“Do you want anything to drink?”

“What do you have?”

He hears rummaging through cupboards, the opening of a refrigerator.

“Water, some juice, wine, a can of Coke,” more rummaging through a cupboard, “a little bit of vodka and tequila…” more rummaging, “beer.”

“I never knew you drank so much.”

“Do you want anything?”

“I’ll have a beer I guess.”

She emerges from the kitchen, two beers, one in each hand. He wishes it wasn’t like this. He just ditched Karen at the wedding reception to go home with a girl that he has constant hypothetical fantasies about. She may already be drunk – he saw her drinking a lot of wine towards the end of the evening. She’s walking straight though, and her speech isn’t slurred, she isn’t stumbling over everything. A nagging voice inside of his head keeps telling him that he’s taking advantage of her and he doesn’t really know why because if anything, she’s taking advantage of him.

“And I don’t drink that much,” she flops down on the sofa, the skirt of her dress seems to leap to her upper thighs and he can’t help but think that the skirt wants her to get laid as well.

“Sure, whatever.”

“I mean it. I took the vodka and tequila from Roy after we broke up. I know how nasty he can get after a couple drinks of hard liquor,” she pops open the top of her beer and takes a long drink.

“Did you mean what you said earlier?” he asks, thinking back to earlier in the evening when she approached him and coyly whispered in his ear that she wanted him to fuck her.

“What did I say earlier?” she wants to catch him in her trap – she’s already gotten him this far. “I said a lot of things earlier.”

“You know what you said.”

She smiles, but it’s a sad smile because things never used to be this way between the two of them. She never felt this mean spirited in the past, but now – after she saw the wedding that was supposed to have been hers played out in front of her eyes and seeing the man she broke off her wedding for with a prettier, probably more interesting woman the spite just bubbled up inside of her.

“Why did you come home with me?”

“Why did you ask me to drive you home in the first place?”

The tension is steadily building between the two of them and they can both feel it weighing heavily on them. It feels as if the Berlin Wall is being constructed between the two of them. West side of the sofa and East side of the sofa.

“I wasn’t lying earlier,” and now she feels like she’s talking in circles. Her head is pounding and her heart hurts from a combination of the wine that she drank at the reception and the horrible animosity that seemed to be inescapable now.

“I’m sure you weren’t,” he takes a sip of the cold beer in his hand and places it on the table then stares at her, focusing in on her bare legs stretched out in front of her.

“Why did you leave Karen at the reception?”

He sighs and his eyes sting for a moment because he doesn’t know whether or not he should tell her the truth or just lie to her so he can feel better about himself.

“I wanted to make sure that you got home okay,” the lie comes out. She nods and she suddenly feels like drowning herself in the long neck of the bottle in her hands.

She pulls her skirt down over her legs and he breaks his gaze with her white skin. He feels disappointment, and the disappointment apparently acts as a magical truth serum.

“The truth is, I would rather come home with you than to spend another moment lying to her.”

“You lied to take me home,” she remembers hearing him say to Karen as he was on the phone with her that he was going to drive Michael home.

She can tell he’s unhappy and it only makes her feel worse about herself – about them.

She sighs, “You can go back to the reception.” She stands up with her beer in her hand, suddenly feeling like all she wants to do is dump the alcohol down the sink and go to sleep for a couple of days. As she walks by him, she’s stopped by his hand wrapping around her wrist and pulling her down.

It feels like everything is pulling her down these days.

She lands on his lap and sets the half-consumed beer on the table next to the sofa. Her eyes are sad and her head is pounding from all the wine from earlier. She searches his eyes for something familiar – something that she can recognize from before he left for Stamford. There is nothing and it only makes her feel even sadder.

She closes her eyes and brings her head down on his shoulder, trying to smell something familiar or feel something familiar. Maybe it is her that has completely changed. His arms wrap around her body and she feels a hot tear creep from her bottom eyelid and fall onto his shirt. What is she doing? Why did she ask him to bring her home? Does she really actually want what she told him she wanted earlier?

“What’s wrong?” And there it is, the voice that has been missing for so many months. She pulls away quickly and looks him in the eyes.

“I’m…drunk,” and it’s the best excuse that she can come up with because she can’t bring herself to say how depressed she is and how bringing him here to her house while she knows that he has a girlfriend has only made her feel like a horrible person – a person that she doesn’t even know anymore.

“Let’s get you to bed,” he smiles weakly and pushes her up off of his lap and as he stands up an arm goes around her waist to keep her from falling over under the weight of her world.

He walks her to the bedroom and she falls over in her bed.

“Do you want to change out of your dress?”

“No.” It’s such a lifeless response and as he looks down at her in the bed he can’t help but feel his heart breaking inside of his chest. He reluctantly pulls the covers up over her feet and tucks the blankets in around her waist. He kneels next to her and runs a hand over her shoulder and down her arm. She stiffens and all he really wants to do is curl next to her in the bed but he knows if he crawls in next to her that his actions could take a drastic turn for the worst.

“I’m sorry.” It comes out quietly and he wishes that he said it louder. “I’m going to go, I need to take Karen home – she doesn’t have a car.”

“Okay,” it’s barely a whisper and he can tell that she’s probably crying.

“You want me to do anything when I leave?”

“Just…take my key and lock the door behind you when you go. Slide the key under the door after.”

He stands up and runs his hand soothingly over her shoulder once more and softly kisses her on her temple. He wants to tell her that he loves her, that he’s sorry, something. He can’t bring himself to do so.

He walks into the living room and grabs the key to her apartment. He turns off the lights on the way out the door and after he locks the door he thinks twice about slipping it under the crack. Instead, he slips the key into his pocket and slowly makes his way down to his car. He’ll be back.