“Throw a mug at someone at Desi’s. We’re all such fucking douches.”

It might have just been the adrenaline, but Nicki laughed. “Give me one of those,” she said, reaching for the cigarettes.

“So are you going to hit me or what?” Dallas asked. He took a drag of his smoke and opened his arms wide, a half smile on his face. The smug motherfucker. Like he knew she wasn’t going to do it. “I deserve it. I know I do.” Well, duh, Nicki thought and hauled off and punched him in the stomach. His face registered a brief look of surprise before collapsing into a cartoony “oof” as he stumbled backwards, reaching for the wall. Nicki sat down on a milk crate and smoked her cigarette.

After a minute, Dallas righted himself again.

“You okay?” she asked.

“Yeah,” he said shakily, bringing the cigarette to his lips.

Nicki stood up, crushed out her butt, and punched him again.

They ended up back at his place – the only time Nicki has been there. Dallas still lived like a frat boy, his one-room apartment furnished with a yard-sale futon and tables made out of empty beer cases, takeout containers strewn across the floor. There were two walls not taken up by windows. A giant flat-screen TV was mounted on one; on the other was what looked like a promotional poster for a movie about bullfighting, but all the words were in Spanish. Without talking about it – without talking about anything – Dallas fucked her up against the wall with the bullfighting poster, so that when she turned her head she could see the unfamiliar words, the red of the cape, the horns of the bull.

“What’s with the poster?” she asked him afterward, sitting on the futon, slightly stunned. All the fight had been screwed right out of her, and she felt almost quiet on the inside – even in that disgusting room, with its cracking ceiling and dirty windows, a place where she now felt she could sit, unmoving, for hours.

“Oh,” Dallas said, following her gaze. “A friend brought that back from Spain. I thought for a while I might want to be a bullfighter. But then I realized that meant I would actually have to fight bulls.”

“You mean a girlfriend,” said Nicki, leaning back on the futon. She had managed to pull up her jeans but her top was still somewhere in the mess on the floor. She ran her hand over her belly, feeling the stretch marks there, the little pouch of flesh that never seemed to go away no matter how many diet pills she took.

“Yeah,” he said. “Her name was Sage. I lived with her on Salt Spring for a couple of years.”