So You Used to Be Human - Book 3 (Original Version)

Chapter 8: 101 Reasons I'm an Asshole

He was right.  I knew exactly why.

"Because it was me saying it."

I was right.  I am an asshole.

Let's get that out of the way, because it's a fact.  We already know how much of an idiot I am, but I think I want to be absolutely clear about the fact that I am an asshole.

Jaime's reaction to me and her escape had brought back a whole flood of memories and a sort of perspective that I had previously thought I had gained about our relationship.  Or rather, lack of relationship.

See, I'd spent the past year and a half beating myself up about Jaime and slowly built a pedestal under her, raising her so high in my mind and memories that I had obscured some of the obvious truths of what being in a relationship with me was like.  The actual relationship and the shit I had put her through, all of that had gotten buried because I just didn't want to remember it how it happened. It's something about how our brains work, and no matter how much we try to resist it, our brains will edit our memories until we're painting ourselves as the good guy, or in my case, the not-so-bad guy.

Jaime was terrified of me, but she had made a choice sometime over the past thirty-six months that she wasn't going to stick around to let me terrify her anymore, and that was important to her.

How do I know this?

She sent me a very detailed letter via Claude and it had crushed my soul.  The letter laid bare her perspective on what our relationship had been, what it had meant to her and it illustrated exactly how deeply I had hurt and betrayed her.  She had loved me with all of her soul and then I had gone and become someone else she didn't recognize, someone she didn't like at all.  The person I had become had stolen her Bob from her and she hated me for it.

Reading that note, I had cringed and had been angry, feeling the righteous anger of the wronged, the kind of anger that is born out of embarrassment and the knowledge that you had fucked up royally and there was nothing you could do about it.   You know what I'm talking about; it starts down deep and attacks you with a sense of desperation until you almost can't breathe properly over the thud, thud, thud of your offended heart.

I had done what I always did and lost myself in my drug of choice, rather than to live with that reality or even look it in the face.

The problem with that kind of forgetting is that when it returns, it brings some friends with it and they all want to kick you in the face.

"What do you think? Should I go after her?"

There was a long silence from Claude.  I could almost hear him counting under his breath, then—

"ARE YOU A FUCKING IDIOT?"

"YES! YES I AM!" I yelled back. "It's kinda my thing, okay? I get into things, I try to do my best and somehow I still manage to fuck them up. So YES! I AM A FUCKING IDIOT!"

"If you go after her, she's going to kill you.  If you don't go after her, I'm going to kill you... in an eventual kind of way and for a lot of other reasons, the least of which not being that there are three really scary vampires who are trying like hell to pry me out of the tin can you abandoned me to, so either way you're kinda fucked.  You kinda laid a lot on her all at once, what the fuck did you expect?"

"How's that going anyway? The tin can situation?"

"Just swell, thanks for asking. And fuck DiGiorgno's man. They fucking lie in those ads. No fucking way you can confuse that shit for delivery."

Yes, Claude was still stuck in Beatrice's vampire-proof bunker and was still trying to come up with a plan to get the fuck out of it.  He'd called me when the Gentlemen had shown up, not more than a little freaked out about how fucking scary they were even from the other side of the camera.  It hadn't been at the best of times and something tells me he was still a little pissed off at me for having to hang up on him.