Wired (14 page)

I thought again of my so-called family. I hardly existed to anyone, and I hadn't mattered to anyone for a long, long time. Until now.

Then I thought of Mason and me up against the wall and indulged in the thrill the memory ran up my spine. I guess I mattered to him, and that was a lot.

“Roxy?”

“Yeah.”

“I know this looks bad, but there's something I want you to consider.” He had his palms up in a defensive posture. I narrowed my eyes as he stumbled over his words. “All you know is that Naveed had a daughter in another version of your reality. You don't
know anything else about his life. It's entirely possible that in this version, Naveed is living a better life.”

“That's a convenient way to look at things,” I scoffed. “You can't just do that to a person. You can't . . . It's just not right. She never had a chance to grow up and do anything! She didn't get a say.”

I looked back over my shoulder at the store. Somehow I felt like Naveed's loss was my fault. “Do you know anyone whose life improved in a subsequent version?”

“My girlfriend.”

For a moment I couldn't breathe. I should have known. I should have known that this oversexed lady-killer I remembered from years ago couldn't have changed that much. It was all I could do not to humiliate myself by crying in front of him. It made me sick that I'd had sex with him and he could brush it off as if it were nothing. There wasn't even an ounce of remorse on his face. He just calmly drew a squeegee over the windshield of his car.

I stared at the squeegee and then the water trough, and then at his face, wondering why he was squeegeeing so carefully and precisely, until it dawned on me that he didn't have the balls to look me in the eyes. So much for mattering.

You thought you had me figured out. Miserable fuck. You thought that you could use me and I'd just fall at your feet and beg for more like one of those girls who invite their boyfriends to treat them like shit. But the thing about me that you obviously don't understand is that I am a highly evolved human being, able to build exponentially upon whatever
units of intelligence enter my brain. And I know when I've been had
.

I carefully stuck the Coke and the water bottle on top of the refuse can. Mason tossed the squeegee back in its trough. “Roxanne, look. I've thought a long time about what I should tell you and what I should keep to myself. It's very complicated and—”

I had to blink a couple of times to see through my rage. “You miserable, piece-of-shit liar.”

“It's not like that, Roxanne; I swear. It's—”

“ ‘It's not
like
that'? Don't even try that one.”

“
What
one? Sorry, but I don't under—Wait, I don't want you to think I was apologizing right there. I meant ‘sorry' in the ‘I didn't understand what the hell you meant by that' sense. Not sorry as in ‘I would take back having sex with you.' Because I'm not totally in the wrong. I'm not that kind of sorry.”

I backed Mason up a couple of steps, and when he stopped moving I came right up to him and stuck my palm flat on his chest. In different circumstances it might have been a nice moment. “I understand the type of sorry you are,” I said. “You're one sorry piece of crap. You're sitting there, lying to me, doling out little meaningless tidbits of information, trying to play me for a fool. Which I obviously am. Thinking I knew anything about you. Letting you manipulate me. Letting myself care about you. You are scum, Mason. You are a miserable, miserable excuse for a human being. You are . . .”

He let me yell. Mine was a beautifully delivered soliloquy with just about every clichéd term for Mason being a jerk I could think of. It went on for quite a while. I thought I might get tired, but, no, I didn't.

“Roxanne—”

“If you say what I think you're going to say, I'm going to lose it.” I stepped away from him and crossed my arms over my chest.

“Roxanne—”

“Don't say it, Merrick, I'm warning you.”

Mason lifted both hands, palms forward, all innocent-like. And then he went and pushed the button: “It doesn't mean what you think.”

“Dammit, Merrick!” A lot can happen in the blink of an eye. One minute I was staring at his face; the next minute I'd hauled back and slammed my closed fist right into it. His head snapped backward. His right arm flew back, making a nasty cracking sound as it hit the gas pump. I stood there in total shock, staring at my fist.

I don't do that . . . do I?
Since when did I do things like that?
I'm not a badass. Am I a badass?

A weird keening sound from Mason, who was huddled down by the wheels, pulled me out of my daze. For good reason. There was blood everywhere, all over his hands, pouring from his nose. I went down on my hands and knees alongside him and touched his cheek to try to see what we were dealing with here. He swore up, down, and sidewise, cringing away from me like he wasn't sure if I was going to help him or try to punch him again. I leaped up and ran into the 7-Eleven as fast as I could, grabbed a roll of paper towels from a shelf, and ran back out the door.

Mason was still kneeling, all off-kilter, delivering a stream-of-consciousness litany of curses I obviously deserved for having hit him like that, regardless of
whom he didn't tell me he was also sleeping with. I ripped the plastic off this huge roll of brand-new paper towels and flailed around, trying to get the plastic to stop sticking to my bloody fingers. Mason was doubled over at this point.

Whether I really was or wasn't the sort of person who went around punching people in their faces, at this particular moment I was definitely out of my element. I did the best I could, jamming wads of paper towel up his damaged nose, unwinding the paper towel in one ridiculous contiguous piece, and slapping it against his face to sop up the blood. Tears streamed down his cheeks. I knew that later he'd try to explain them as involuntary, that the pain was simply acute enough to draw them from him without his having a say-so, but I didn't plan on bringing any of this up later anyway.

“I'm not sure what to say here,” I said nervously.

He glowered at me. “I'll start,” he croaked. “I have two things to say. One, please get me to a hospital. Now. Two, don't fuck the moment up by saying you're sorry. Now,
you
go.”

I tried to think objectively. I tried to think about it all from Mason's point of view. What would Mason Merrick say at a time like this? What would he say if he'd punched Leonardo?

“Suck it up and take it like a man,” I blurted.

He looked at me, then delicately pressed the paper towel to his nose. Aside from the fact that I could tell he kind of wanted me dead, somewhere in there I think he was also impressed.

I tucked Mason into the car. He held his arm to his chest, wincing, and I almost felt guilty when I took the keys from him; I had to work hard to conceal the sudden thrill that shot up my spine as I walked around the car and took control.

We got to the hospital and they took Mason almost immediately, probably because the amount of blood from his nose made the injury look worse than it actually was. The nurse came back to get me after about fifteen minutes and led me to a room where Mason sat on the examining table, his back slumped against the wall and his face contorted with pain. His hurt arm was cradled in his hand.

“Hi,” I said.

“Don't even think of asking if I'm okay.”

The nurse gestured for me to come back outside the room with her. “He's a bit surly,” she said, handing me a clipboard with some paperwork. “He took a good one.”

“I didn't mean to hit him so hard,” I said, sounding more bitter than I'd meant.

The nurse lifted an eyebrow.

I shrugged my shoulders resignedly and signed the bottom of the document. “He told me he had a girlfriend after we'd already had sex.”
Not to mention he disappeared my local convenience store manager's infant daughter, which I find, to say the least, heartless
.

I handed the clipboard back. The nurse's eyes were narrowed. “Men. What do you want to bet that by the time you get home he'll have a perfectly reasonable-sounding excuse, in spite of the fact that there is no such thing as a reasonable excuse for this sort of thing.”

“Yeah,” I agreed. We swapped a couple more girl power–centric complaints against cheating men, and I kind of enjoyed the camaraderie of the circumstances, in spite of the fact that my real experience with this sort of thing was limited to this one thing with Mason.

We went back inside. Mason was testing the range of his hurt arm, checking out the still-functional musculature and poking gingerly at the array of tender spots on his face. The nurse put her hand on my shoulder and whispered, “Don't you worry, honey.”

A good person would have asked her what she meant, particularly in light of the evil glint in her eye, but I didn't. A good person would have clarified things when she said, “I'll bet a light sedative would be helpful. And let's make sure we stabilize that arm, shall we?”

I didn't. “Let's,” I said.

The nurse gave me a smile, picked up an enormous needle from the side table, and turned to Mason.
“Now, Mr. Merrick. If you could just turn around . . .”

Half an hour later, I was helping a glassy-eyed Mason to my living room couch. He lay there looking totally lobotomized, his right arm completely encased in a massive plaster apparatus. It was significant enough to be called an
apparatus
. Apparently my jilted nurse friend had released her aggression by encasing Mason's right arm in enough plaster to redo the walls of my place. The end of the construction in particular was a masterwork: she'd triple-wrapped it. And I'd essentially okayed this construction of a club limb.

Shame filled me. I was still incredibly hurt. I felt betrayed and sort of disgusted that I'd actually thought I'd pierced Mason's armor the way he had mine, that I meant something more to him than the other girls he'd screwed, but this was a petty, petty thing I'd done. And it did beg the question: when had I started being the girl who fucked guys against walls, punched people out, and took revenge by conspiring with the medical community to immobilize the limbs of cheating boyfriends? When had I started being the girl I'd sort of fantasized about being? And in reality, was it as good as it sounded?

I sat down on the couch next to Mason, whose head was lolling back, and I pushed play on the DVD player. A movie started up where I'd left off, the girl on film kicking the shit out of some bad guy, wearing a nasty pair of boots and some sort of figure-enhancing catsuit, and armed to the teeth.

Mason made a gargling sound. I looked over. “Do you want something to drink?”

No answer. I fast-forwarded. The girl was talking into a headset as she crawled through the bushes with a huge machete.

Reality is such a relative thing
.

I sighed and flipped the movie off, tossing the remote to the side and feeling totally unsettled. I looked over at Mason and felt tears pinch at my eyes. It was no good; I was crappy at revenge. To successfully achieve revenge, you had to be unhampered by feelings of regret. I was soft. I'd always been soft. I leaned over and pushed my hand gently against Mason's chest. He was malleable in his drugged state and slumped gently into the cushions at his back. I lifted his legs up and arranged his bulbous cast in the most comfortable position possible.

Checking my watch and remembering what the nurse had told me, I calculated that Mason's sedatives would wear off in about twenty minutes. He'd take a moment to orient himself and a minute to freak the hell out that we were supposed to be somewhere we weren't.
Sigh
.

I went upstairs and lost myself on the Internet for a while.

“Roxanne! Roxaaaaaaaaaaanne! I'm going to kill you.”

I took a deep breath and went downstairs. Mason wasn't on the couch. He was in the kitchen. A half-dressed Mason, his suit jacket hanging loosely off the side of his frame. Which was, of course, because he couldn't get the enormous bulb at the end of his plaster cast through the right sleeve. His smartie was jiggling in vibrate mode on the countertop.

Over the grinding whir of my electric carving knife,
Mason turned furious eyes on me. “It was a sprain, Rox. Not even a sprain. A bad, bad bruise. A bruise, okay? You left the paperwork on the table. And was it necessary to tranquilize the piss out of me?”

Maybe what I'd done wasn't so bad. Maybe total regret and massive guilt weren't entirely necessary under the circumstances. Maybe I was being too hard on myself. My mouth twitched.

“It looked pretty bad, Mason,” I said as seriously as I could. “And let me tell you, it sounded extremely bad. I was almost certain something had cracked. I figured I should err on the side of caution. After all, I did throw the punch.”

He gave me a look of death and went back to his attempts at drawing the carving knife through the white cement.

He gestured to his smartie with his chin, and through gritted teeth he hissed, “We've got to get going, and I can't go anywhere like
this
.”

I shrugged. “Then maybe this isn't as important as you make it sound.”

He switched the knife off and laid it very precisely down on the table as he mustered as much dignity as a man with a nose bandage, wearing half a suit, using a meat knife to attempt to remove a plaster-of-paris club limb could possibly muster. “This, L. Roxanne Zaborovsky, is the most important event of your life.”

The words hit hard. “Okay,” I said. “Okay.” I walked over, ducked under his arm, and switched on the knife. He used the draping side of his jacket to cover my dress while I worked the meat knife in and managed to get just enough plaster bulb off the top of the casing to get his arm through the sleeve.