Reese covered her nose and mouth. “Oh my … oh my God,” she said in a muffled Long Island accent. “What are you doing in here? Collecting shit and mold?”

“Waiting to die,” I said, setting my Ensure on the table.

She walked in and looked around for two seconds before collecting empty pizza boxes and other trash.

“What are you doing?” I asked, annoyed.

“Making it tolerable. No wonder you’re depressed. You’re lucky I owed you a favor. Fucking gross.”

“You owe me a favor? I think it’s the opposite. You hooked me up with your sister’s kitchen, remember?”

“We can talk about it later.” She handed me the sack. “Clean clothes. Take a shower. I’ll clean up.”

I stared at her, holding the sack in my hands, confused and unmoving.

She stomped into the bathroom, turned on the shower, then came out, pointing behind her. “Shower! Now!”

“Fine! Christ, Reese. I got a heart condition, you know.”

“Don’t wanna hear it! Heart patients can brush their teeth and wash their asses. Get to it.”

I shut the bathroom door behind me, set the sack on the counter and undressed, trying to think of the last time I’d worn clean clothes. I stood under the hot water. Reese was right, I was already feeling more human. A human without the love of my life, but a human anyway. Week-old grime dripped to the tub and circled the drain.

It wasn’t easy knowing I was just being stubborn and also feeling like I was doing us both a favor. Naomi didn’t want to kiss Peter. I should’ve beat the shit out of him, but she’d lose her job, and I’d probably end up in the ER. It was fucked. I was fucked. I needed her and had to stay away from her. Fucked.

Brad had told me once if I talked too much sense I’d lose my mind. He’d always known that I could get too far into my head, trying to compartmentalize and explain emotions so I could get a handle on them—mine or someone else’s.

That tendency was a big problem for me, because love in any capacity didn’t make sense. The beginning was perfect, the end was agony, and the middle was filled with expectations and disappointment that eventually paved the pathway to falling out of love. We could fall in love with someone, too much of something or not enough. Someone wrong for us or too much like us to get along. It was too delicate a balance, but love didn’t care. We fell without reason and basked in the light of it, only to become blind to why we fell in the first place.

The flaw in it all was love made us insane, and returning to reason was inevitably the beginning of the end. Love had to be senseless to survive.