“Thanks for the advice. Appreciate it. But see, for all of what I just said about black being the king of defaults or whatever… you have to give the challenger proper consideration.” He holds up the other tie. “The white tie will match her dress.”

A white dress.

Ripped satin. Loose. Streaked in mud. Forced onto her shaking body again. Bloody from the gashes on her fingers.

“You all right, bud?”

A white dress on a bride who belonged to him first.

But mine.

He means some other woman.

He does not.

He’s not talking about a wedding.

He fucking is.

She is mine.

“How?” The rest of the words lie flaccid on my tongue. Arms strong enough to strangle him hang at my sides like dead slabs of meat.

“You put it under the collar and you tie it. I’m not wearing a clip-on to my own wedding, my man. Or did you mean the annulment? That was Massimo’s John Hancock that did it.”

Worse than impotent, I am dickless. Castrated and cauterized. Nothing between my legs but a spark of the flesh that connected her to me.

The white one, obviously.

A man needs to match his woman.

“Fuck it. I’ll just wear the black.”

The last spark left is the first. It put hair on my chest. It dropped my balls. Made me taller. Stronger. That first bit of masculinity, which is dying now, sent me into the world to take it, to own it, to fuck it like a cunt, and it has one last flash it bypasses my brain to use.

I throw the tray with the bowl of lentils at him, but it just hits the glass and makes a mess. He doesn’t even flinch, so I fling myself at the glass, convinced no material thing can stand up to the physics of my thrust. My fists are hard enough to punch through it. I will drop into the hall in a sparkling rain of broken glass and rip Sergio’s throat open like an animal. I will pull his tongue out and knot it, because this last wedding tie will be blood red.

But pain flashes on my fists and my face as I bounce off the glass and fall to the floor with a thup sound and a head full of stars.

When Sergio laughs, I absorb the insult, staring at the ceiling, unable to move. Invalid.

Then he’s gone, and it’s just me with my headache, taking up space—a waste of life.

I can see under the bed where the razor is hidden—pressed between the frame and the mattress. I slide it out. What can I cut with it? With my hand under the bed and away from the camera, I flip it between scarred fingers.

I can wait to find out they’ve cut her life from mine, or I can end this all right now, on my own terms.