padded in from the direction of my bedroom, having opted, I suppose, to sleep on his dog bed despite my sacking out on the couch. He began pressing his nose toward my face, panting his hot humid breath.
Nausea roiled in conjunction with the headache. Thanks a lot, dog.
I blinked at the screen once the buzzing and alarm stopped. Kat’s phone was locked, of course, but the bright screen stung my eyes. I pondered the time, six thirty-one a.m. on Monday morning. My eyes dropped automatically to the unread text just below. Nosy, sure. But it was an unconscious action born from the habit of looking at my own screen.
Once I read the message there, however, I immediately wished I hadn’t.
Hey, Red. We still on for coffee after work? Need a lift?
The contact entry was Hot Russian Astro, followed by five shiny gold stars. My jaw clenched immediately only sending more pain to my throbbing temples. Heat flushed up my neck and if I wasn’t careful, I was in danger of blowing a gasket. He’d addressed her by a nickname Red. And that was exactly the color I was immediately seeing as anger quickly wrapped a stranglehold around my throat.
Fuck.
Of course, this meant that Kat had gone ahead and called the Russian cosmonaut who had been flirting hard with her during our tour of the Draco campus. Despite the fact that I’d trashed his business card days ago.
Goddamn it.
I nudged Max’s face away from mine, then covered my face with my hands, pressing palms to my closed eyelids, as if willing the pain away would help. Yeah sure. The physical pain, maybe. But I was seething and shaken from what could very well be, but likely wasn’t, an innocent text.
We had agreed to not see other people and thus she was breaking the rules. I had a right to be irritated with her for that. But this sick roiling in my gut and the burning fire at the base of my throat was not mere annoyance. It was a volcano of fiery jealousy threatening to erupt at any moment.
It was picturing this damn Russian schmoozing her, charming her, buying her coffee and then putting his hands on her.
Fuck no. Fuck no.
With an aggravated growl, I bolted off the couch and stalked through my bedroom, dumping the pillow and blanket on my bed before heading into the bathroom. As I went through my morning routine, laced with much-needed tablets of pain reliever and a full glass of water, my joints were still stiff with anger.
In my brain, jealousy scorched a huge swath through my thoughts, turning everything else to ashes and dust. To the point that in the shower I cranked the hot water to nearly scalding. Even when it was at the point of being uncomfortable, I let it run all over my body until the stream turned ice cold. I’d emptied my water heater for one goddamn wasteful shower and had nothing to show for it besides a fast-growing obsession with the thought of Kat with that Russian cosmonaut.
What the hell was she thinking, going out with him?
If it had been just an innocent or friendly thing, she’d have told me about it. No. She was hiding it from me.
And she wasn’t the first woman in my life to have done that.
I dragged a razor across my jaw and chin, only to barely avoid opening my carotid by accident. In frustration, I couldn’t avoid thinking about that other time. The morning I’d found updates on Claire’s phone from one of my closest friends at Cambridge. Only to hack the damn thing open—her passcode had taken me exactly three tries to guess—and find over two months’ worth of texts between the two of them. Beginning at the innocent, to the venting of frustrations, to the inappropriate for a newly married person to the unquestionably unfaithful.
The day that I’d read those, I’d felt hollow, numb and oddly, inexplicably relieved. Relieved that my new wife was professing love for someone else, even if it was a friend. I took a deep, painful breath, studying my half-shaved face in the mirror. Those memories arrived on a problematic wave of even darker, more unpleasant memories—the beginning of the end of my old life. I hadn’t hated everything about it. And parts of my younger life I missed still.
But not enough to want them back. Never that.
I threw my razor down after rinsing the blood out of it for the second time—and subsequently patching up my