"Yeah, lots of 'em. Anyway, about an hour later she and Dominic come back downstairs. Dominic comes over without the bag and pulls me away from this yellow painted naked girl that I had been dancing with after I let her out of a cage. We get outside and just as I notice I've got yellow paint all over my clothes, he pulls out the largest stack of hundreds I've ever seen and peels off ten for me. Evan, she bought fifty grand worth of china for a fuckin' party man, and you don't even want to know what Dominic said was going on upstairs. Man, I'm amazed any of them lived."

"So what?" I said defensively.

"So what?" he said surprised. "So what? So... be careful alright," he said, softening his tone. He leaned on the frosted glass and looked at me waiting for a response. The soft blue glow lit his face from below giving him a ghostly appearance.

I felt it welling up inside me like a hot spring from some unknown place. Hate. I hated him for what he was saying. Each word out of his mouth was like a wedge driven between the two worlds I now straddled.

Out of the corner of my eye, I could see people raising glasses and bills trying to get his attention. He didn't flinch. "You don't understand," I said glancing away, unable to look him in the eye.

"Okay, I don't understand." He leaned closer until our noses were inches apart. "Why don't you explain it to me?"

Looking at him was like trying to stare at the sun. Telling him should have been easy, but it wasn't. I'd already told him a hundred times in my head and each time he'd understood. I swallowed hard on my anger and just spat the words out.

"I'm different Henry." I exhaled a nervous breath as I watched his face for a reaction. It felt good to say the words, healthy, but hollow at the same time like I should have said them months or even years before.

He smiled and shook his head. "That's it? I'm different Henry," he said in a mocking tone. "You’re a professional arsonist. You’re different. Tell me something I don't know." He held up his finger toward several people trying to get his attention at the end of the bar.

"That's not what I mean." Those first simple words felt like the first trickle of water slipping through a fissure in a dike. There were millions of gallons still behind it, eager to eat away at the breech. "I'm not like other--," I stopped when I saw him stiffen and look over my shoulder.

"Later," he said, going back to work.

She put her hand on my shoulder as she sat down. I looked down into the frosted glass and tried to shake off what he'd told me about her.

"Are you okay? You look like you've seen a ghost," she said.