Faster We Burn

you? Or kiss your stomach? Or even just take it slow? Not that angry revenge sex isn’t great.” I’d tried all of those things, but she’d always stopped me.
    “Angry revenge sex?”
    I sighed and closed the hood of the car. I wasn’t going to get anything more done today until we got everything out in the open.
    “You have sex with me because you’re hurt and you’re mad and you’re looking for a distraction. You even said so yourself. A physical distraction.”
    “And your point is?”
    I leaned on the door and stared down at her.
    “My point is that just because you say you’re going to have casual sex with no attachment, that doesn’t mean it’s going to happen.”
    She pulled the blanket tighter. “So, what? You want to be my boyfriend now?”
    I shook my head. I’d really walked into that one. “I don’t know what I’m saying. Forget it. You hungry?” I grabbed my tools and started to walk back upstairs, but she stopped me.
    “I can’t do non-angry revenge sex. I can’t. I can barely do…whatever this is we’re doing. Not after everything with Zack.”
    I put the tools down and swung to face her.
    “See? That’s your problem. I’ve told you. I’m not him. Stop treating me like I’m going to beat the shit out of you and leave you in a fucking parking lot. I’ve never hit a woman. Not even Trish. You think that everyone is going to screw you over. It’s a bad way to live, sweetheart.”
    She glared at me. “Aren’t you? Aren’t you going to screw me over?”
    “I might. But that doesn’t mean you shouldn’t let me in. You have some really good people in your life and all you do is wait for them to hurt you instead of enjoying it. God, I don’t know how you got started on this fucked-up path, but I wish I could kick his teeth in.”
    “What about you? You show me your suicide scar and tell me that you’ve tried more than once? What the fuck is up with that?” We were both in each other’s faces.
    “Do you really want to know? Because I thought we weren’t doing that heart-to-heart shit. If you want to know, I’ll tell you.”
    She jutted her chin out and met my eyes.
    “I want to know.”
    “Fine, but let’s go inside. I’ll make you some coffee.” Her teeth had started to chatter.
    She nodded and let me lead her inside. I got her on the couch with another blanket and a hot mug of coffee in her hands before I sat down next to her.
    “So, where do you want me to start?” She swirled the cup and stared into it.
    “What were you like as a kid?”
    We were starting at the beginning. They said it was a good place to start, but not for me.
    “My parents were both drug addicts. Meth heads. They had a lab in our basement. Trish and I used to play with some of the equipment. It’s a miracle the place didn’t blow up. There were always people coming and going and I remember not eating a whole lot. Dad split pretty early on and Mom was high or drunk or both most of the time.”
    I’d been prepared for her sharp intake of breath.
    “Then she got busted so we bounced around for a few years. First to our relatives, no matter how distant they were. We switched schools and states. I had to teach Trish how to read and do math because of how many times we moved.”  One of the worst places had been with our Mom’s brother and his wife. He took a liking to Trish and I had to beat him off her one night with a baseball bat. I also tried to kill myself for the second time in that house by swallowing a bunch of aspirin, but it made me sick and I’d just ended up in the hospital and we’d gotten moved to a new home afterward. I didn’t give Katie those details. She didn’t need them and I didn’t want to give them to her.
    “Then, when we’d exhausted all our relatives’ hospitality, we got put in the foster care system. After that it was just a merry-go-round of houses. Some were good, some were bad, but we left all of them eventually. Our last one was especially bad, so when I turned eighteen I got custody of Trish. Despite moving so much I had really good grades, so I got into college and even though I didn’t look responsible, they let me have her. We had a social worker that went up to bat for us. Trish finished up high school and then enrolled here. We fought like cats and dogs, so as soon as she could, she moved out. Fast forward a few years and here we are.”
    Katie sipped her coffee through my story and put the empty mug down when I finished.
    “I’m