Round 1

He flew in to Vegas to bring her back to Colorado.
When they arrived at the house on Lake Ryan on Saturday, they were exhausted. The days in between had been spent making love, peeling away scarves and scabs to get to the truth.
“So we’re dating other people now.” She said, as he dropped a suitcase.
“No. Stop it. She is a nice woman. She’s just like you.”
“Well, that’s comforting. If you found somebody two towns instead of two states away to date who is, ‘just like me,’ … which by the way, that’s about the worst thing you could have said … then date her.”
“It wasn’t a date.”
“Yes, Z, it was. What else can you call it, if you are calling a woman up, asking her to go out of town with you, picking her up at her house in the truck I bought you, buying her dinner, and driving her home, and whatever else you did?”
“I didn’t have sex with her.”
“Fuck off. Fuck you. You lied your way through the whole story. I had to pick the truth out of you with tweezers, practically. You sure as hell weren’t taking a grandma from Berthoud to play bingo, like you said you were. Why would I believe anything you have to say? And that you did it to punish me? I’m surprised you didn’t take her to the stock car races. It’s about the only way you could have hurt me more than you did.”
“Well, now you know how I felt.”
“No. Because I’m not the kind of person that sits for six weeks dreaming up a revenge plot for the person I claim to love.”
She knew she had hurt him by letting her buddy D fall asleep on her couch, by cooking him a meal or two, helping him, a near illiterate, use Craig’s List, and apparently, worst of all, according to Z at least, washed a pair of pants and a couple of t-shirts for him. For her the difference lay in that she hadn’t done those things to hurt anyone. She had compassion for a friend. She just hadn’t realized what keeping that information to herself would cost her. At least, that’s what she had convinced herself had happened.
When Z asked questions about the oil stain in front of her house, X had told him that she had let D sleep on the couch. During the following six weeks that they were parted, X found out Z was using her phone and computer to spy on her, and had been doing so for months, maybe longer.
X had a near perfect memory, and Z, being infuriated and jealous and hiding it, had mentioned certain things he could not possibly have known, unless he was invading her privacy. X took the phone and computer to a geeky cousin, who found how Z had hacked both. No one else could or would have done that to her. And Z’s little slips not only implicated him, they were numerous enough to convict him, unless he was a psychic, which he was not.
X knew she had not walked on water through the relationship, but she would never have hurt Z on purpose, and she would never have invaded his privacy, not for any reason, not until now. Until these realizations, she had trusted him, implicitly. Until then, she had held his character in the highest esteem. She now also hated him for destroying her opinion of him, for degrading himself and their love affair from something sacred into something common, and she could not comprehend why he would put anything or anyone between them. At least that’s what she told other people.
“Why did you even go to the trouble of working so hard to earn my trust, if all you were going to do was destroy it?”
“You can trust me.”
“I think not. The worst part is you ruined who I thought we were. It’s like a bad joke now.”
“What is a bad joke?” Z asked this, as he splashed his face with water in the kitchen sink.
“Us, now we are just a shitty joke with a bad punch line. You never trusted me, or you would never have done this. And if you loved me, you couldn’t have hurt me this way, ESPECIALLY not ON PURPOSE. ”
“Why can’t you forgive me? You’re the one always talking about God. Doesn’t God want us to forgive?” The honest retort sent her running to protect her queen with a rook, risking a knight. X thought it was an advantage that she was a candidate master in love and war; the war of love; and the love of war.
“You don’t get to drag God into this. I can’t even tell if you’re agnostic, or if you believe in Him but you think you’re too good for Him and don’t need Him. Because I did forgive you for lying to me about a woman before –”
Z raised his voice, “That was a comment, a fucking comment!”
“Maybe. Maybe not. I asked you the night you made it if you were flirting with her, and you lied then and for five months more about it, whenever I brought it up. The worst part was you making me believe it was crazy, that I couldn’t trust my own gut, my own instincts. You tried to make me doubt myself. Even after you admitted it, you refused to talk through it. We never came to any closure about it, still haven’t. I just finally gave up and tried not to think about it when I looked at your pretty, lying lips. You didn’t give a damn how you made me feel on that deal, and you still don’t.”
“It was a fuuuucking caawm-mnt, X!” The more upset Z became, the more his Minnesota accent showed forth.
“If you had admitted it, that’s all it would have been. But you didn’t, just like you made me needle nose the details about your date out of you like they were microscopic shards of glass. So you not only lied again – and it wasn’t just one lie over and over; this time it was a whole pack of lies — but in the process you piss all over me and nearly everything that was sacred about us … AND you used that girl to hold your dick while you did it.
“It feels like that that’s what you were doing with me from the beginning. Did you bring me here to this tiny little town to get me to hold your dick to piss all over Y?” She took a breath at last. “That’s what you did, isn’t it? You’re a … a Serial PISSER. You put R-Fuckin-Kelly to shame.”
Z shook his head. She had exhausted him. “I just drove for ten hours. I have to work tomorrow.”
She shot him a look of utter disgust.
Z, genuinely hurt by her expression and words, let his guard down, which was a big mistake. He walked toward her, close enough to touch her, “What happened to the sweetest woman in the world I fell in love with? Where is she? She’s gotta be somewhere in there,” he said, placing his fingertips between her breasts.
“I told you in the car when we were driving through the *Devil’s Canyon in Utah, you killed her. I am the zombie with a hole in its heart, with liquid nitrogen pumping in its veins. You couldn’t find that sweet girl if you hunted for her the rest of your life. YOU made that sweet, sweet girl. Then you slaughtered her. Then you made me out of whatever was left.”
Z had never seen X like this, never. That was when he saw his sin for what it was. He had been consciously jealous, suspicious, and controlling by nature, at least since he was 16 and his heart was broken for the first time.
Like most men, when Z felt hurt, he got angry. That’s how men deal with getting their feelings hurt, for the most part. Plus, Z knew very well what D had been up to, dropping in on X after a couple of years, chatting her up, eating the beef Z had raised, watching movies with her, sleeping on her couch, getting her to wash his dirty fuckin clothes. Z didn’t care how many years X had known D, and he wasn’t sure he believed her that, “Nothing physical or emotional,” had ever happened between them, “Ever.”
Hell, Z himself had pulled that method out of his own hat in the past to turn a woman who was a friend into a friend with benefits. Slowly but surely, a guy starts breaking down boundaries, spending more and more time at her house, marking it with his piss, making up some shit excuse to get her to let him use her shower after helping her out here and there with some chores or handiwork. Then he acts just needy enough until she offers to wash his clothes. You order a pizza, sit around and bullshit with her, all buddy-buddy.
Hell, it was no different from breaking in a horse, not really, but not the way you break in a horse you intend to love, just one you intend to use. After that, a man only has to keep showing up, here and there, waiting, watching, until she has a vulnerable moment, a fight with her boss, best friend, or boyfriend, that moment of fear or uncertainty you see in her eyes, in her body language … just like a horse. That moment is the one a fucker waits for, and then he fucks her. Because that’s all he really wanted all along. She doesn’t necessarily have to be all that pretty or hot even, and X was both. Z knew, instinctively and from lots of experience, what D had been planning or hoping to do with his woman, if he hadn’t already done it.
Z had taken those feelings from that visit to her house back home with him, added the yeast of the pain and resentment from his past relationships to grow that hurt into stinking, sweltering, righteous indignation, into quiet fury. In his act of retribution, “The Date,” as it would come to be known, henceforth and forevermore, and in his revealing it to her piece by piece, lie by lie, and in their coupling in her bed back in Vegas during the week before this, their first real fight, he had infused her with his spite, his anger, his hurt pride, and his vindictiveness.
He had consummated her spirit with a part of his personality he had successfully hidden from her completely until then. He had learned to control the monster within himself, but he could not quell it in her, especially not after he had put his seed inside of her and fertilized it with his bullshit.
His sin was in poisoning her spirit. And she had told him so at one point. “I hate you for filling me with your sickest, most gross emotions. I would rather be dead than to feel what you made me feel on purpose. I wish we had never met rather than be the woman you’ve turned me into in the last seven days.”
They had met and fell in love over an hours long period of time, and now, two years later, they were falling apart. It was as though hope was lost, and for that, they were both lost, in deed, and at heart. As always, the universe laid it at his feet, because he was the man.
She whispered, but not because she was calming down. It was more like a lit fuse sizzling, inches from detonation. “And I cannot believe You have been spying on Me.”
“I was,” he said, and he had believed it was the right thing, the smartest thing to do to protect her, even from herself, until this moment.
“I really trusted you,” she said.
“I trust you, baby.”
“If you trusted me … how could you spy on me?”
“Oh, baby…”
“Don’t oh-baby me. We are so far past that.”
He didn’t have words for the betrayal he had lived. For God’s sake, neither of them did. He had been her last hope of decency and truth in an intelligent man. He thought he could love her and make her happy, and both had been right. But within their words lay the paradoxes: Trust; How; Spy; Cheat; you; me; us; baby.
A true fight ensued. What had begun as a chess game of words huffed and puffed itself into a battle, into blood-boiling rage, into visceral, vengeful wrath.
For two years he had courted her, two years, across two large states, and they stood there, separated now by their individual pasts. For the bond formed in trust was shattered. It seemed that all their previous efforts had been in vain. When that happens, vanity erupts; as Vesuvius, vanity erupts.
“I didn’t –” he began … and she slapped his face as hard as she could with her left hand, because she knew that by now, they were both lying and she hated him for reducing her to being a liar. His expression didn’t finish registering his surprise before she slapped the other cheek with her right, even harder. Before the echo of the second blow …that spun his head hard to the right … had hit her ears, he was behind her, grabbed both her wrists, and picked her up off her feet. She struggled in wrath and fury. Only Z had the balls to pick up an erupting volcano.
As he spun them both around and brought them both to the couch, and her into his lap, as he wrapped one of his long legs around hers, she was spitting the words out. “You ruined it! You ruined us! US! Two years, two fucking years you spend pulling my heart out of a grave to mend it, make it new, and then you rip it in two and take a dump in it! You broke my heart.”
“Stop it,” his breath was hot and heavy on the back of her head. She was like trying to contain a feral cat soaked in diesel fuel.
“You … broke … my … heart,” she began to sob. She was shaking so hard.
“I will fix this,” his voice quieted.
“You broke it. You can’t fix what you didn’t make.” X did not cry often. It had been years since anyone had made her cry —
“I made you love me.”
But she was crying now. She sniffed hard to swallow her tears and stop them. “Yeah, well you didn’t make my heart, and that’s what you broke.” For a moment their chests heaved, bodies and brains sucking oxygen out of the fire triangle. “We were perfect,” she said, her muscles relaxing a little, “and you ruined it. You ruined Everything.”
He relaxed his grip in the moment he realized the gravitas of his transgression. “I am sorry. I love you, X.”
She leapt from his arms. He had misjudged her, yet again.
“The sweet, sexy guy with twilight blue eyes, who, finally, robbed me of the desire to never love any man, ever again.”
It was well past 2:00 a.m. They were both exhausted. Z was drunk with arrogance and regret; X, with wine and sorrow, a poisonous concoction. Yet, eventually they slept, slept through the accusations, guilt, and despair. The coin landed on its end; no one won; no one died, and as painful as it was, in the morning they were still in love.
She made and drank her coffee. It was black and bitter. She tucked her vicious tongue between her teeth and journaled. He got up and went to shower. They didn’t speak. Before he left, he leaned over the bed and kissed her. She kissed him back.
In that moment, they chose love, even though it was only by default. They had conquered everything else, anyway, before they met, and now they were conquering one another, and perhaps their own warped natures, at last. People will do anything for love, at least they would, at least so far.
Z left that morning seeking the advice of older, wiser men, husbands, whose wives at least appeared happy. In other relationships, he had done what a younger man does when he has hurt the woman in his bed enough for her to rebel and trouble his world.
He had disparaged their characters to his friends, their friends, her friends, and eventually to acquaintances. He had called them all names. He had made jokes out of their pain and frosted his own behavior in bullshit, doing all of this in order to ensure his ego’s survival and his reputation within the townships where he operated his business and took his pleasures, that he may continue to do those two things, after the inevitable break-ups. He did these things until he had slept with all the women he had desired — but had not had the opportunity to fornicate with — during those relationships — basically until he had been with enough women to forget the last one, and he was ready to settle down a little, which was more convenient. Then, he would pick one out, and say, “Next.” Because — well, because that is what younger, less wise men do on the Northern Platt.
The conundrum was that Z didn’t want to lose this woman, even though keeping her would prove more burdensome than he imagined. Making her happy, again, at the moment seemed implausible. Regaining her trust …well, Z would need to enlist the help of God on that, whether he knew it or not. He had thought being and saying sorry would be enough. It would have been, if he had just not lied to her, especially about his feelings.
When she heard his truck pull out, she shoved her face into the pillow and began to cry, until she was sobbing, until she was wailing.
The little red fox that patrolled the neighborhood came and sat by the screen door of the bedroom, listening to the woman he had smelled yesterday, late, while he was searching for a certain cat he had his eye and stomach set on to feed himself and his mate, and their kits, who were always hungry.
Mr. Fox, as he came to be known, took the time to sit, listening to X grieve, learning the scent of her and her sorrow. He sat and listened to her cry herself back to sleep, and then he left. Humans are the only mammals that don’t instinctively know when to make their exit. Besides, Mr. Fox had a cat to bring home for lunch, and so he left his curiosities behind, to hunt.