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“Don’t call the cops,” Kace tells me. The tone of his voice sends shivers down my spine as he turns his focus back on Derrick. “I can just make him go away. For good.”
“Is that a threat?”
“It’s a promise,” Kace states. “You’re free to stick around and see how that turns out for you.”
A few seconds pass in the coldest kind of silence. The rest of the world just rolls on by—cars, people, lives different from mine—some worse, some better. All of them strangers to how I feel in this particular moment as I breathlessly await the conclusion to a situation I never wanted in the first place.
Finally, Derrick starts to laugh, raising his hands in a slightly defensive gesture.
“Hey, man, I’m really not interested in any kind of trouble,” he says. “Had I known that Amaya has already moved on, maybe I would’ve been less persistent.”
“Even if she didn’t move on, when a woman says no, it’s no,” Kace bluntly replies.
“You don’t know her like I do.”
“You don’t know me at all,” I tell Derrick. “For five years, I put up with your filth and convinced myself that it’s what love is supposed to be like. Not anymore. We’re done. Leave me alone.”
Derrick looks at me and smiles. “I will win you back, Amaya.”
“You keep saying that, yet all you do is prove how much of a nuisance you can be when you can’t have it your way,” I retort. “The next time I see you, I promise I will call the police. And I will file a restraining order against you.”
“Leave. Now.” Kace adds.
Derrick finally gives up, offering a pacifying nod as he makes his way up the street, lost in a sea of people flowing in from downtown. Losing sight of him gives me a sense of peace, but I know it’s not over.
I’m confident it will be the same old story. He leaves, giving me a few days’ worth of quiet, then he comes back with the same crap, the same cheesy lines and cheap gaslighting. He’s not delusional, though, it’s more that he is determined to wear me down through repetition until I give up, until I cave in.
That’s not gonna happen.
I rush to Mikey and get him out of the car, taking him in my arms for a long and soothing hug. “I’m so sorry, honey,” I tell him and kiss his curly blonde hair. “I’m sorry, baby. Come on, let’s get you upstairs.”
“Amaya, we need to talk,” Kace says. I owe him that much.
“Mikey, are you hungry?”
“Not really. I’m tired.”
“Good, we’ll tuck you in, then,” I say as I look at Kace. “Would you like to come upstairs with us? My place is a mess, but Mikey needs his beauty sleep.”
Kace offers a soft smile and an appeasing nod. “Sure.”
I grab Mikey’s go-bag and my purse from the car, but Kace firmly takes both away so I can focus on getting Mikey up the stairs. Once we’re in my apartment, I realize precisely how different my life is compared to Kace and his friends.
It’s a nice place, but it’s small and overflowing with Mikey’s toys. I don’t even have a bookshelf for all my fitness and health-related books, currently cluttered in uneven towers in the corner of my living room.
“I’ll be right back,” I tell Kace as I carry Mikey to his room.
Mikey was so tired and emotionally frustrated from Derrick’s uninvited visit that he went out like a light as soon as I got him in his bed. I’ll give him a bath first thing in the morning.
“I’d call it small and chic,” Kace replies when I return, the corner of his mouth twitching. “I like it.”
“What’s there to like?” I scoff, motioning at everything around me. “It’s all I could afford after I split up with Derrick. The cost of rent in Sacramento has gone way up since the last time I had to put a deposit down.”
“I’m sorry you had to deal with that jackass,” he says.
I shake my head. “It is what it is. I prefer to own my mistakes. And he was a big one.”
“You weren’t alone in that dynamic, Amaya. He’s at fault, too. I could tell that much from just a couple of minutes with the guy,” Kace replies. “I can smell a narcissist from a mile away, and Derrick… let’s just say he’s any therapist’s wet dream.”
