“I just…” She sighed, trying to find passive words that wouldn’t give away her emotions, but would still fool Bette into thinking she was opening up. Unfortunately, she was having a hard time succeeding. “Carmen… doesn’t seem to care.” Bette looked at her questioningly, urging her to continue. “I mean, here I am, hurting so bad, but I’m the one that left her. Shouldn’t she be hurt?” Bette stayed silent, not wanting to interrupt her when she was starting to open up. She found talking just reminded Shane someone else was there, and it was easier for Shane to just talk to herself. “I don’t know. That’s kind of the thing, too. I mean, if she’s hurt, that means she cares. That she hasn’t moved on, that she still loves me. That it didn’t take, like, a week to get over me, you know? It’s like, is that all I was to her? No, is that all we were to her? Just somebody to be with until the “real deal” comes along? Like with Jenny? I mean, I don’t get it. I’m supposed to be this master with women, and with most women, I can just predict what they’re gonna say or do just by spending five minutes with them. But with Carmen, she always kept me on my toes. Half the time she was conservative, the other half she was wild and crazy. One half was Christian values, the other half was ‘Fuck that whole Judeo-Christian theology.’ But maybe that was part of the attraction. I don’t know, I just… I just wish I knew how she felt.” She paused, remembering her anger. “And she just let everybody feel on her!” she yelled suddenly, jumping up and pacing in front of the stairs. “I mean, she knows I’m sitting right there! Is she trying to make me jealous?! Or is she trying to make me see that she doesn’t care about me anymore?! I… I can’t deal with this jealousy and this anger, man! It’s like every time she laughs, something that used to be so fucking beautiful, it’s just like another twist of the Goddamn knife! And every time somebody touches her,” her voice faltered and she dropped it down to a whisper so she could finish her thought. “I think ‘That should be me! But I fucked up. I fucked up bad.’” She dragged her eyes, shining with tears in the bright sunlight, to meet Bette’s. “And now, now I have no say in who touches her. Because I let my father get to me. I let that son of a bitch make me think that I didn’t deserve her. That I wouldn’t be able to handle her, that I would hurt her! He thought I was like him. That I am like him. But I’m not, Bette. I’m not like him. No matter how much I deny it, I do need people that aren’t just there for me to fuck. I need you, I need Tina, I need Al, Dana, Jenny, Kit, but most of all, Bette… I need Carmen. Because Carmen is the only person who ever made me feel like everything single thing they were doing for me was out of love, not pity. The only person who made me feel secure. She was the one person in my life where after I slept with her, I didn’t wake up and want to spend hours on end in the shower to try and scrub off the dirt, the shame of being known as just ‘the heartbreaker,’ of knowing that the girl I just slept with could be crawling with disease, and I wouldn’t even know it. She was the only person in this entire world who I could be… just completely…” She paused, gesticulating wildly while she searched for the right word, “…me… around.”