Screwing My Ex

I reached toward my jacket and slipped my hand in the pocket. There was the feel of metal again.

"What are you doing?" Amber asked.

I stopped and looked at her. "Grabbing a smoke."

"I thought you quit?"

"One of the casualties of your betrayal."

A look of regret crossed her face, and for a moment I thought she might apologize. But then she looked away and muttered, "Don't blame me 'cause you have no control." Amber stretched her body, with her arms over her head, making herself completely vulnerable. I realized this was my moment to strike.

"I left my favorite clit stimulator at your place."

Amber's voice came over my answering machine sounding like she was ordering a pizza. Of course this was four months after I found her cheating on me, so she had probably gotten over the embarrassment. But for me it wouldn't stop playing over and over in my head. Not to mention the fact that my heart was shattered. Just hearing her voice sent me into a fit.

I took my mail into the bedroom and started to go through it, crying uncontrollably and looking for something to distract me from my despair. There were bills, junk mail, an offer to fly to Hawaii if I was willing to hear a pitch about a time-share, and one small envelope addressed by hand and written in green ink. The name on the return address was H. Pollard. At first the name didn't mean anything. Then it came to me – the girl I'd stabbed in high school.

Inside was a four-page letter. Heather started out explaining that she spent many years angry with me for what I did, and even considered suing me at one point. I almost stopped there, but curiosity grabbed hold of my senses and pushed me to keep reading. Heather went on to describe how she dropped out of college after getting pregnant. Even though it's been hard raising a child single-handedly, she said she never regrets the decision. Her son Chris recently started sixth grade and developed a crush on a girl. He wrote a love letter and sneaked it into her bag, but when she found it the girl made fun of him in front of her friends. By the next day almost everyone at school had seen or heard about the letter and Chris was picked on mercilessly. The poor kid went home crying, devastated to the point where he doesn't even want to go back to school.

While Heather always realized she wasn't innocent in our situation, she thought I had overreacted when I stabbed her. All that changed when she felt such a blinding anger towards the girl who caused Chris so much pain that she considered calling the girl's mother. That's when she remembered the phone call my mother placed to her mother after the video became public. As Heather comforted her son, she felt an overwhelming sense of guilt because once she had been that girl. And she realized what she'd done to me was ten times worse than showing people a love letter.

Now she completely understands how angry I was when I stabbed her, and even though it was fourteen years too late she wanted to express how sorry she was for what she did. While there is nothing she can do to change what happened, she hoped I would accept her apology. She ended the letter asking if I would write her back to tell her how I felt and how my life was going.

What goes around comes around. Just like my mother had said.

"Wait! Don't go! You can't leave me like this!"

Amber yelled those words as I pushed back the curtain at VaVem and put my jacket on. She pulled against the handcuff that was secured around her wrist, and then tried to pull at the other one secured to the handrail. Neither one would budge. And while the handrail wasn't the best choice for what it was made for, it was made very well, so that someone much stronger than Amber couldn't just pull it out of the wall. I grabbed her clothes and started walking away.

"Blossom please! I'll get fired!"

When I got to the checkout area I tossed Amber's stuff on the floor. Then I took the key to the handcuffs and put it on the counter, turned and started for the door. I thought of Amber's boss coming in, finding her in there, unlocking the handcuffs and firing her.

"You fucking bitch! I never really loved you!"

That stopped me cold, and suddenly another thought ran through my head. Amber's boss calling the police to get her out of the cuffs. They don't have the tools, so they have to call the fire department. One thing I've learned is that if you're going to embarrass someone, make sure there's enough of an audience. I went back to the counter and grabbed the key.

There was a bar down the street with a window view of Va Vem. I went in and ordered a double Long Island Iced Tea, took up a window seat and passed the time by trying to decide if I should write Heather back. Yes, she did something horrible to me, but she also learned about being on the other side of it too. I thought about how it just takes a little time for things to work out.

And sometimes it doesn't take long at all, like when I caught sight of Amber's boss walking into Va Vem. It only took fifteen minutes for the police to get there, and just another ten for the fire truck to arrive. They probably ran over people after hearing the call was to cut a naked woman out of some handcuffs. I decided to make my getaway after that, since Amber might come up with some halfway believable story to explain what happened. Probably not, remembering how badly she failed to come up with an excuse for the cops in Philly. Maybe she'd get fired and maybe not, but that didn't matter because what I'd wanted to do was finished. And at that moment I decided to write Heather back and offer her my forgiveness, because you can't hold on to hate forever.

I walked out of the bar headed for a new destination, a tattoo shop where I planned to have Amber's name covered over with that devil woman I wanted. Time to start fresh.

THE END

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