Bleeding Heart

by Taylor Holloway

  “Alexander, you really are a pig,” Madison said after a few, measured deep breaths. She tried to get around me.

  I blocked her path.

  “You don’t want to admit it, do you?” I asked her, leaning down close to her face and inspecting it carefully. She was so cute up close—especially with the angry blush she was wearing; it turned her pale cheeks all pink and rosy.

  “Admit what, Alexander? That you’re a pig? I’ll hire a sky writer to make that known to a wider audience if you’d like. Or how about a tattoo artist? He could write it right here,” Madison replied, sticking out a short finger and pressing it to my forehead to push me back. I didn’t move. She narrowed her eyes and drew herself up to her maximum height of five-foot-nothing. She didn’t pull away from me. She held her ground even as I did my best to rile and intimidate her.

  After a long moment I stepped back, smirking at her and letting her get around me and escape.

  “No,” I finally replied as she stalked off, “Not that. You don’t want to admit that you don’t know why you’re with him, do you?”

  “Oh, go fuck yourself,” she said haughtily, making her petite, stomping way in the opposite direction.

  I eventually managed to find some reception and confirmed that all was going well at home in Dubai. Deciding that Madison had probably found Cunt-face and returned to the table by then, I planned on taking a leak and then heading back to torment her some more. But when I pushed open the door to the bathroom, I found Cunt-face. And Angelica.

  Together.

  Angelica was on all fours, her skanky dress lying balled up next to her. She was getting pounded on the floor from behind by Madison’s fiancé. Their coupling had all the romance of something you’d see between primates on the Discovery Channel, and probably less observance to proper hygiene. I was momentarily stunned, too shocked to do anything else but stare. As they were both very… busy, I was able to shut the door before they saw me. I leaned heavily against the door, pondering what to do next.

  Right on cue, and as if God himself were intervening for me, Madison and Clara appeared down the narrow hallway. This had to be fate.

  “Have you seen Kevin?” Clara asks me with Madison standing uncomfortably by her side. This literally could not get any more perfect if I planned it. I was going to send Angelica a dozen roses.

  “Actually, yes,” I said seriously, looking Madison in the eye, “take a look.”

  I took a deep breath and pushed the door behind me wide open.

  4

  Madison

  When I’d laid eyes on Angelica and Kevin humping on the ground in the men’s room of all places, something inside me broke. It shattered—I shattered—into a million pieces and unleashed something primitive and violent. Even I was surprised by its savagery, and by the high-pitched tea kettle noise that ripped from my throat.

  “Fuck you. Fuck your stupid start-up, fuck your stupid friends in California…” The words that were coming out of my mouth a moment later were subject to zero filter as I stalked forward onto the sticky floor of the men’s room toward my fiancé. My fiancé who was still balls-deep in Mrs. Angelica Hunt.

  As I went, I scooped up Angelica’s Hermès handbag, all ten-thousand-dollars-worth of it. I smacked her over the head with it. The bag was surprisingly heavy. She went down, wiping the shit-eating grin right off her stupid, plastic, pretty face. I tossed the bag right into the urinal to my right, wanting to focus my attention on Kevin.

  “Hey!” Angelica squealed and wriggled, but she was naked, drunk, and vulnerable on the ground. I almost pitied her until she grabbed my ankle, getting in my way. This was not a good moment to get in my way.

  “Go home and fuck your grandpa—I mean husband,” I told her, kicking her black dress to the corner of the room so she’d have to crawl nakedly over to get it, “Unless you want to get the shit kicked out of you by a middle-class do-gooder.”

  I suppose the look on my face, coupled with the growing crowd at the door, was enough to discourage her from challenging me. She scurried off somewhere; I didn’t care where.

  Kevin was in my crosshairs now. I’m sure some really nasty things came out of my mouth as he tried to get his pants back on.

  “Madison, oh god. Madison, I’m sorry. This was a mistake,” He said. Kevin was groveling? I wasn’t really paying close attention to his words, but that was just pathetic. It was too late to regret anything.

  I threw my glass at him, striking him on the side of the face. It bounced harmlessly off him. I hadn’t thrown it hard enough for it to shatter, although it did cover him in my drink. Other objects made it into my hands and I threw them at him, too. I also kicked him in the ribs, hard. He didn’t fight back, just continued to beg my forgiveness. It was pitiful, but I was pitiless.

  It was not one of my finest moments, but it did make me feel better. Unfortunately (or perhaps very fortunately), Alexander and David pulled me off of him before I did any real damage, each grabbed one of my arms and literally dragged me out of the room backward. They clearly found this situation highly entertaining.

  The aftermath was ugly. Kevin was crying. Clara was wide-eyed. Alexander and David were laughing their asses off. Angelica’s ass, on the other hand, was still hanging out as she tried to shimmy back into her too-tight dress. I was as livid as I’d ever been in my life, and apparently the management of the bar wanted me gone.

  I went.

  And Kevin was dead to me.

  Sitting in the Range Rover next to Clara, I performed a ritual digital exorcism. I blocked Kevin’s many social media accounts, his numbers, and deleted his emails to me over the past two years. Every picture, every video, every text was deleted and consigned to oblivion. It felt good to delete him. But not as good as kicking him in the ribs had.

  “Um… Madison,” Clara ventured softly, “Do you maybe want to talk about it?”

  “Nope,” I replied as I continued to delete Kevin from my life, “Why don’t you just take me to my Dad’s office? Kevin will be out of the carriage house by morning if he knows what’s good for him. I’ve got work to do anyway.”

  I’d realized that Kevin and I were having some problems. I’d known that we were on the precipice of something big. But I’d never thought, not in a million years, that he would humiliate himself or me like that. And Alexander saw everything.

  All it took was Angelica winking at him, a few cocktails and I’m guessing a not-so-insignificant amount of coke, and he was nailing her?

  I expected more of him. I expected more of us.

  In hindsight, there had been warning signs that something big had happened during my absence over the last few months. The subtle shifts in his personality that I had observed over the past week should have told me what I needed to know. Our relationship was the walking dead. I shouldn’t have even brought him with me to Pennsylvania.

  Strangely, I was more angry and humiliated than I was heartbroken. Maybe the heartbreak phase would come later. But the heart-squeezing attraction was never really there with Kevin, or at least, it hadn’t been there anymore for a long, long time. We’d been good together in a lot of ways for a long time. But now it was over. And for that, I felt more empty than sad. But his public betrayal of me? That just filled me with rage.

  As Clara drove me to the Clark and Jeffries office at one in the morning, I looked over at her soft, elegant profile and saw that she was crying.

  “Clara?” I asked her.

  “I’m so sorry, Madison,” Clara said, sniffling and shaking her head, “I never should have let Angelica come tonight. I should have never let her do this. She’s awful.”

  Clara was blaming herself. She always did this where her sister was concerned.

  Once, when we were kids, Angelica had stolen a necklace from me. It was something that our housekeeper Elena had given me for my tenth birthday, a silver St. Christopher medal on a long chain. Elena had told me that St. Christopher was the patron saint of travelers, and that if I was really going to
spend my life travelling the world and helping people, he would protect me. I had just gotten back from a Catholic youth group trip to Mexico, and my mind was blown by what I’d seen there.

  I’d been crushed when I thought I had lost the necklace, and furious when I saw Angelica wearing it a few days later. My parents had brought me to a barbeque at her house attended by all my parents’ friends and business contacts. She was fourteen at the time. I suppose the Durants and Breyers were there too, but I was prepubescent at that point and they were just more faceless grownups.

  “Give it back!” I had yelled at her in front of everyone, “You stole it.”

  “Why would I steal from you? You don’t have anything I want,” Angelica had said calmly, rolling the necklace between her fingers as the adults looked on. She looked so grown up that day, more like an adult than a kid like Clara and me. “This is mine. I don’t really even like it.”

  “I know you took it from me, Angelica. Three days ago when you were at my house. You even helped Clara and me look for it.”

  “When I was babysitting you two? You were looking for a necklace? I thought you were looking for your Barbie doll.”

  “You’re a filthy liar! I hate you!” I had screamed, tears and snot running down my face in rivulets. I don’t think anyone had ever spoken that way to Angelica before. Beautiful Angelica, the apple of her father’s eye. Angelica, who was so spoiled that she probably didn’t even realize that it was wrong to take things from others. Her pretty blue eyes had gone wide in shock.

  “Ugh, fine. Here. If you like it so much, you can have it. Brat.” She’d said to me, throwing the necklace on the ground so I had to collect it from the dirt. In response I pushed her down, screamed, and dumped my glass of blue Kool-Aid on her white, lacey dress.

  I’d been grounded for that, and for refusing to apologize later. Angelica wasn’t punished. She never was. Actions didn’t have consequences for her. Her daddy, Senator Tom Ellis, would never admit that she’d stolen from me, even with Clara giving testimony. My parents didn’t back me up. In fact, they apologized for me. Privately they believed me, but publicly the relationship between our family and Angelica’s was more important than the truth.

  I told Clara the same thing then that I told her now, “Don’t worry about it, Clara. I’m fine.”

  Only this time… it was true.

  Clara looked at me in surprise. The fact that I wasn’t crying or crushed was shocking to me, too. I didn’t know why I wasn’t crying. I should have been crying.

  I stared at my engagement ring on my finger, before taking it off and carefully placing it in my handbag. I told myself I would sell it later. I certainly wouldn’t be giving it back to Kevin. It was mine, just like that St. Christopher medal. The savage thing that had been unleashed when I saw Kevin cheating on me tonight was still very much awake.

  Part of me was afraid of it.

  5

  Alexander

  In the ensuing fallout, there wasn’t much for me to do but watch. Which was fine. Madison was absolutely magnificent.

  Cunt-face was verbally eviscerated by Madison. His actual name was Kevin, I’d finally learned since Madison screamed it several times in between other obscenities. She punctuated her assault by tearing a soap dispenser from its cradle on the wall and throwing it at him. He was already covered in Madison’s beer, so the added soap gave him a unique aroma. When she ran out of easily accessible objects, she took off her shoes and threw them at him, one at a time, striking him squarely in the flushed face as he pulled up his pants. Then she kicked him, and he curled up on the ground like a worm.

  Cunt-face cried. I almost felt bad for him. Madison was savage. This trip across the globe was already entertaining if nothing else.

  Angelica, who was immune to any feelings of guilt or shame, eventually slunk off somewhere after her own Madison-attack and her subsequent battle to get back into her ridiculous dress. I suspected that Angelica seduced Madison’s fiancé just to mess with her. Angelica may not feel shame, but she was smart enough to know when she wasn’t smart enough. It was patently obvious to everyone that Madison was far more intelligent. In response, Angelica seduced and fucked her fiancé on a piss-covered floor. And David and Nathan said I was petty and immature.

  “Madison,” Clara pleaded as a growing crowd collected outside the VIP men’s room, “Madison, let’s get out of here.”

  Poor little Clara Ellis. She had all of Madison’s tender-heartedness and none of her spark, courage, or resolve. Clara was smart in her own way, navigating the complex social no-man’s-land of being the ‘good’ daughter of her politically ambitious family, but she tended to melt into the background when challenged or insulted. I actually liked Clara fine, and she’d once done me a tremendous favor, but she just didn’t do it for me.

  Madison, on the other hand, knew how to rise to the occasion. She definitely did it for me in more ways than one. And while she was certainly a ‘middleclass do-gooder’, and it was obnoxious and silly, her sense of justice always brought the fight out in her.

  The first time I remembered laying eyes on Madison Clark, she was seven years old. I was thirteen. We were both at a New Year’s Day brunch thrown by Senator Thomas Ellis, Durant Industries favorite politician for hire. The party was dull, my cousins were obnoxious, and for some reason I was hanging around near my mother in the Thompson’s kitchen, probably looking to steal a Bloody Mary.

  Madison was on the floor, crying and throwing a fit.

  A seven-year-old throwing a fit was neither remarkable or interesting. What was interesting, at least to me, was why.

  “All of them?!” My mother asked Mrs. Clark in disbelief.

  “Yes. Even the books that she begged for. She’s furious we didn’t agree. She’s been like this all day,” Mrs. Clark replied, shaking her head and ignoring her daughter, clearly opting for the ‘cry it out’ parenting approach.

  “Well I suppose it’s admirable, in a way,” My mother remarked. Noticing me standing around, she smiled fondly, “Peculiar though. That’s certainly not an issue we have with Alexander.”

  “What are you talking about?” I asked the two women, feeling irritated that they were talking about me as if I wasn’t there. I wasn’t the one sobbing and beating my fists on the kitchen floor, after all.

  “Madison tried to donate all her Christmas presents to the Salvation Army,” Mrs. Clark answered me, “She’s furious that we won’t let her.”

  At fourteen, I understood enough about inequity and money to know about charity. Under the tutelage of my father and grandfather, I understood that helping the less fortunate could only be accomplished by giving everyone access to education, jobs, and opportunity. According to everything I’d ever been told, giving them presents was pointless. It made no sense to me. I wanted to understand why anyone would do such a thing.

  “Why do you want to give away your presents?” I asked the still-crying little girl, nudging her gently with my foot.

  Shocked that someone so much older than her was talking to her, Madison blinked and sat up. She paused mid-fit. Our mothers continued to talk, oblivious to our exchange. Madison met my eyes with her soft hazel ones, biting her lip.

  “Well?” I repeated, “Why do you want to give them away? Did you not get what you wanted or something?”

  If she hadn’t gotten what she wanted and was trying to punish her parents by getting rid of everything else, that would make sense to me. It was passive-aggressive. It sounded like something I would do.

  “N-no,” Madison replied to my surprise, “I got what I wanted. But it makes me sad that other kids don’t get any presents. It isn’t fair.”

  “Why do you care?” I asked, genuinely perplexed why this seven-year-old girl would feel responsible for the fact that other kids might not get presents. Sure, it was unfortunate. But it wasn’t her fault. And she couldn’t fix the larger issue by giving them her own presents.

  The world wasn’t fair. It just wasn’t. It never wo
uld be. I may have been fourteen, but I wasn’t dumb. I wasn’t going to waste my time dwelling on problems that would never be solved. She might as well have been throwing a fit because the sky was blue and not green.

  “Why don’t you?” She shot back, shocking me with her sudden anger, “Don’t you want other kids to be happy on Christmas?”

  At that point I had simply shrugged, stepped over her, and walked away. I snagged a bottle of vodka and returned triumphant to my cousins with alcohol in hand. I never did find out if Madison had donated all her presents or not.

  But I thought about her question for a long time. I really didn’t care if other kids were happy on Christmas. Their happiness or unhappiness was irrelevant to my life, and little more than an abstraction. But Madison cared that the world wasn’t fair. She cared more about strangers than most people cared about themselves. I’d never met anyone who thought like her before. And that was interesting to me.

  Little did I know at the time, Madison would grow more interesting to me over the years. Her confusing, confounding worldview would stay the same, but so would her grit. She grew into a little contradiction of a person, all soft and caring about the world, but stubborn and extreme in her execution. It was easy to push her buttons, but impossible to change her mind. She was a walking challenge to me.

  Tonight, she’d proven to me that she was still as interesting as ever. Her temper and her idealism were intact. She still wanted the world to be fair. And the world had failed her again—this time personally.

  To my disappointment, David arrived shortly after the physical assault portion of Madison’s offensive on her now ex-fiancé commenced. Clara and propriety demanded that we pull Madison off of Cunt-face, which we reluctantly did. Clara and Madison took off shortly afterward, and I ditched David to trail Madison’s SUV to the Clark and Jeffries offices.