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And the truth was that I was still mad. I was mad at her for choosing that asshole over me. I was mad that she’d lost so much weight, making her almost unrecognizable. I was pissed that she’d left me alone when she’d said she would stay.

“Stop this,” she whispered from the corner of her mouth, resting her hand on my knee. I flinched at the burn and ground my teeth.

“Happy birthday, Jess.” She smiled. “I was hoping I’d see you here tonight.”

“Oh shit!” Jake laughed. “I forgot it was your birthday! But don’t worry, you don’t look a day over forty.”

“I’m twenty-six, asshole.”

Charlie giggled. “I didn’t think you’d come, so I set your gift back in Delivery. Not sure if you got more than one, but mine is the red one with a white bow.” She winked.

My chest caved, and my head swam with how sickeningly sweet the girl was. “You got me a birthday gift?”

“Of course. Well, it’s sort of a Christmas-birthday combo gift,” she added, waving her hand. “Sorry. Tips sucked this week.”

I blinked slowly, keeping my head down. “When is
your
birthday?” I asked.

She nervously chuckled and looked away. “It was in July.”

“Because, you know, friends are supposed to know stuff like that. Right?” I was dizzy, trying to keep all of the emotion away, but it all flooded in and washed away any rational thought. The Madness, the Whirl, the Grim all came at once, I remembered every minute I’d spent with her, as painstaking as it was.

A goddamn montage of Charlie swept through my mind:
Charlie at
the park, Charlie at the cabin, the lake, the silence, the frogs, the hippie, the phone numbers, the grass…

I pushed up from the booth and jogged to the back. Sure enough, a large red package with a white bow sat on the Delivery desk. Ben stood talking on the phone, and he cocked his head when he saw my bloodshot eyes.

…Her bed, her painting, her thighs, her panties, her car, the men’s bathroom sign…

Ben covered the receiver with his hand and whispered, “Jess, you can’t be back here. You’re not punched in and you’re fucked up.”

I shook my head and grabbed the package, ripping it open. Red paper flew all over the kitchen.

…the beach, the shell in my palm, the stars, the night, the day, the red dress, the heat, the cabinet, Mandy, the frying pan, the barn, Lily…

“Fuck,” I whispered, taking the box from the wrapping paper. Flipping it over, I gripped the ends tightly, looking down at the gift.

A clear chessboard lined with plastic, one side set in crystal and the other in black pewter.

I don’t know where I went in that moment, but I wasn’t inside myself.

I wasn’t even outside myself.

I was nowhere.

I was everywhere.

I was gone.

was nowhere.
of myself.
t moment, but I wasn'.king down at a chessboard. t, the cabinet, the frying pan, the barn...ade. again
Chapter Three

Charlie

I shouldn’t have gone that night. I knew when I saw him that he was drunk. I should’ve left when he shouted from across the bar.

But I hadn’t.

My mistake.

My stupid, naïve mistake.

My head spun, my stomach churned, and I didn’t want to open the kitchen doors. He’d stumbled to get there, desperation in every step. Jake hadn’t noticed because he didn’t have a clear angle, but I’d heard Jesse’s voice. I’d seen him grab his chest when I’d mentioned the present.

I approached the doors quickly, with Jake following closely behind. Angie stood at the expo line, and when she saw the determination and worry in my eyes, she set a plate of food down to join us.

I swung open the doors. Ben was on the phone, but his attention wasn’t on his conversation. Focused on something in the corner just out of my sight, Ben’s eyes were hooded with concern and his lips were parted in confusion.

I took a ragged breath and another step into the kitchen.

On his knees, Jesse was on the floor. Pieces of red wrapping paper and one white bow lay scattered around him. He was still, and his eyes were empty.

I fought the dizziness, the shooting pain in my side, and the words that I suddenly wanted to blurt.

Help me.

Everything had been okay. Our friendship had seen some tough times, but I still cared. I’d always care. I thought that the chessboard would’ve been a peace offering—a way to tell him that I still gave a shit, that he was worth the effort. We’d gone through so much since spring, it felt like a lifetime ago.

The four of us stood staring down at Jesse, waiting for him to speak.

I wanted to grab his arm and lead him away from the scene he’d created, take him to the parking lot or lock him in the employee bathroom. I didn’t want anyone seeing him like that. If he had been in his right mind, he wouldn’t have stood for it.

I took a step forward and he didn’t flinch. So I took another.

“Jess?” I whispered, and my head fought another round of spins.

He had a strange sort of smile on his face as he mumbled a few words. His hands gripped the edges of the chessboard so tightly that his fingers shook.

“You need to get out of here,” I added.

His head jerked up and his dull gray eyes locked with mine. His stare drew inward and a short sinister laugh flew from his throat. “A game that we’ll never get to play.”

I took a step back.

His smile vanished. “You’ll always be the fat girl who thought she meant something to me. You just couldn’t be the girl who fucked me and left me alone.”

Jake laughed.

Ben dropped the phone.

And Angie took three long strides toward Jesse and punched him square in the jaw.

I held my stomach. My lungs didn’t work. My eyes closed. And all the love I’d once had for the shattered man in front of me leapt from my chest.

***

I once knew a guy named Austin. I’d met him at a freeway gas station I worked at that had a small deli with fresh chicken and potatoes every afternoon. It was a summer when Interstate 35 was under a lot of construction. The convenience store was the only cheap place for miles around for the construction workers to come every day. I was nineteen years old.

Austin was a loner. He didn’t have many friends, but I always found more intrigue in people who were misunderstood. A twitchy fucker, he could talk for hours, never leaving a dull moment between us. He was funny. He made me laugh.

I hung out with him for several months. He didn’t sleep much, and when I started my overnight stocking position a few months later, he’d come visit me at my midnight break and sometimes again at the three o’clock ones. On my nights off, sometimes we’d go to a twenty-four-hour restaurant and sit and talk.

Austin seemed like a nice guy. Nice enough.

He always wore a leather coat, chain-smoked, and had a sharp nose and jaw. Though his lack of eye-contact was always unsettling.

I trusted him. I called him a friend.

It wasn’t until I sat at a booth in that twenty-four-hour restaurant one night that I discovered our friendship wasn’t at all what I thought.

A mutual friend of ours approached me cautiously. His name was Joe. Joe was a heavier guy, had big cheeks, and I only knew him because of Austin.

“Charlie? You have a minute?”

“Sure. Have a seat.” I knew something was wrong immediately. “Is Austin okay?”

He nodded and rubbed his cheeks. “I wanted to tell you something.”

It would’ve been strange for most people, but I was used to people confiding in me. A lot of crazy things came out when I offered my ear. His approach wasn’t unusual for me.

“Austin isn’t a nice guy. And you need to know that.”

I remember being confused. I remember wondering why Joe felt the need to tell me. “What do you mean?” I asked.

“He’s a dick behind your back. He calls you names. And you’re a nice person, I know you are. I don’t want him to hurt you anymore.”

Daggers hit my heart, stinging bile churned in my stomach, and all of my fears from my school years flashed behind my eyes. My chin quivered, but I demanded more. “What does he call me? What are the things he says?”

He was hesitant, but recognized the desperation in my voice. “Fat, fatty, disgusting. I’ll ask him what he’s been up to and he’ll say, ‘Oh, I just visited Fatty at work. I watched her eat her lunch. She’s so fucking gross.’” His eyes closed with the admission.

I cried for a long time when I got home that night. I hadn’t even been attracted to Austin. But he was someone I’d confided in. He was someone I’d let into my heart. I had him pegged all wrong.

My memory was long and there was a lot of scarring—years and years of abuse from people I’d let in. Hell, from people I hadn’t let in. I was sick of the assholes. I was tired of the people who always knew what to say in order to get under my skin.

I was always so concerned about disappointing people. My entire life revolved around the needy and helpless. I treated others as though their opinions of me were more important than my opinion of myself. I believed their perceptions; I lived their idea of who I was.

It had been easier than fighting. I avoided confrontation and accepted their quiet judgments. I’d fed the stigma because standing up for myself wasn’t something I thought I could do.

But not anymore. I was tired of it.

I was tired of crying. Tired of fighting. Tired of being sad and lonely and mad.

There’s only so far you can push a girl until she slaps you in the face and puts you in your place.

Because I deserved respect. I deserved love. I deserved happiness.

I was somebody.

My feelings were valid no matter who decided they weren’t worth anything.

Austin was wrong. Aaron Paulson was wrong. Jesse was wrong.

I sighed, remembering Jesse’s birthday, and slid the CD from its sleeve. It was the third time I’d exercised that day. The metallic silver shone across my palm and Jesse’s handwritten letters stared back at me.

Rx Bandits: Progress
.

With every pound I lost, I shed a part of me that I’d held onto tightly for too long. Every insult. Every stare. Every quiet giggle. One by one, as the days passed, I discarded the pieces of me that I thought defined me and walked taller than I had the day before.

Almost a year had passed since I’d started at The Crimson. It had been three months since my first date with Ryan. Two months since I’d had sex with him.

And five weeks since he’d broken up with me.

Jess was right: all it took was the right moment, the right lighting. Ryan was almost everything I wanted him to be for my first. He was passionate, gentle, and kind. It could have been that the thrill was gone once he knew he’d gotten it. But Ryan hadn’t showed me that he possessed that cruel gene, like so many others had.

No one at work knew; I’d kept that part of my life a secret. The way rumors spread around the restaurant would have made it too easy to get back to Jesse. And he was better off unknowing.

But I hadn’t been hurt by Ryan. Initially, I’d cried for a few seconds after our breakup. Until I realized that it had more to do with the rejection than it did my actual feelings for him. It was probably the most uneventful and least dramatic breakup in the history of breakups. He hadn’t really even given me a reason why.

“It just isn’t working,” he’d said.

Because sometimes we didn’t have reasons why we felt the way we did. Sometimes, we just had to listen to our guts.

And every night since then, Jesse had come to me in my dreams. He crawled in bed behind me, wrapped himself around me, and for the first time since I’d met him, I was comfortable in his arms.

I never shook. I never worried. And I’d been able to sleep through the night, never shrugging away from him or coming up with an excuse to leave.

The only problem with that scenario was that Jesse wasn’t the kind of man who would do something like that. And reality only left me cold when I woke in the morning.

Jesse and I would always be opposites. Two people connected in the unlikeliest of ways.

Contrary forces acting complementarily.

Fire and water.

Absent and present.

Dead and alive.

Light and dark.

Always and never.

Everybody had a hero inside them. Given the right situation, they’d know what they needed to do. So when I refused to be the damsel in distress wishing for my knight to come rescue me, I realized that the knight had never existed in the first place. And that my only chance at becoming the person I wanted to be was to save myself.

I’d started off that year as someone who wound herself around the woes of everyone around her, on a direct path to self-destruction. And within eleven months, I’d begun to wind around myself instead.

Jesse was beautiful. He was my best friend. He’d changed my life.

I’d never be able to repay him for what he’d shown me, what he’d taught me, and how he’d flipped me upside down.

But I wanted him to change. He’d never be the man I wanted him to be. Behind the beautiful, broken man was a mean person. And I deserved more than that.

Because I was beautiful. In every way that counted.

I’d continue to make mistakes, and I’d probably fall back into my old ways at some point. There’s comfort in consistency that way. But now that I’d seen myself for who I really was, there was no turning back. I could never return to a life of self-loathing and playing the victim again.

Jesse’s behavior on his birthday only solidified it.

Angie had to take a few anger management courses for the outburst in order to keep her job, and the two of them weren’t scheduled to work with each other for over a month. But all was for the best. Jesse kept his distance, and I tried not to miss us.

I guess Jess was a meaner bastard than I’d ever given him credit for. Whether or not he remembered he said it was beside the point. Someone capable of
thinking
something like that wasn’t worth my time. The way he’d said it only made me think I was some kind of pity case. A demented fixation with the freak.

Perhaps it was all some sick game after all. A strange, absurd mindfuck.

I’d never let him take away what I had gotten from that friendship, though. He’d always be one of the beautiful ones who’d dared to spend time with me. And it was during our time spent together that I’d lost over a hundred pounds and begun to define myself. He wasn’t the first person to pick on me, and he wouldn’t be the last. He was just the first person to go through so much effort to make me feel like I was special: exactly what I needed, when I needed it.

Maybe I was the crazy one. Crazy because after all that had happened, I still loved him for who he was deep down. I held onto the half of the man I adored and discarded the rest. Pathological optimist, indeed. But that didn’t mean I’d forget the stuff about him that hurt the most. It just meant I’d already forgiven him for it.

Unfortunately it wasn’t something I could allow in my life any longer.

I rarely worked with him. Most of the time, I’d punch out just as he was walking in, or we were on opposite shifts. The few days our time at the restaurant overlapped, we did our best to stay out of each other’s way.

Once in a while I sensed him looking my way, and I fought the thoughts that crept into my mind, knowing where they came from.
Our story isn’t over yet
, I wanted to say, but kept my mouth shut.

If his thoughts were true, I knew what was left for us. There was only one place I wanted him to take me. One place I’d wanted him to take me since the moment I first saw him. And if he took me there, it would be our end.