She told him he didn’t need to worry because she wasn’t going to tell anyone about coming over here today. She was doing this for herself, and he no longer mattered to her in any way. She didn’t care if she ever saw him again, but given the likelihood that she would, she’d be polite and hoped he could respect her enough to do the same. Kimmie said coming over here to tell him all this was her way of moving forward, of saying good-bye to her past, of taking the sheep mask off the wolf and revealing him for what he was.

She hoped that from now on, because of her, he would treat girls with a little more respect, because pretty girls, even if he viewed them as personal playthings, had feelings, too. She asked him if he wanted to say anything back to her now that she was done, but all he said was how sorry he was that he had hurt her feelings. He said that in the past he was guilty of being selfish, but that these days he was a changed man, though he offered no explanation.

“A real man wouldn’t have treated sex as a sport; and a real man doesn’t go around stealing other people’s girlfriends.”

His nostrils flared as he stood up to walk her out, but she stopped him. She was more than capable of finding her own way. As she rode down the elevator, she wasn’t sure if she felt better, but she did know she felt proud of herself for living up to her new code of not taking shit from anyone, especially not a guy.

XIV

Vronsky sat on his bed in silence, shell-shocked from the Kimmie bomb that had exploded in his face. He didn’t know what to do with himself, so he just lay back on his bed and stared at the ceiling, trying to absorb everything that had been said, not just by Kimmie but by Anna, who had shown up twenty minutes before Kimmie to tell him what had happened with Alexander.

Then Anna stepped out of Vronsky’s closet, and as she did, he remembered how he’d once hid in his brother’s closet, which he considered his sexual awakening. But now it occurred to him that watching his brother have sex was what started his own sexual odyssey and was not as cool as he’d once thought it was. Maybe that was where he learned to treat women the way he did.