virgin. She didn’t need me to ride her mouth, didn’t need me to take her so hard she hit the headboard. Didn’t need me to eat her like I was starving.
Because I was.
And that’s about all my shit, and I put her through that. And then I left. I left like a fucking asshole, which is exactly what I am. I’m content to play the villain. As long as everybody else is a firm distance away from me. That’s not what this was.
I bad guyed a little bit too close to the sun today, and I’m not happy with myself. I throw my truck into Park, fling open the front door, and slam it shut behind me. I go upstairs and turn the shower on. Then I strip my clothes off, and I stand underneath the spray. Like I’m washing the last hour of my life away.
I didn’t want to touch another woman. For the whole rest of my goddamned life. That was why I got married. And then she died. And that’s so stupid. To this day, it is the number one dumbest thing that’s ever happened. Why would a young, beautiful, vivacious woman with all the dreams in the world just die?
Before she got to see her horse go to the Olympics. Before she got to have children. Before she got to grow old with me,or decide she hated me and divorce me, or whatever the hell might’ve happened. It was all taken away.
And it’s just terrible. The worst thing. The worst thing in the world.
And I went and made it worse tonight. By dragging somebody else into my bullshit.
“Sadie, you would be so mad at me,” I say. And it’s not about me having sex with another woman. Knowing her, she’d tell me she’s dead and that’s not her problem. It’s the way I went about things. It’s about Stella herself. How sweet she is, howvulnerable.
She’d say it’s not like me. Except sometimes it’s exactly like me, and she’d know that too.
You always have to act like you’re such a prick. But you care a whole lot more than you ever let anybody else see. Why do you do that?
I still remember her looking at me, so hurt when she said that. Because I’d gotten prickly and closed off about something she wanted to talk about – I can’t even remember what. It was a theme.
I didn’t know the answer then, and I don’t know it now.
Even if she were alive, I still wouldn’t be able to tell her. That pisses me off.
That no matter if she were here now, Istillwouldn’t be able to give her the answer to that question. I still haven’t healed that part of myself.
