“Why does the term emotional have such a negative connotation?” Demi asked him, sounding riled.  “Humans are emotional creatures.  I’m emotional but that doesn’t mean I run around crying all the time.  I’m more likely to laugh and love harder because I’m emotional.”

I blinked at her after she’d finished her own little rant.  I liked this sassy side of her.

I sent Anton a sideways glare because he seemed to like it too by the way he was looking at her.  I made a note to have a talk with him at some point.  He was not allowed to mess around with Demi.  She was too innocent for him.

At some hazy point Leona came home.  I was pretty numb by then and so it didn’t hurt quite as bad to tell her about Gram.

“Oh Scarlett,” she said, coming to sit beside me, taking one of my hands into both of hers.  “What can I do?  Do you want to talk about it?”

I thought about that.  “I do not.  The scotch is helping.  This show is fucking awesome, so that helps, too.  You drinking with us?”

She bit her lip and nodded.

Even later than Leona, Farrah showed up and joined us in over-toasting my gram.

At some point I was so sloppy drunk that I even confessed to Leona, “I slept with him last night.”

Her eyes widened and I could see by how horrified she was that she was far from as drunk as I was.  I was at the drunken stage that was incapable of horror.

“You what?”

I nodded, giving her what I imagined was a thoughtful look.  “What indeed, my friend.  What indeed.”

I thought she was going to drop the subject, and I thought that was odd, but eventually she came back with a stunned, “You slept with him?”

How to explain?  I thought about it and, “It’s complicated.”

“Clearly,” Anton drawled.

“Are you guys in a better place, then?” Leona asked.

“Not fucking likely.  It’s complicated.”

“Sounds that way,” Leona said, still giving me worried eyes.

“We have history.”  What a light, little sentence that was to hold such clenched, fathomless, unabated pain inside of it.

“I still can’t believe you slept with him,” Demi added.

I shrugged.  It was hard to articulate sober, harder now.  “Have you ever done something that hurts you just because you know it hurts the other person, too?”

They were all just staring at me.  I shrugged again.  “I hate his lying, conniving guts, but sex with him can be a religious experience.  He remembers things about my body that even I forgot.”

“Ah.”

“Oh.”

“I see.”

That they seemed to get.  The universal understanding of phenomenal sex.  Go figure.

CHAPTER

FOURTEEN

“Love is a trap.  When it appears, we see only its light, not its shadows.”

~Paulo Coelho

The morning of the funeral arrived too quickly.  I packed light and went with dread to the airport, making it to my flight with mere minutes to spare.

Leona dropped me off, her best friend eyes worried on me as we said goodbye.  Though she never voiced her concerns, she didn’t have to.  She knew this was an unpleasant trip for me, unhealthy for my state of mind, but it was unavoidable.

“I’ll be fine,” I told her chidingly, avoiding eye contact.

That was the closest I’d get to voicing my trepidation of the ordeal to come: Acknowledging the fact that there was something I might not be fine with.

“I know you will,” she assured me.

We kissed cheeks and said goodbye.

And off I went.  Heading back into hell for the sake of Gram.

Oh the irony.  She’d been one of the few people in my life that’d actively tried to keep me out of it.

I wasn’t even mildly surprised when I found myself in a first class seat for the flight from LAX to Seattle.  It was so Dante.  The nonchalantly rich bastard.

I’d been conditioned to stay awake on airplanes, so I didn’t sleep a wink for that entire leg of the trip.  I’d brought a book, and it was a good one, but I couldn’t focus on it for shit.

Instead, I stared out the window and drove myself crazy.

Why did I still feel so much for Dante?  What would it take to make me numb?

I’d have paid a heavy price for numbness, felt I’d already paid it in the attempt to seek it out.

And for the price, nothing.  All of my efforts had been futile.  Every furious, vengeful, masochistic thing I’d ever done to get over him had left me at ground zero.

I still felt.  Too much.  With just the slightest provocation, I was wrapped up in him again, in the good and the bad.  He got to me, was so deep under my skin that even now, years after the end of us, it was a fight with myself not to let the bitterness of it consume my waking hours.

At SeaTac I switched to a tiny commuter jet for the short flight to the small town I’d been raised in.

That flight was shorter but worse for my peace of mind.  I hadn’t been back in years, and when I’d left, I’d been ecstatic to be done with the place.

I hadn’t planned to come back ever, and the reason for it . . .  fuck my life.

One small relief was that Dante didn’t pick me up himself when I arrived.  I’d been almost certain that he would.

Instead it was an unfamiliar middle-aged man wearing a comfortable looking T-shirt and jeans and holding a small sign that said SCARLET.

Despite the spelling of the name, I figured it was meant for me.  Who else?