Jack Off

by K.B. Cinder

When the screen lights up, my heart plummets at the string of notifications waiting for me: twelve missed calls and twenty-one unread texts. My phone buzzes in my hand. Scratch that. Twenty-two unread texts. This can’t be good. Tapping into my messages, a knot wedges in my throat. Bryant Baby, it was nothing. Answer me. What was nothing? I scroll to the last text I sent to him, a picture taken right before we walked into the honky-tonk bar. The selfie has a backdrop of my girlfriends posing like Charlie’s Angels against the building’s dilapidated exterior. He’d responded with a laughing emoji, and I’d tossed my phone in my bag without a second thought. But not five minutes later, he’d sent another message that I’d missed, and the words on the screen bring the tequila tangoing in my belly to a halt. Bryant House to myself. One last fuck for old-time’s sake? The blow to the heart is swift, and a wave of fiery heat blankets my body from my scalp to my toes. Time-stamped a minute later, there’s another text after he’d realized his epic mistake. Bryant LOL!!! Just kidding. Have a good night with the girls, baby. A picture of his bare feet on the coffee table follows—my coffee table. The one I bought at a consignment shop while still living in Queens and surviving off coffee and the sheer will not to become rat food on the subway. But there’s a glaring problem with the photo that’s meant to calm me. I know what the foil square peeking beneath his right foot is. I’d kn...