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“It was my body!”
“I know whose fucking body it was.”
“Then stop acting like I don’t have a dog in this fight!” Charm slams her palm against her chest. “Lance took the most humiliating evidence of my self-hatred and handed it to people I will never meet. He turned my illness into a weapon and made you look at what happened to me after you left while he accused you of causing it.”
“You think that made me hate you?”
“I don’t know what you saw!”
“You know exactly who I blamed.”
“No, I don’t!” She crosses the space and shoves me. “You refuse to tell me what you thought, what you felt, or what seeing those pictures did to you. All I know is that you saw me like that. You saw how pathetic I became after losing you, and everyone except me knew those pictures existed.”
I catch both of her wrists before she can shove me again. “You were sick. You weren’t pathetic.”
“I felt pathetic!”
“That doesn’t make it true.”
“It felt fucking true when I learned you had seen it!”
“You don’t get to put your self-hatred inside my head and call it my opinion.”
“Then tell me what you saw.”
“No.”
Her entire body goes still inside my grip.
“No?” she asks.
“No. You gave me your misery. I did not ask for it, and I am not trading mine so the two of us can decide the suffering is even.”
“That isn’t what I’m asking.”
“You want to know what those pictures did to me.”
“Yes.”
“That belongs to me.”
Her jaw trembles, but she nods once. “Fine.”
I release her wrists. She rubs the places my fingers circled while glaring at me through her tears. “Keep it. Keep Milwaukee, the meetings, the cabin, and every ugly thing you still think I have no right to know. I won’t drag it out of you.”
“Good.”
“But you will not use what you refuse to tell me as proof that I didn’t suffer enough to understand what I lost.”
“I never said you didn’t suffer.”
“You said I deserved it.”
“You did.”
“I know!” She shoves me again. “I deserved to miss you. I deserved to lose you. I did not deserve to nearly die, and you did not deserve to be blamed for it. Both things can be fucking true!”
I capture her hands against my chest. Her palms press over my heartbeat while she fights my grip.
