Chapter Text
KING LEAR
Out of my sight!
KENT
See better, Lear; and let me still remain
The true blank of thine eye.—William Shakespeare, King Lear, Act 1, Scene 1
act i, scene i. the cool girl™.
Once upon a time, Mama sits you down in your Sunday dress in the third row of the church. It’s all white and lacey because Mama says it’s pretty that way; and Sundays mean white dresses, and white dresses mean curling your knuckles right by the hem and lifting it just right above your knees so when you kneel in the pew, it won’t crinkle.
Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.
Lamb of God who takes away the sins of the world, grant us peace.
The priest is funny, Mama says so, but you don’t really get what he’s saying most of the time. You just count the windows as best as you can sometimes, fumbling to yourself because you can’t count that high. And Mama takes your hand, has you blessed, pretty, pretty girl in her pretty, pretty dress. She takes you back home and you don’t really remember what started the conversation but she shakes her head and says, “sweetie, when you’re all grown up, I better not see you doing those kinds of things.”
You place your Barbie’s furniture on the carpet. The coffee table’s been pushed to the side which Mama usually allows you to do as long as you promise to clean up after yourself. “Like what?” You ask.
“I don’t mind you getting boyfriends, sweetheart, you know that. Mama doesn’t care about that but,” she pokes your lower belly and you try not to giggle, thinking she’s just tickling you, “giving that up? No, no, that’s for your husband, alright? That’s for after marriage.”
You see, Mama doesn’t really know you that well. Mama’s been saying the same thing over and over again since you were a little girl like a hypocrite, a word you learn when you’re thirteen and it’s a word you’ve liked using since. Your Mama doesn’t know what happened in the girl’s restroom when you’re in high school, sixteen, on your knees and using your mouth like God intended. You don’t really like sex that much. Well, you do, but not to the extent that you’d like to have it everyday or every week.
Your Mama really doesn’t know you very well. She doesn’t know the lengths you go through to secure a proper boyfriend nowadays because in this day and age, even a decent man is hard to find. Your college friends say it’s not really that hard, as long as you dock a few requirements for what it takes to be your boyfriend, like at least knowing how to open the door for you.
Hell, when you’re about to exit through the door and there’s someone right behind you, you have the basic decency of holding the door open for them too. When you’re with your girl friends, it feels nice to move them to the other side so they’re not on the side of the road. America’s hyper-individualism is killing dating culture, you decided at senior year in university. Because in a relationship, you believe that everyone has duties in order to like, be liked, and to maintain that mutual liking.
Your duty is being the Cool Girl.
Ahem, Cool Girl™.
You’ve known how to be a Cool Girl™ before Gone Girl (2014) gave a term for the Cool Girl™. And from that day on, you’ve known to call this thing the Cool Girl™.
A Cool Girl™ understands that men are fragile, bewildered, and slow creatures who need space to figure themselves out. A Cool Girl™ doesn’t nag about where, when, how a man is, and lets himself be because she’s chill just like that. A Cool Girl™ gives damn good blow jobs and then makes a wry remark about the geopolitical implications of the Star Wars prequels, and she laughs—genuinely laughs—when the man trots out the, “I have brought peace, freedom, justice, and security to my new empire. Your new empire? Don’t make me kill you. Anakin, my allegiance is to the republic—to democracy!” for the eleventh time.
You’ve perfected the art of leaning back against the pillows like a dead wife straight out of an action movie with a hypermasculine, testosterone-addled male lead. You and your red wine, artificially flushed from a cream blush, and saying, “Oh my god, that’s terrible, do it again,” sparkling eyes and all.
You’re low-maintenance. Kind of. And you’ve been so good. You’re good at dating. You’re good at dating the same way someone who’s done something a hundred times will eventually be good at whatever that thing is. You’ve been perfect. But Daniel—thirty-two, finance, and the owner of a half-dead Monstera—didn’t seem to think so. Because Daniel had that particular crease between his eyebrows that men get when they’re about to deliver a speech they’re doing their best to imbue basic human empathy in. “Hey,” he’d said, “you’re really pretty and sweet. You really are, babe, but…”
He wasn’t in the right headspace for a relationship, is all.
He thought you’re incredible, really, but he just needed to work on himself.
You’re really fucking pretty though. Can you two still be friends?—he asked. Which is another way of saying, “can I still ask you to come over without expectation that I’ll have to bring you on dates because your blowjobs are really good?”
All that effort for nothing.
Three months of dinners cooked in his kitchen, of your toothbrush migrating to his bathroom counter, of him groaning your name into the hollow of your neck like a perverted, wrinkled, old man paying for a 20-year-old pussy. Whatever. Whatever.
Men are easy anyway. You can have the next best thing—preferably someone who doesn’t look like he drinks protein shake and calls it a meal. He didn’t even have abs. So much for going to the gym three times a week.
Whatever.
Because Daniel is in the past. This monologue is all about what happens next: your real “once upon a time.” Because God can be good. He rewards those who suffer. Like every relationship blog says, you truly find your one true love when you least expect it. And this time, it’s right after Daniel breaks up with you (which, in your defense, wasn’t really a “break-up” because there was no relationship to break).
Because once upon a time, Daniel didn’t even ask you if you had an umbrella when you left his apartment, and of course, the world just had to make your day a lot worse by pouring on you in that terrible, terrible Hell’s Kitchen rainshower. And you’d walked the twelve blocks to your apartment, soaked right to the bone. You’d become a waterlogged heroine from a novel your mother would have prayed over with rosary.
Once upon a time, you were halfway up the stairs, the elevator door unusable with the big “OUT OF ORDER” taped up front. Now, you have to set the scene because the next part is really sweet, and romantic, and everything a fairy tale should be.
The stairs are old and marble. It’s worn into the shallow dips by decades of broken elevators. They spiral upward; it’s dimly lit by a single bulb on the second floor landing that flickers every now and then like a horror movie. Click, click, click—snap! The heel of your left shoe makes an audible snap, a clean break. It’s a small tik! sound that echoes in the stairwell. Your ankle buckles and the world tilts, and here comes the best part:
A hand closes around your upper arm. It’s firm. It’s warm through your soaked sleeve. The grip stops your descent and suddenly, you’re hauled gently back onto your feet. You hear your broken heel skitter away the same time you hear an, “easy there.”
In the instant it takes your breath to catch, the damp, dusty smell of the stairwell vanishes. It’s replaced by flowers. Actual flowers erupting from the corner of your eyes. A filter draws over your vision: rose colored and golden. It’s a sort of honeyed, soft-focus glow that seems to erase every shadow, like a cinematographer smearing Vaseline on the lens of your eyes.
You can hear Snow White herself just behind your left ear, her voice a sweet, lilting ribbon of sound: la-da-dee, la-da-doo, la-da-something. It doesn’t matter. The mean is clear. You—pretty, drenched, but still very pretty you—are the star. And this man before you is your co-star.
“You alright, ma’am?”
act i, scene ii. that part in a romcom with the montage.
You know what they say when you first meet someone, and then suddenly, you start seeing them everywhere? You’ve never seen them before in your entire life and then suddenly, you see them every time you come down stairs or in the lobby of your apartment.
Benjamin Poindexter—odd name, really, but it could be worse—insists on being called Dex. “Dex” like “Dexter,” or something. Everyone calls him Dex, he’d said. He’s a tenant in the third floor which is two floors just below yours. It’s probably why you’ve never seen him before. If you’d already known you had a hot neighbor, you wouldn’t have gone through all the trouble dating Daniel. But alas, life works in mysterious ways, and you’re definitely not complaining now.
You wouldn’t say your typical type of man is like Dex. Your type of man is usually someone… less white, which is not Daniel, really, but your type of man is someone your friends would describe to be traditional. Traditional in the sense he’d pull the chair out for you or open doors for you, who’d put a hand on your lower back, lean down and whisper something to your ear. But not too much, of course. You don’t want a man who’s all testosterone and male. You want a gentle man who can engage in intellectual conversations without sounding like, well, a man.
A prince charming who is everything you want.
Ben-ja-min Poin-dex-ter.
Noun, Merriam Webster helpfully provides.
ˈpȯin(t)-ˌdek-stər—you never knew that it was an actual word. A person with intellectual or academic interests or pretensions. From Poindexter, boy genius who wears a lab coat and mortarboard hat in the television cartoon series Felix the Cat (1959-60).
Is it wrong for you to take that as a sign that he’s a smart guy? It sounds like a completely made-up name. LinkedIn gives you barely any information though. There are surprisingly a couple of Benjamin Poindexters of various titles but the only one from New York is someone who works in “the U.S. Department of Justice.” Vague. That can mean anything.
Analyst. Lawyer. Paper-pusher. He could be anyone, or everything at once.
“I, ah, work for the FBI,” he says. His lips quirk to a smile, favoring the left over the other side. He looks torn between being proud of it and being bashful.
You’d thought that it would take a bit more to have Dex ask you out on a date. Though he does seem like a confident sort of man, if not a bit contained and pressed into himself. You don’t mind making the first move when it comes to dating, though your Mama won’t like it much. When you want something, you work for it, and you get it. Men are the same. You make the first move and the rest comes easy. It’s only a matter of keeping it that way. Which is the hardest part, in your opinion.
“FBI,” you’re genuinely surprised at this part. You chew on your bottom lip, trying your best not to seem too enamored at the thought of dating someone who works with or in the FBI. Not that you’re dating. It’s just the first date. The first among, you hope, many. “So you’re like an agent? And you do the… the thing?” You pick up your phone and flick it downward, clumsily miming the way you think someone would show a badge.
Dex’ eyes crinkle with amusement. “Well, not that fast. You have to—...” He gestures an invisible badge, one hand on the apparent bottom half and the other keeping the top half up. “You have to make sure you can see all of it: the picture, the name, the information.”
“But you do do it,” you say.
“Yeah, we do.”
Dex isn’t the most talkative man on the first date, nor is he particularly quiet. You have to carry the conversation most of the time but you find yourself not minding it when he’s clearly paying attention to everything you say, reacting just the right and sensitive manner, asking questions to clarify and expound your stories. He’s also pleasant to look at. Very pleasant.
And he doesn’t try to kiss you after the first date even though he could very well have tried to do so, given that you two live in the same building. He could have escalated it a lot more but he didn’t. He’d just smiled the same smile that he wore throughout the dinner, squeezed your arm gently, and said, “that was fun for me. Do you want to go out again? If you want, we can go tomorrow, for lunch. Or is that too soon?”
He asks this part with a small, self-correcting cock of the head, like he’s caught himself wanting something too much and is now trying to walk back. You find this sweet, so, so sweet. You say ‘yes’ before you can take it back.
What follows is a montage, because surely it is. You’re living inside a romcom montage now, the kind with acoustic guitar and soft jump cuts. Coffee cups multiply on tabletops. Your hand finds his sleeve first, then his wrist, then the calloused warmth inside of his palm. The city becomes a series of backdrops: the bench in Central Park where he tells you about Quantico, the Chinese place a few blocks away where the waitress starts bringing you extra spring rolls without asking because you guys are Regulars now.
He meets your dog: a chubby pomeranian with an attitude who can’t seem to like anyone but you. Dex makes that uncomfortable face, not liking how he’s disliked by your closest family, and you have to explain that Gigi is just really like that. She hates everyone. He relents.
You learn things about him in careful fragments and crumbs. His room is spotless and clean, a bit minimalist with obligatory decoration like a picture frame of something. And oh, he used to work in a suicide hotline center which means he’s sensitive and socially aware, and he’s not like those guys whose minds are addled with the desperate need prove they’re manly. He doesn’t sleep well either. He owns exactly seven books, mostly classics, and another that he read when he was in Quantico, some biography of a former-CIA and FBI agent. He also has no social media too, which is, in your opinion, a green flag. He has no fish posts or sleazy bar pictures with fellow bachelors.
He has, as far as you can tell, no family too. They died when he was young, he’d said, and then he just lived in a home for the rest of his life before he went to join the army. You normally don’t like the idea of dating army guys. They’re too… ugh, you don’t know how to explain it. There’s just a visceral reaction in your body at the idea of dating someone in the law enforcement or army but the FBI is different, right? It’s more… it’s just more sophisticated. More proper. Cooler. You’re the woman with the FBI boyfriend. That sounds better than the woman who’s dating someone from NYPD or someone in the Army.
In bed, he’s also astonishingly attentive. You’ve had an occasional eater every now and then but just because someone’s an eater, doesn’t mean they’re actually good at it. Dex is clinical in his focus: one hand on your lower belly, the other guiding your leg to sling over his shoulder before he seals his tongue against your clit, flicking it just right, and making those slurping noises that’s almost louder than your own mewls. Dex, Dex, ah, right there, he watches you like someone might watch a movie without subtitles, parsing every frame for meaning.
“C’mon, baby,” he’d murmur to your ear, a large hand cupping your bottom just enough so you’d feel the thick size between his legs. “Open up for me?” His hands move like he’s memorizing you. It feels romantic. It feels so romantic when you drag your manicured nail extensions down his back, whining into his ear how it’s so thick, Dex, it’s so deep, Dex, it feels so good, Dex.
You’re so perfect, Dex.
Because he is. Because he’s six feet, keeps himself in shape, knows how to cook, has incredible hygiene and keeps his room clean, has a great job, a good amount of savings, has good manners, is good-looking, has a thick fucking cock, is generous in bed, is good at sex—oh, wow. He’s perfect. Your Dex is so perfect. Love truly does come when you least expect it. It comes when you’re not actively looking for it.
Here, in the montage, you’re happy.
In this montage, you’re the Cool Girl™ who has finally, finally found the man who deserves her performance. You cook in his apartment because his kitchen is bigger and more organized, and he stands behind you, with his chin on your shoulder while you stir. There’s a rush of vibrance in the rush of your blood stream when you see the little things you’ve left at his place. Like a hair tie. Or your second tooth brush. Or lip gloss.
He notices all of them, and has this look on his face that he’s not sure if he likes the new mess or likes that you’re here so often you’re leaving the mess more.
It’s perfect.
You’re living in your own romcom, and you can’t wait to tell your future children how I met your father.
act i, scene iii. every fairy tale has a curse.
Here is a thing you learn about Dex in the fourth week of dating him: he’s a bit intense.
Sometimes, he forgets to nod along to what you’re saying and sometimes, just looks at you. The sudden stare comes without warning, mid-sentence, mid-gesture, as though he’s so fascinated with you that the rest of the world has pressed a mute button and you’re the only one still playing. You’ll be talking—about work, about Mama, about the dream you had when you were being chased through an IKEA by a bear—and you’ll look over, and he’ll be gone.
Not physically.
Physically, he’s right there, on the couch, a coffee cup suspended halfway to his lips. But his eyes, though focused on you, feel like they’re someone else. The first time, you think he’s gotten bored of you and you're yapping about the same stories involving the same people. Gigi makes a sound of protest when you stop rubbing her tummy. “Dex,” you say, and he replies back, “Yeah, baby?”
Your heart thuds at that smooth drawl. Baby. “What was that?”
“What was what?”
You frown. “You just—went away for a second.”
“Did I?” He looks genuinely puzzled. “I was listening. You were talking about your dream in IKEA.”
You don’t press. The Cool Girl™ doesn’t press. But it happens again. And again. It’s not anything big. It’s just a quirk, maybe. Maybe he has ADHD. His leg taps impatiently sometimes, and his hand naturally reaches out to you when you leave just for a bit for a restroom break. Maybe, it’s the job. The job, you decide, is the perfect explanation. The job is classified and stressful and probably involves things he can’t talk about, which is why he sometimes stares at walls, why he sometimes buries his head into the crook of your neck and inhales your scent and lets out that weary, weary sigh, why he once called you at three in the morning and said he just had a bad dream when you irritably answered before he mumbled a, “sorry, baby, didn’t mean to wake you. Good night. See you tomorrow, yeah?”
“It’s work stuff,” you tell your friend during lunch break. Dex made you lunch today. He can’t do it very often but it’s an M-W-F schedule. Today, he’s learned how to make chǎomiàn exactly how you like it. “You know how it is.”
Penny doesn’t know what it is. Penny has never dated a federal agent so Penny just says, “are you sure he’s okay?” and you say, “of course,” because the alternative is that something is wrong, and if something is wrong, you’ll have to do something about it, and you don’t know what that something will be. Because Dex has become the man you don’t have to build and shape to be the perfect boyfriend. There are so many men who are half-baked at late-20s and early-30s, waiting for a woman to fix them for the next woman who they’ll marry.
Dex isn’t like that.
Dex is perfect.
And Dex is good to you. He is so good to you. When you have a bad day, he shows up at your door with those very specific barbeque-flavored french fries from a very specific food truck and doesn’t ask what’s wrong until you’re ready to tell him. When you mention, offhand, that you used to love Reese’s with whipped cream on top, a box appears on your kitchen counter two days later, with a big whipped cream in your fridge. He remembers everything. He remembers the name of your fifth-grade teacher and the plot of the movie you saw three weeks ago and the exact words you used to describe being six and having pink sandals too tight for you in church. He pays attention like you’re plated in a petri dish and he has a tweezer, moving you around under a microscope. Sometimes, it’s cute. Sometimes, it’s fucking creepy but really, it’s romantic.
He’s perfect.
So perfect.
You think: this is what true love is. This is the type of love that woke Snow White up. You think: no one’s ever paid this much attention to me before. If you just do good, if you just keep this up, this can last forever and ever.
And then, because you’re a Cool Girl™ and Cool Girls™ don’t do emotional monologues, you kiss him on the cheek, make him feel big and strong and good, and say, “you’re so sweet, Dex,” and he smiles that tilted smile.
Here is the thing you learn about Dex much, much later, after hitting the seventh week mark of dating. You weren’t snooping. You don’t snoop. You just had a bad migraine. That’s all.
You’re in his bathroom—Dex’ bathroom, which you’ve been in before but never with the door closed and the medicine cabinet open, and a migraine drilling a hot needle through your right temple like it’s trying to tunnel out to the other side. He’d pointed from the kitchen, half-distracted, spatula in one hand because he’s making you lunch even though you showed up unannounced, headachey, and wanting to be spoiled.
Bathroom cabinet, behind the mirror, ibuprofen.
You find the ibuprofen immediately, a small mercy, it is. The bottle is a brand name, the cap is childproof in that aggressive way that makes you feel like you're being punished for something you haven't done yet. You shake two pills into your palm and you’re about to close the cabinet, you swear, you were, but then, your eyes drift.
You’re not snooping.
You’re definitely not snooping.
You’re just… looking. The way a princess in a fairy tale always looks inside the forbidden room. The way Bluebeard's wife put her hand on the door she was told never to open. You've read that story. You know how it ends. But the thing about fairy tales is that someone always opens the door, otherwise there wouldn't be a story in the first place. So really, you're not being nosy.
You’re just looking. That’s all.
Two prescription bottles are tucked in the back, the labels facing inward like they’re hiding something. And here is the part where the voice in your head splits into two, like comical cartoon characters with an angel on the right side and the devil on the left—or is it supposed to be the other way around?
Angel: nooo, close the cabinet. Take the pills. Go eat the stir-fry he’s making you. Don’t invade his privacy, babe.
Devil: just check. Just a little. It’s not a crime when it’s just there. People get curious.
So naturally, you lean closer, squinting under the bathroom light. You push an index finger against the bottle just enough for it to turn around suspensefully. SERTRALINE, it says. Okay. Zoloft. Half your office is on Zoloft. The world is half-destroyed by aliens and rent is astronomical even in Hell’s Kitchen.
You almost close the cabinet then, a heroine who learned her lesson and walked away from the forbidden room with her curiosity sated and her virtue intact.
But there’s a second bottle.
The second bottle has the same pharmacy sticker with his full legal name printed in neat, block betters: BENJAMIN LEONARD POINDEXTER. Staring at his full legal name makes you feel more like a stranger in his bathroom than you did thirty seconds ago. You didn’t know his middle name. Leonard.
You type: A-R-I-P-A-P-R-A-Z-O-L-E.
Google asks you—Did you mean: Aripiprazole?
Oh, fuck you too.
You press the first result. The little white bar at the top of your phone loads, loads, loads, and then: Aripiprazole is an atypical antipsychotic used to treat schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, and irritability associated with autism.
Hm.
Well.
The word antipsychotic sits on the screen like a toad in a jewelry box. It doesn't belong in your romantic comedy. It doesn't belong in your montage. It's a word from a different genre entirely—something with flickering fluorescent lights and long institutional hallways. Something your mother would cross herself over. Something that does not feature acoustic guitar.
You look at your reflection in the bathroom mirror. Your reflection looks back with the expression of a woman who has just discovered that her Prince Charming keeps a locked room in the castle, and inside the room is not a dead ex-wife but something harder to name. Something with a medical billing code.
Okay. Okay, think.
You’re not a doctor. You work an office job in a security company, not even in a flashy way. But you know enough to know that antipsychotics are not Zoloft, and that “antipsychotic” is a word that Hollywood drops when they’re trying to convey that the character is a psycho, and that antipsychotic is the kind of thing that you’re supposed to disclose before the third date, or the fifth, or before you start calling yourself boyfriend-girlfriend.
You're not an ableist piece of garbage who thinks mental illness disqualifies someone from love. You're educated. You voted for the right people.
You don’t want to be this person. You genuinely, truly do not want to be the woman who finds medication in a bathroom and immediately starts thinking about horrible stereotypes about getting murdered. You’ve been on the receiving end of judgment, thank you, Mama. You know how it feels. Mental illness isn’t a moral failing. Medication is a sign of responsibility, that a man who takes his antipsychotics is a man who’s managing his shit, not a man who’s failing to manage it.
And he’s FBI! The FBI has psych evaluations. The FBI has stricter dating standards than you do. If Dex were anything other than the perfect boyfriend who makes you lunch and puts towels in the dryer so they’ll be warm when you get caught in the rain, someone would have noticed. Someone would have stopped him. The government, presumably. The government is always involved.
So the medication changes nothing. The medication changes nothing about the man who handed you that warm towel. The medication changes nothing about the man who stands behind you with his chin on your shoulder while you stir. The medication is just a thing, a small thing, a chemical thing, a responsible thing. It's proof that he's handling it. Whatever it is. Which you don't even know. Which could be anything. Which could be something mild and manageable and barely worth mentioning, which is probably why he hasn't mentioned it, because it's barely worth mentioning. Right?
Right.
But.
The but is the size of a house.
The but is the size of the future you've been building in your head, the one with the white fence and the hypothetical children and the story you'll tell them about how their father caught you on a broken staircase in the rain. You think about genetics. You think about heritability. You think about the word episode, which you’ve only ever encountered in medical dramas and the whispered stories your Mama told you about your second cousin who was never quite right, sweetie, we don’t talk about it. You think about what it would mean to build a life with someone whose brain chemistry requires this level of maintenance, this level of medication, this level of language—bipolar, antipsychotic, episodes, triggers, management, fucking antipsychotics—and you feel a wave of something you don’t want to name.
Then you feel guilty for being uncomfortable. Then feel weird about feeling guilty for being uncomfortable because oh, God, you’re being mean right now. Then you think: you’re a woman. An unstable man is dangerous. And then the guilt comes again because that’s a bit ableist and judgmental, and taking medications mean taking responsibility, just look at how good he’s been to you, you’re being so MEAN right now, sweetheart—
Here is the truth, which you will not admit to yourself in this bathroom, but which is nonetheless the truth: you are not afraid of Dex (kind of).
You are afraid of the subplot you didn’t audition for. You signed up for a romcom. You didn’t sign up for a drama about the complexities of loving someone with a serious mental illness. You’re a Cool Girl™. Cool Girls™ don’t do complex dramas. Cool Girls™ do geopolitical implications of Star Trek—or was it Star Wars?—and gives sloppy blowjobs and leans back against pillows with root beer. Cool Girls™ are low-maintenance, and a boyfriend who requires antipsychotics is, by definition, high-maintenance, even if he’s the one taking them, even if he’s the one managing it, even if he’s been nothing but wonderful. The maintenance is still there. It’s in the bathroom cabinet. It has a copay.
You hate yourself a little for thinking this. You hate yourself a little more for knowing you’ll keep thinking it anyway.
But he’s perfect. He’s been so perfect. He’s been so perfect that whatever is in those bottles clearly works, clearly helps, clearly keeps him being the perfect boyfriend who makes you lunch and kisses your temple and says your name like it’s the only work he bothered ever learning. So what if his brain needs a little extra chemistry? So what if there’s a diagnosis tucked behind the mirror? Some guys don’t have diagnoses and are still assholes.
Besides, every prince has a curse. That’s how fairy tales work. The beast has a rose. The prince has a beast inside him. Sleeping Beauty had a spindle. Snow White had an apple and a glass coffin. Love is the thing that breaks the spell. Love is the thing that wakes you up.
You’ll be the one who stays. You’ll be the one who doesn’t leave. You’ll be the princess who looked at the forbidden room and decided, no, this doesn’t change anything, this is just part of the story, this is just another dragon to slay, Dex! You’re so good at being good. You’re so fucking good. You can be good at this too.
You close the cabinet. The click is too loud. You flinch at your own reflection, and your reflection flinches back, and for a moment you are both just two women in a bathroom, trying very hard to believe something you're not quite sure is true.
You wash your hands. You look at the mirror. You smile: eyes squinted a little, because it looks more genuine that way. The migraine is still there, a dull throb behind your right eye, but you've decided not to notice it. You've decided a lot of things.
You open the bathroom door.
“Oh, my god, Dex, that smells so good!”
58 days before happily never after.