“When?” I whisper.
Seth shrugs, the movement cruel in its carelessness, his hand still out for the phone.
“A few weeks ago, maybe? I don’t remember.”
“She sent you her tits today!”
“Then maybe I’m gonna fuck her again tonight.”
Behind my back, I try to snap his phone in half with my bare hands. It doesn’t work.
“What about Jenna?” I demand, naming another girl from the texts. “You fuck her?”
“Yes.”
I’m silent a moment. I thought he’d say no. For some idiot reason, I thought he’d say no.
“Amber Stremp?”
“Yes.”
“Lindsay Colber?”
“Yes.”
“Alexis Minton?”
“Yes.”
That’s five. Five other women and I barely scrolled down, five women in a matter of what — weeks, months?
“Are you kidding me right now?” I ask.
Before I can react, Seth steps in, reaches around me, snatches his phone back.
“Hey!” I shout. “Don’t touch me, don’t you dare fucking touch —"
“Don’t look through my phone!” he shouts, turning away, crossing the hotel room.
Suddenly I feel naked, more naked than I’ve ever felt in my entire life. I grab a pillow and hug it in front of myself, so at least he can’t look at my tits while I scream at him.
“Tiffany Finley?” I say, still half-shouting, still out of control.
Seth is facing away, doing something on his phone, doesn’t answer.
“Seth!”
“Yes!”
I squeeze the pillow a little tighter, knuckles white.
“Who else?”
“It’s none of your goddamn business,” he says, turning sideways to me, still looking at his phone.
“Who haven’t you fucked, then?” I snap, nasty and vicious.
Finally, he tosses the phone onto his bed, turns to me, paces forward.
“Your friend Lainey,” he says, bending to grab his boxers from the floor. “Your sisters. Most of our high school teachers. Anyone currently married, though I’m more than happy to fuck a divorcee. Obviously.”
He pulls on his boxers, grabs his jeans, pulls them on.
“You think you’re the first woman coming out of a bad marriage in desperate need of a good hard fuck?” he asks.
I watch him pull on his clothes in stunned silence, teeth clenched against the big, ugly, angry sobs threatening to break free.
“What the fuck?” I finally ask, my voice a frantic, high-pitched whisper. “How could you?”
Seth stops, his shirt in his hands. He looks at me in disbelief. Turns. Takes three steps forward so full of menace that I nearly fall back.
“You got married,” he says.
His voice is pure vitriol, so toxic that I close my eyes.
“So you fucked everyone I kn —”
“You broke up with me,” he says, voice rising, louder but less venomous. “Out of nowhere you broke up with me in the most careless, brutal breakup and then not eight months later you were engaged.”
I say nothing, because there’s nothing to say.
“You said you loved me and then less than a year later you let someone else put a ring on your finger and you married him and now you’re mad that I fucked someone else?”
“Everyone else, apparently,” I say, quietly.
“I’ll fuck whoever I want. You made it pretty clear I’m no concern of yours.”
Seth turns away, his shirt balled in his hands, shakes it out, pulls it over his head. I shift my stance and wipe my eyes on the pillow I’m still holding and then the stickiness between my thighs reminds me of something.
A new spike of horror drives itself through me.
“We just barebacked all fucking weekend,” I say, and my voice is shaking again. “Seth. You goddamn asshole, you’ve been fucking anything that moves and you thought it was okay to just go ahead and —”
“I used condoms with everyone else,” he says.
“That’s not foolproof!” I say, pitch rising again. “You can’t just go fucking people and not say a single goddamn thing before I let you fuck me bare. Jesus, I’m going to have chlamydia and the clap and syphilis —”
“It was your idea!” he shouts. “You’re the one who was all Seth, fuck me ba—"
“I didn’t know everyone in town had taken a ride on your dick!” I shout.
I throw the pillow back on the bed. I’m crying again, still fighting sobs as the hot ugly tears run down my face and I don’t bother getting them off.
“I wrapped it up!”
“I’ve practically had sex with Stacey now!” I shout, snatching my underwear from the floor.
There’s a brief, tense silence. I find my pants.
“She did beg for it raw,” Seth finally says.
I look up. He’s in the entryway, leaning against the wall, face hard and cruel.
I turn away, button my jeans.
“Always wanted me to spank her while we fucked,” he muses.
“Stop.”
“Tried calling me Daddy once, but I shut that down.”
“Don’t tell me this,” I snap, searching out my bra.
“Amber likes getting tittyfucked,” he says, his voice hard, lethal.
I pull the bra on, reach behind myself to close it and look him in the eye as I do.
“I’m so glad I didn’t marry you,” I say.
It works. He looks away, jaw working, something flickering across his face for a split second.
“Why, so you could get divorced and come crawling back?”
“It’s better than finding out what a whore you are after we said our vows,” I tell him.
I’m still looking him dead in the eyes from across the room. Still crying. Still fighting sobs, but all I want right now is to hurt him so deeply that he never hurts me again.
Seth just snorts.
“Whores get paid,” he says, standing up straight. “I’m free. Bye, Delilah.”
With that, he turns and walks out of the hotel room and leaves me there, half-dressed. To my credit, I don’t open the door and scream at him down the hallway, I just get back into the bed and turn on the TV.
A few days later, I get my first tattoo: the silhouette of a flying bird on one hip.
Chapter Twenty-Three
Seth
Present Day
I wake up unmoored, like I’m floating in time. It could be midnight. It could be five in the morning. All I know is that it’s dark and silent, the room too warm from the fire, light leaking in from the other room.
Delilah’s still next to me, sprawled on her stomach, her face toward me, her hair frizzed around her like an electrical storm. The blankets are kicked down to her waist, and when I sit up, my head spins, and I spend a long time looking at her.
The arm nearest me is the ocean, done Sailor-Jerry-meets-stained-glass style, the same as the rest of her tattoos. The easily visible ones, at least; I know her well enough to have seen the ugly, sketchy, self-made ones on her thighs, the faded butterfly on one hip, the lace garters with the bows on the back.