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Amory cuddles up into her makeshift pallet and closes her eyes.
It’s incredibly uncomfortable, especially after spending so much time getting used to the bed, but she refuses to bend or change her mind about sleeping on the floor. She keeps her eyes closed and hopes that eventually she’ll be able to fall asleep, despite it only being supper time. She just wants to sleep and forget everything that’s ever happened between her and Blake.
It doesn’t work, unfortunately, and Amory stays up all night, thinking and in an uncomfortable position.
In the middle of the night, her stomach begins to growl. She ignores it at first, but after a while it becomes difficult to do. She looks over at the table, where her food still sits. Even though it’s been hours, the stir fry still smells delicious. She wants some, so she stands up. She looks at the bed to make sure that Blake is still asleep. She is. Amory walks over to the table, trying her best to be quiet and not wake Blake.
She eats all of the food that is on her plate and is still almost hungry for more. But, she decides, she’ll have to wait until the morning when she can have breakfast.
Amory quietly washes the dishes and puts them away. She knows that Blake will know what she did when she wakes up in the morning, but she can’t bring herself to care, even if the idea of Blake gaining any kind of satisfaction from Amory eating her food pisses her off.
Amory walks back over to her little pallet and tries, once again, to fall asleep. And again, it doesn’t work. She had hoped that with a belly full of food, it would be easier to sleep, but that proves to not be the case. So Amory lies there, thinking about how much she hates Blake, until the sunrise.
Amory wants nothing more than to be home right now. She loves her job, and loves that she’s helping people who really need it, but being around Blake is impossible and hurts her fragile heart.
She wants her mom and she feels like a little girl, wanting to go home to cry to momma. But her mom has always been there for her, always helped her when she’s down. She needs that right now, needs the comfort.
Throughout the day, Amory tries to focus on her job, but it’s hard. There’s too much occupying her thoughts. Blake, her homesickness, Natalie, and the fact that she didn’t get any sleep last night. All of those factors come together to create a storm of emotions and distractedness inside of Amory.
She’s really lucky that the work is repetitive, that for the most case, she’s treating the same disease over and over again. There are different levels of severity, sure, but for the most part it’s very methodic. It helps keep her from making mistakes. It does not, however, keep her from overthinking. She swears, Blake’s betrayal has thrown her into the stages of grief and now she’s at sadness.
She wishes that she could find someone to treat her right, to not cheat on her or treat her like a side piece. She just wants something long-term, wholesome, and fulfilling. She wants someone she can trust. She can’t trust Blake and doesn’t know why she ever thought she could.
Their relationship has been rocky the entire time they’ve known each other, after all, and even though it seemed like things were getting better, that Blake truly had changed, she should have expected otherwise. It’s her fault, really, and she can’t help but feel ashamed of herself for wanting a relationship with a woman she should have known couldn’t be trusted or give her what she needs.
When it’s time to go home for the day, Amory sees Blake standing near the doors, waiting for her, looking so beautiful and casually sexy with her short dark hair flopping over her face, but she can’t deal with that. She doesn’t want to. She shouldn’t have to. Blake should know better than to act like she did nothing wrong or to continue their little rituals when Amory wants nothing to do with her.
Amory walks right past Blake, ignoring her and her attempts to greet Amory as she does so. When she gets back to the cabin, she opens her laptop and decides that if she’s tired and can’t seem to think of anything other than Blake, she might as well read in order to distract herself.
It doesn’t help, however. All Amory has downloaded on her laptop are romance books, and those are definitely not the move right now. She groans to herself and closes her laptop, pacing around the cabin for a moment. Blake watches her, sitting on the bed, but she doesn’t say anything and Amory’s glad of that. She doesn’t think that she could handle that right now. All she wants right now is to be alone and cry, but that’s kind of impossible given their situation.
Amory decides that it’s time to make supper, so she walks over to the kitchen area. Blake stands up, looking as though she wants to join her, and Amory looks over at Blake and glares at her. Blake immediately sits down again, looking dejected. She opens her mouth as if she’s going to talk, but Amory glares at her again, and Blake closes her mouth.
Good, Amory thinks, she really doesn’t want to know what Blake has to say right now. Her mom’s words replay in her head, and she knows that they probably should have some sort of conversation, especially if they are going to live together for the rest of their time in Zambia, but Amory can’t stand the thought of talking to Blake.
Her stomach ties in knots, and there’s a sharp pain in her chest every time she looks at her; she can’t imagine what she’ll feel like if Blake tries to talk to her, if they try to have a conversation. In Amory’s mind, Blake has already done the unforgivable, so there’s no point in talking about it. Amory just wants to get through the rest of their trip in silence and with seeing Blake as little as possible.
Somehow, Amory feels more hatred toward Blake now than she did when they arrived. It’s strange, she went from hating her, to forgiving her, to hating her again, and all of these emotions are like a roller coaster, giving Amory whiplash.
Amory makes supper, more pasta, except this time she pairs it with rice. She’s been craving rice ever since last night and decides to make some even though she knows it probably won’t be as good as Blake’s, but she decides to try.
At first, while cooking, Amory is tempted to only cook enough for herself and leave Blake to fend for herself, but that just seems unnecessarily cruel. Amory hates the person she feels Blake has turned her into, someone cruel and wanting to hurt another person.
She supposes she never really got to hurt Blake enough for what she did with Natalie, and now that’s all Amory wants, to make Blake feel the way she feels—heartbroken, betrayed and unbearably lonely. But Amory fights against that instinct to be outright cruel to Blake, and she makes enough food for both of them.
When she’s done, she prepares two plates and leaves them on the table, but Blake doesn’t come over to eat when Amory does, like she was half expecting. Instead, she waits until Amory goes to wash her plate to sit down at the table and eat. Amory decides that this is good, that Blake is following her plan to ignore her perfectly.
Amory doesn’t really know what to do for entertainment now. She definitely doesn’t feel like reading a book on her laptop, and she’s absolutely not playing poker with Blake like she has been. But, she decides, there are other games she can play with her cards.
She gets out her cards and decides that if she can’t read to pass the time, she should play solitaire. So, she does, spending hours on the game and trying to numb her brain as much as possible. She ignores Blake as she moves around their cabin, and after a while, Amory gets tired, and goes to her little pallet. She falls into an uneasy sleep.
10
BLAKE
Blake feels like shit. She has a bad cough and she has been miserable for the last several days. Amory still isn’t talking to her, and she doesn’t know what to do. Or maybe she does know what to do and she’s just scared.
She’s pretty sure her cough is just from allergies, or, at least, she hopes that’s the case. She doesn’t know much about the allergy situation in Zambia, but the cough and congestion feels like allergies.
