“No, stay,” says Dallas, reaching over and cupping her breast.

Just then the television switches over to a local news promo, and that Cassandra Coelho bitch starts talking about Kate. The two of them watch in silence as Kate flies over the waterfall. Dallas shakes his head again. “Un-fucking-believable,” he says. “How is she not dead?”

“I don’t know.” Nicki remembers the story of Princess Green Mantle plummeting over the falls to her death in order to save her tribe. At least she was doing something useful – if anyone should have survived the fall, it was her, not Kate, who went over for no good reason. “Finn thinks there’s something really wrong with her. Like she would know anything about anything.”

Dallas is quiet for a minute. “I saw her, you know,” he says finally. “Finn, I mean.”

Nicki pokes at the inner corner of her eye, chasing a nonexistent eyelash. “I know,” she says. “Do you think I didn’t know?”

Suddenly the room feels oppressively hot, even with the air conditioner. Nicki can’t breathe. She glances at Dallas, lying against the pillow, his too-long blond hair sticking up from his head at unlikely angles. He seems to be breathing just fine, but it’s hard to tell. She checks her watch: it’s nearly six. Four hours of her life wasted in this shithole. “I’m gonna go,” she says.

“Wait,” says Dallas, sitting up. “Are you okay?”

“Fuck you,” she says, although she doesn’t know why. It is their usual routine: fight, fuck, flee. She tells herself it’s what she wants as she walks out the door.

2003

Nicki only has last night’s clothes to wear. It couldn’t be any worse: the Spanx digging into her bloated belly, everything else chafing against her hypersensitive hungover skin, all of it too tight and bright and perfectly wrong for pretty much anything that could happen before midnight. Dallas offers her his plaid shirt and she takes it, buttoning it up over her tube top, which is still sticky with tequila. She’s still not talking to him. At least he has the sense to act sheepish about the whole thing, otherwise Nicki might have to drill him in the other side, give him a matching bruise.

“I’ll tell her I found your phone at the bar,” Dallas says, sitting on the edge of the bed, watching as Nicki puts on her shoes. “I took it and was going to give it back to you, but then it rang, so I answered it, thinking it might be you…”

Nicki stares at him, unblinking. “You really are dumb as a fucking post,” she says. She wriggles her foot down into her shoe and limps towards the dresser, searching for her purse. “I don’t know how Finn has put up with you for this long.”