Thank you for reading!

While his righteous indignation at being used was still at its strongest power, Major debated whether to text Shawna to break their date—and to break up—or if he should wait until she arrived. She was expecting to go dancing. Maybe it would have been kinder to tell her before she came over. But he had been brought up to believe that bad news was best given in person … and he wanted to see her face when he told her he knew about the website, about the way she had used him. So he waited.

As he did so, he cleaned up the remains of Fort Lust, thinking what an idiot he had been to trust someone who had written a sympathetic letter to a serial killer. Of course she had only been out for what she could get from him. What had he expected, some kind of soul connection, understanding? No, he was honest enough to admit that really all he had been looking for was exactly what he had gotten: the chance to drown his sorrows in hours of athletic, mind-numbing sex. He should be grateful to Shawna for providing that, and he should be man enough to accept that whatever else had come from the experience was his own fault for not being more cautious.

He met her at the door, standing firmly in the doorway. Shawna looked him up and down and frowned. "What's goin' on? Why aren't you dressed? You okay?"

"Not really." He took a deep breath and decided just to get straight on with it. "Saw your Tumblr page."

"Okay." Shawna didn't seem to see why he should be upset.

Which only upset him more, really. "I—I get that exploiting other people for their fame is a thing, but couldn't you have at least asked me first?"

She followed him into the living room, not missing the half-finished clean-up of the reminder of their great weekend of mindless sex. "Whoa! Who was exploiting you?"

Major stared at her. How could she not get what she had done? "You posted stuff that was private, that was just between us."

"I'm trying to help you, Major! You're basically a hermit because all anyone sees when they look at you is the Chaos Killer." She came toward him as she spoke, her hands coming to rest on his chest in an intimate manner that she apparently expected was still appropriate. "I'm showing them the real Major—the one who is sweet, and smart, and funny, and charming, and, okay, pretty easy on the eyes." She smiled at him, her eyes dancing. "Don't you think it's time someone told that story?"

He supposed he understood that, but he couldn't understand how she thought it was okay not to ask him, not to talk to him about what she planned to do, not to give him a choice. If only she had given him a chance to explain how he felt, what he wanted. "I don't want to be any story. Right? I just want to go back to when nobody knew who I was."

Shawna looked at him with pity written on her face. "Oh, baby, that ship has sailed." She stroked his arms and shoulders. "Look, if the posts bother you that much, I'll take them down. Okay?"

Major stood frozen, not sure what to think. If he took her at her word, if he believed her explanation, she had still done this without asking, or thinking about what he wanted—and she was way more emotionally invested in this than he was. And if he didn't believe her, then she was deeply embedded in her crazy, and that was not a place he needed to go.

She couldn't read his thoughts any more than he could hers, though, and she went on, "Can we call that the end of our first fight? Maybe hold a peace treaty signing ceremony in Fort Us?" She caressed his chest, preparatory to stepping in for a kiss, and Major knew he couldn't let this go any further. It was tempting to stay with it, to keep using her for sex in order to take his mind off of how crappy everything else was—but that was what it would be, using her. And he used to be better than that. He needed to be better than that again.

"I'm sorry, Shawna," he said softly. "I can't see you anymore."

Staring at him in open-mouthed surprise, she asked, "Are you serious?"

"Yeah."

She took a moment to make sure she understood, and then, to her credit, accepted it. "Fine." Taking her hands off him, she turned away, with a final, and fair, parting shot. "Good luck finding a time machine."

When she left, he stood in the middle of what had seemed like a good idea at the time and now felt like only childish self-indulgence, and wished with all his heart for a time machine. If zombies existed, surely so could other staples of science fiction, right? To turn back the clock, all the way back to the boat party, to tell Liv not to go, to spend that night with her on the couch, watching movies and making love, and then to marry her the way it always should have been. A normal life.

But there was no such thing. Time continued forward, and forward, and forward, and he had to go with it, even if he didn't see any future that appealed to him. This was the life he had, the life he was stuck with. And if the last bit of comfort had just walked out the door—if a probably manipulative psycho was the only comfort he had left—then he would just have to live with that.

Leaving the mess he had made of the living room behind, he climbed the stairs and got into bed, under the covers, staring at the wall in the dark, wishing for oblivion.