good and bad
Marco was not a bad man. Even if he was curt with his peers- even if he had a habit of smoking in his friend’s house with the dog around. He was raised to be just like his father by his father, and maybe that’s where the sense of self-aggrandising came from. But what was the cost of narcissism if it came with chivalry and determination?
When he wakes up at six in the morning, he brushes his teeth and washes his face. Afterwards, he’ll stare into the mirror and conjure the will to think; Marco is a good man. Not a handsome or talented one, but a good one. It started as a tongue-in-cheek manifestation. When he was 15, he caught Paolo up at the crack of dawn giving himself a speech, and then and there he decided to spend the rest of his life picking up the habit if only to embarrass his friend.
And just like that, Marco becomes a committed man too. To his career, to the promises he makes, and to his relationships. Even after the initial betrayal of Ai-Ting’s breakup, he still opened his door to her and left the spare house keys he knew were in her wallet. Even after ten-odd years he still wakes up extra early to go to the guest room Paolo stays at and whispers cheesy manifestations until he’s screamed at.
Victoria is a commitment. Just like all the women before her, she is someone who he devotes much of his time and energy to. And Victoria is good. She’s really, really good. Even with the stick so far up her ass rivaling his own, she brought things to the table that perfectly complemented what he’d needed. He was getting lazy; she loved nothing more than to whip something into shape. She liked high-brow arthouse productions, and he’d never seen a piece of theatre that cost less than two hundred dollars to watch.
Mama didn’t like her, but Papa did. So did his friends, even if Alyona hated the films she was in. And by god, did the press like her. The press liked Them; cherry lipstick and maroon ties- he knew they looked striking on the red carpet interviews. Their relationship did miracles for his reputation.
But some nights he didn’t know if he wanted something good for him.
Victoria was good. Melina was nice. She was bright, and the kind of woman Mama would love. He has to be careful about the degree of separation unless he wanted to break the dam that was how he felt about her. She was nice in the way that she offered to clean up the messes her friends made, but the bite of her lip gave away that she didn’t really want to do it- she wanted to have fun and be messy all the same as them. She asked him to call her Mel, like she was a teenager trying to let their substitute teacher have an easier time. But the name Melina tasted like the sea, and even when he muttered it to himself he could picture her warm eyes darting around the room. It was enough syllables for him to steel his nerves, and prepare himself for his chest tightening when she’d tilt her head and smile at him.
Waking up, he brushes his teeth and washes his face. This time, he dares not to look into the mirror, fearing that his reflection would tell him what he already knew.
He was not a good man.
He was not a good man for kissing his girlfriend good morning, for telling her that she looked beautiful only for him to scroll through old pictures in his gallery on the way to work. At the red light, he comes across an old picture he’d taken of Melina- at the beach, he could barely make out Laurin’s pale arms in the background. She was smiling, lips crooked, and laughing at something someone was saying. His phone screen dims from inactivity, and he gets a glimpse of his own face. He tossed the phone onto the empty passenger seat and quietly hoped that he was funny enough to have been the one who made her smile.
Sooner than later, Melina becomes a commitment. A cracked seashell firmly embedded in the back of his thigh, something precious to remember but painful to think about.
And Victoria was not a stupid woman. He’d tried to confess, but everytime it she sensed the topic coming up she clammed up and shot the conversation down. She’d yell at him that he needed to get his act together and stop thinking about things that didn’t matter. He lay in bed staring at the ceiling after that fight; he manages to forget about what he had for dinner three nights ago, about the insensitive things that Victoria shot at him; but he gets out of bed when he remembers the cookbook Melina had bought him for a birthday.
The next day at work he’s in his head. Melina’s voice sounds like Victoria’s cold shoulder, and he cannot make out half the words she’s saying. As good of a driver as he was, staring blankly ahead of him with fingers slack on the wheel was only ever going to end in a crash. It was nothing bad, whether it was because he felt perfectly numb from everything else or that he’d tumbled so much in training that this was nothing.
Melina was asking for a response, just like the protocol asked for. He toils in his seat momentarily, pretending she was asking anything else. Where he wanted to go for lunch tomorrow, how he liked his eggs in the morning, or how she managed to stay so fucking relentless in his head.
He slides out the car onto the hot track, and he doesn’t know either. Between the half-used bottles of bleach from when she’d fallen asleep touching up her roots, to tripping over her own feet trying to dance to some cartoon movie she loved. He thinks it's somewhere in there- or in the hundreds of mental images he has tattooed into every other inch of his skin.
The voices of his team chiding him were nothing more than fodder. When Melina ran into his arms, it felt like going home. Not the apartment, but home; with his family chattering in the summer sun as Pippa barked. She touched his face, gently grazing over a bruise so delicately that only someone kind deserved it. Her eyebrows knitted together in worry, and somehow still so utterly beautiful if he died in this moment it would have been in contentment.
That night, he calls his mama with a knot in his throat, asking her if her husband had been a bad man too.