About Last Night

by Ruthie Knox

  He grabbed her hand. “Cath.”

  She yanked hard, freeing herself from his hot, possessive fingers. “Don’t you touch me, or I swear to God I will scream so loud you’ll be arrested for assault.”

  “Christ, Cath. Can’t we talk?”

  “What can you possibly have to say to me? ‘Sorry I pimped you out so I could get a promotion’?”

  “I didn’t pimp you out.”

  “No? Then why do I feel like such a whore?”

  She looked down at her outfit—a prim brown linen skirt, pink ballet flats, and a white T-shirt under a brown short-sleeved cardigan. Old-lady clothes. The only thing she wore that belonged to her was the T-shirt. Everything else, Nev had bought. She unbuttoned the sweater and pulled it off, dropping it in the road. Nev ignored it.

  “You’re not a whore, love.”

  “Don’t call me that. I’m not your love.” If he’d loved her, he would’ve defended her. He wouldn’t have sat there, cold as a whole goddamn tray of ice cubes, while his brother told him what an awful person she was. He wouldn’t have sat there while she took off her rings and threw them in his face and walked out.

  Never mind that he’d come after her eventually. It was too little, too late. He could go to hell.

  “You are. I love you. I want to marry you.”

  “Oh, please. Go home, Neville. Go back to work at your precious bank, and find somebody with a pedigree and papers to marry. This thing between us doesn’t work. I was going to end it anyway, as soon as we got back to Greenwich.”

  That stopped him for half a minute, but eventually he caught up at a jog. She wished he weren’t so damn fit. Running away was a lot harder when the guy you were fleeing kept in such excellent shape.

  “Why?”

  “Let it go, Nev. We’re not worth fighting for.”

  “We bloody well are. Why?”

  She looked at him finally. His cheeks were pink, his eyes were hard, and he looked stubborn as a mule. “Because you were a mistake,” she said, hoping to wound him as badly as he’d wounded her. “You promised me you wouldn’t be, but you are. I only fell in love with you because you’re a mistake. Maybe your brother’s little recitation didn’t make it clear. That’s what I do. I screw things up. It’s my specialty. And you— You only think you love me because it pisses your family off. You want somebody totally inappropriate so you can rebel without rebelling. In a nutshell, love, I’m a screwup, and you’re a coward.”

  “That’s what you think? That’s your assessment of the situation?”

  “Yeah.”

  “And you’re angry with me because you think I made you come here as part of some sick game I play with my family?”

  “Essentially, yes.”

  “Christ.”

  He picked up a big stick off the side of the road and threw it as far out into the woods behind the hedgerow as he could. It went a really long way. It was the angriest thing she’d ever seen him do, and it dawned on her that Nev was well and truly pissed off.

  First time for everything, apparently.

  “You were married.” He flung the words at her.

  “Yep.”

  “You might have told me.”

  “Would it have made any difference?”

  “Yes, of course it would have made a difference!”

  “How?”

  “I would have bloody known, wouldn’t I? I wouldn’t have had to sit there and listen to my brother drop bombshells about you. I could’ve said something, because I would’ve had some information, some actual solid bloody knowledge about you, to offer to the conversation.”

  “I don’t get it. What difference does it make if you know I committed arson? What would you tell them, It was only minor arson? She wasn’t convicted, so no worries?”

  “How the hell should I know what I’d have said? I didn’t have the choice, because you never told me the first thing about yourself. I was good enough to shag, but not good enough to confide in, isn’t that about right?”

  Damn it, she had been confiding in him. More than anyone else in her life. The things she’d told him, she’d only ever told him. She’d been getting there.

  But there was no “there” to get to. No way to save this mess they’d constructed together. All they could do was walk away from it.

  They reached the end of the road, both of them gleaming with sweat and breathing hard, and Cath turned left. Nev grabbed her hand again, and she wrenched it out of his grasp for a second time. “Where on earth do you think you’re going?” he asked.

  She pointed a hundred yards down the road to the bus stop. “I’m taking a bus.”

  “What bloody bus?”

  “Any bloody bus.”

  “Oh, for the love of— Stop acting like a child. Come back to the house and talk to me.”

  “We’re finished, Nev. Over. Done with. Kaput. Get it through your head.”

  She saw a bus pulling up to the stop, but she was too far away to reach it. She started to jog anyway. The bus left the curb before she got there.

  Nev came up beside her, grabbed her by the shoulder, and spun her around. He brought his other hand up too, bracing her between his palms at arm’s length. She shifted, but he had a tight grip. Someone gasped, and she realized that to the four people waiting for the bus under the shelter, what Nev was doing probably looked uncomfortably like assault. He would never hurt her, though. Not physically.

  “Tell me now,” he said.

  “Tell you what?”

  “Tell me all of it. Every single dark, terrible secret. If we’re through, it doesn’t matter. You won’t see me again anyway. So tell me. I want to know.”

  She looked at him, at his pink cheeks and sweat-darkened hair. His eyes burned with disapproval and pain. His casual white polo shirt had darkened under his arms, and his formerly shiny shoes were coated in roadside dust. She’d never seen him so messy and intense before except in bed. This was different. He was angry and frustrated, pissed off and confused, and for the first time since she’d met him, he wasn’t letting her have her way. He was fighting.

  She hadn’t thought he’d fight, and it infuriated her. She wanted to beat on his chest and order him to let her go. She wasn’t worth fighting for. He should have defended her, but she didn’t deserve to be defended. She hated him and hated herself in equal measure, and all she wanted was to get away from here, to escape him as quickly and completely as possible.

  She’d tell him, but only because her past was the weapon that would drive him off.

  “Let go of me.”

  With a glance at the people on the bench a few feet away, staring through the glass wall of the bus shelter, he complied, dropping his hands to his hips.

  “You want me to tell you? Fine.” She stripped out of her T-shirt and turned her back to him, giving an eyeful to the peanut gallery. Whatever. It wasn’t like they’d never seen a bra before.

  “Are you mad?” he snapped. “Put your shirt back on.”

  She glared at him over her shoulder. “My body, Nev. I can take off my shirt whenever the hell I please.” Sweat trickled between her shoulder blades as she stabbed her finger into the bird tattooed at the base of her spine. “You’re going to get the condensed version. Pay attention. My dad died when I was fourteen. I was his princess, his precious Mary Catherine, and when he died, I pretty much lost my shit. Started drinking, running around with any boy who’d look twice at me. Your typical teenager with daddy issues. I didn’t know who I was anymore. I needed somebody to tell me. Only you know what? Sixteen-year-old boys aren’t much good at that sort of thing.

  “My mom was in mourning too, but she chose to express it by telling me what a tramp I was every time she caught me sneaking home in the middle of the night or found a contraband tube of lipstick in my purse. She decided to escape the horrible Talaricos and move back to England. I refused to go. She left me with my uncle Pete and aunt Nina.”

  Cath looked up from her feet and saw all four of the bus station pa
trons staring at her. There was a teenage boy, maybe fifteen, who was honest-to-God slack-jawed, his eyes focused on her breasts. An older guy smoking a cigarette leaned against the shelter support and leered at her. Two biddies wearing church hats frowned with pruney mouths and clutched their purses tight, like maybe when she finished her story she was going to rob them and run off. She was tempted to give them the finger. She hadn’t done it in years, but then she hadn’t been this angry since she was a teenager. She’d forgotten how jacked up and high it made her feel.

  “You still with me, Nev? Want to hear what the future held for poor Mary Catherine?”

  His answer came out through gritted teeth. “Yes.”

  “Good.” She tossed her hair and carried on. “Aunt Nina thought I was a kick. She let me sleep in the basement apartment. I lived there for a couple years, which was long enough for me to get knocked up not once, but twice. The first time, I was sixteen, and I had an abortion. The second time, I was seventeen, and I married Jimmy Calabrese. He was twenty-seven and smooth as Scotch on the rocks. Jimmy made me feel special. He told me I was beautiful. He thought I’d make a great mother. It took me three or four months to figure out that all Jimmy wanted was a ticket into the family. He tucked me away in a little house in the ’burbs and left me alone, mostly. I took these special classes for pregnant high school girls so I could get my GED, and I cooked meals out of Betty Crocker that Jimmy didn’t show up to eat.”

  Her shoulder was starting to hurt from holding her finger to her back. She dropped the pointer. She’d tattooed numbers onto her skin, for crying out loud. Nev was clever enough to follow them.

  “I was happy even after I figured out Jimmy wasn’t my One True Love, because I was young and stupid, and because I had Wren. I was going to be the best mother in the world. She helped fill me up, you know? That part of me that had been missing since Dad died didn’t feel so empty with Wren growing inside me. Only, bad luck comes in threes, right? First Dad, then Jimmy, and then when I was six months pregnant and hanging Christmas lights, I started bleeding like Carrie in the locker room shower.”

  The cynical smoking guy raised an eyebrow, and she remembered she was in England, and Nev wouldn’t get the reference. Whatever.

  “When I came to, my daughter was dead, I was sterile, and my husband was nowhere to be found. Merry fucking Christmas, Mary Catherine.”

  One of the biddies gasped. Cath gave her a sick smile, and she turned her wrinkled face away, disapproval written all over it. Good. If old women disapproved of her, the world was starting to make sense again.

  “Jimmy showed up eventually and took me home. I became basically catatonic, except with more vodka. Jimmy’s patience lasted a few weeks, but then he got sick of it and started telling me I needed to get over it. I didn’t get over it. I didn’t want to get over it. I baited him into arguments whenever he was around, just to feel alive for a few minutes. It pissed me off that he didn’t seem to care as much as I did that Wren was dead. One night, I pushed him too far and he punched me. I think it scared him more than it did me. I was furious. He took off, and I piled up all his clothes on the bed and set them on fire. Tattoo number two, Neville.”

  “Stop it.”

  “You asked for it.”

  “Not like this.”

  “Too bad. You don’t get to choose.” She was tempted to ask the leering guy for a cigarette, but she thought if she let a strange man give her a light while she stood there shirtless, Nev might go postal. She carried on with the story instead.

  “The curtains went up, and the next thing I knew my house was burning down. I had no idea you could get arrested for burning down your own house. I guess since Jimmy’s name was on the mortgage, it wasn’t really mine. They charged me with arson, but Uncle Pete took care of it. He got me out, got his lawyers working on a divorce, and quietly shipped me off to art school in Seattle.

  “He shouldn’t have bothered. I screwed it up. I could hardly stand to be alone with myself. I skipped class and spent as much of my time drunk or high or sleeping with strange guys as I possibly could. It was easier to drift than to think. They kicked me out at the end of the semester. Pete found me a spot at a university in California, but it was the same story. After a few years, he ran out of connections, and I ran out of schools that would accept me. That’s tattoo number three. The closed book. It’s symbolic, don’tcha know?”

  “Cath.” He wrapped his hands around her waist and pulled her backward until the bridge of his nose rested against the nape of her neck. “Why are you doing this?”

  “Do you hate me yet?”

  He didn’t answer.

  Clearly, she had more work to do.

  “I came to England. Mom and I fought constantly. I wouldn’t get a job. I wouldn’t go to college. After a few months, I met this guy whose band was about to start touring in Germany, and I went with him. And for the next few years, I just drifted around Europe. I was a groupie, basically, though at least I was a monogamous one. I’d only fall in love with one musician at a time. I partied a lot, smoked a little, let men treat me like shit.”

  She’d had bad dreams every night, and she’d hardly slept. She’d spent her days wandering through the museums of Florence, Nuremberg, Madrid. Mom had tried several times to get her to come back and live with her, and sometimes she would for a while, but it never worked. She’d been toxic.

  Placing her hands over Nev’s, she pressed his fingers into the side of her stomach where dozens of lines interlaced and twined together toward her navel. Number four. “This one’s supposed to be a labyrinth. Because I was so lost, for such a long time.”

  She looked at their hands. Looked at her dirty pink ballet flats, delicate shoes never meant to be actually worn anywhere. Looked up for a bus, hoping for an escape before she had to say the rest. The cavalry didn’t come. She pushed Nev’s hands off her and turned around.

  Whatever that expression was in his eyes, it wasn’t love. It was something new. Something sick and disappointed she’d conjured up.

  “My mom tried to call me to tell me she had cancer, but I didn’t call her back. I hardly ever called her back. By the time I found out about the chemotherapy, she’d already lost her hair. She was dying, and I wasn’t grown up enough to answer the fucking phone. I moved back here and took care of her. I was determined to prove to her I could do one thing right, and I hoped … I think I hoped if I pulled myself together she wouldn’t really die. Like maybe it was just a test, you know?”

  He didn’t say anything.

  “It wasn’t a test. She died. It was slow and painful and completely unfair, and I was no comfort to her whatsoever. A week after the funeral, I got the tattoos. Then I got a job at a yarn shop, and later at the V and A. I got a life. I pulled my act together. It’s been two years. I’m broke, on the verge of being unemployed, and I just spent the weekend lying to a bunch of strangers because you asked me to.”

  She paused, wondering if he deserved to be knifed after all that shit she’d just dumped on him. Probably not. Probably he didn’t deserve any of this. He was a banker. He was City. Just because he’d disappointed her—just because she loved Nev better—didn’t mean she got to punish him for being who he was.

  She heard shifting behind her, and Nev’s eyes skated over her shoulder to where the bus had to be approaching.

  Cath pulled her shirt over her head and wrestled her arms into the sleeves.

  He didn’t deserve it, but she knifed him anyway. “I honestly thought you were the best person I’ve ever met. Which just goes to show you my judgment is as shoddy as ever.”

  “Don’t do this,” he said.

  “I have to. It’s what I do.”

  When the bus pulled up to the curb, she got on it.

  Chapter Eighteen

  Cath nearly walked in front of a cab. She stepped off the curb after glancing to the left, having forgotten the traffic came from the other direction in this godforsaken country. The unlicensed taxi had to swerve, and the dr
iver leaned on his horn in anger.

  She blinked, slow and stupid, and took a step back. Her body felt as if she were controlling it remotely and the signal was poor. Heartbreak had made her a zombie.

  Normally, she was good at this. She made her mistakes, and then she drew a line to separate the past from the present and walked away. If she felt pain, it was faint and empathetic, as if it were someone else’s. The pain of Past Cath. The Ghost of Christmas Cath.

  Maybe she’d fallen out of practice, or maybe it was because she’d fallen in love this time, but this pain, this Nev pain, was a mangling, keening, unmanageable beast. It lived in her chest and her skin, in all her nerve endings and the space behind her eyes, at the nape of her neck and in the balls of her feet. Everything screaming out, telling her to fix it quick, because she couldn’t possibly be expected to carry on like this.

  But she would. The control center in her skull said she’d get better eventually. It promised a broken heart couldn’t kill her. She would get used to it, as hard-core monks must once have gotten used to their hair shirts and their daily flagellations.

  All night long, her brain had picked over the corpse of her relationship with Nev. She’d lain awake, thinking about the New Cath Reform Project, about her life and her work and what the future would hold. Her brain had plans. If only it could keep her body from throwing itself in front of moving vehicles.

  She put one foot in front of the other and shambled gracelessly into the office, where she found Judith sorting through dozens of pairs of knitted socks and stockings on the table.

  “I thought you weren’t coming in today.”

  “I wasn’t.” Cath dumped her purse on the floor and surveyed the limp, lifeless hosiery. Judith planned to include a feature on socks in the exhibit, but she’d struggled to come up with a way to make them interesting. The subject of hand-knit socks made the eyes of all but the most devoted knitters glaze right over.

  “I thought you were in the countryside with Banker Ken.”