picked up her drink and drained it.
“Where’s your phone?” she said. I handed it over. I’d already turned it all the way off. She checked, then put it in her pocket and stood, picking up my full drink as she rose. “Ladies’ room.”
She was stalking off across the bar before I could answer. I got up and followed her. She set my drink down on a different table, right by the women’s restroom, then went through the swinging door. I did, too.
The grungy bathroom had avocado-colored floor tile and graffiti in archaeological layers on every inch of the stall doors. She stayed by the chipped sinks, holding her hands out, and I stepped toward her, for once unfazed. I had held her body, racked with shudders, terrified. I had cut it free, carried it up into the air, cradled it until the boat came. My ownership of her body in those moments somehow negated the invasion of her hands now.
She started with my hair again, working her way down as before, talking the whole time. The words came clipped and fast, and I could feel the rising tide of her fury kept in check behind them.
“You aren’t noble. Come on. I can read you easy. I can read you, because I am you. You checked the angles, Amy. If you let me drown, you were so fucked. You never saw my certifications. You lied, on paper, to your shop and that crew. That would have come out. You would have lost your job, maybe faced charges. Probably been sued, and your husband, your neighbors, your coworkers, they all would have wanted to know why you would lie like that for me. Maybe all your secrets would have come out anyway. But you saved me to save your own ass, and oh, now you’re supposed to be my hero?” She was being quick but thorough, already crouching to check my legs and feet, her skirt hiked up to keep the pale, pretty fabric of her dress off the filthy tiles. She glared up at me. “While I’m down here, should I rain tears and kisses on your feet, dry them with my hair? Should I say, ‘Oh, Amy, thank you for my life, let’s call it even’? And just like that you’re off the hook.”
I shook my head. I’d known that wasn’t how this would work right after we broke the surface. Even as she’d floated helpless as a baby in my arms, she’d been rasping at me that nothing had changed. She was too desperate for the money to absolve me now. It was interesting to hear how she tried to justify it, though, and I understood her better. She’d mocked me for living a lie, but she did it, too, exactly the same.
She got up and stomped out of the bathroom, and I went with her, back to the new table. We sat, and she picked up my drink and took a big gulp of it.
“Another round?” the bartender called.
I shook my head. “We’re good.”
Roux ignored the exchange, her eyes on me, insistent. “Tell me I’m wrong.”
I shrugged. There was truth in what she was saying.
“I thought some of those things, but that’s not why I saved you,” I said.
“Sure,” she said, that disbelieving word, but this time it was not enough. She leaned across the table, hands on my drink. “You’re such a liar. You’re lying to yourself right now.” I was looking at her with a kind of pity, because every word she aimed at me was really about her. That story she told Luca, about people needing to pay and her helping them, as if she were the high priest of karma itself, she believed it, too. She had to, to live with herself. It was the largest silent lie I’d ever seen, and I lived with some whoppers. She was trying hard now to find a way to stay karma’s agent, the hero, and still take my money. “I see you, Amy. I know you. You’ve wrapped yourself in a pretty skin so thick it even fools you, but I see you. You can keep that skin on if you want, but you’re damn well going to pay me for the privilege.”
I shook my head. Maybe so, but how thick does a skin have to be before it’s realer than the meat inside? I was already working to undo my steps, rewinding myself to the woman I’d built, reattaching to the family and the home