Plot Swap: Reveals Who: Max What: Reveal: swap plot
She didn’t know what to do with nice.
The hotel was like a choose your own adventure book, the kind her mother brought to the grocery store when she was little, flipping through to try and be the hero over and over again, except every ending was twisty, impossible-to-avoid death. She’d made the wrong choices at eight years old with her hair in pigtails to her waist and she’d made them ever since.
She didn’t know what to do without the salt taste of regret on her mouth and she didn’t know what to do when it came flooding back, arms out to welcome her home and guilt kissed her on the cheek, warm lipped. She knew what its absence felt like, and she knew the way her shoulders felt without its burden.
She ran her hand along the kitchen counter and she reached faintly for whatever it was her body had been doing without her in it and found nothing but an absence, a postcard from ‘no regrets’ signed with love. She stripped with steam billowing in the bathroom and there wasn’t a mark and she thought she’d write a thank you note to bricks and mortar somewhere in Vegas, relief pooling like saliva in her mouth.
She’d had regret trailing her like a puppy-dog with nose to heels for so long that the suds circling the drain felt like poor choices and bad decisions, Vegas very far away. And when she combed out blond hair across her shoulders and looked at her own face and not her sister’s in the mirror she could parse all the ways in which the new world had made them similar.
She wondered where the man looking for recognition had found himself and whether he mourned the missed chance. It was a choice, a chute or a ladder and somehow the dice had rolled out as if she’d won the game.
No regrets. Was that Max? She doubted it. But everything, she decided, cup of tea in a quiet kitchen and her hair damp against her back, the clothes piled in the laundry hamper and wearing a very old, very soft blue dress dug out from the back of the wardrobe, was different again.