1/2
When Lita asks if he thinks Pete is the sort of guy she'd be into, he'd like to feel as sure that he isn't as she seems to think he ought to. The fact of the matter is that maybe he thinks Pete seems like the sort of guy she should be into. When he thinks about the men in her past, he thinks they probably were closer to whatever Pete is than what he is. He imagines men with bank accounts and clean clothes, who probably combed their hair and lived in houses without wheels and didn't start carrying a gun when they were sixteen years old. He imagines her going on dates with guys who could order off the menu for her in French and knew how to knot their own ties. She's a million dollar woman and there's no chance in hell she belongs with a low-down dirty dog like him. Maybe a fella like him might be fine for a ride but he's nobody's prince charming, least of all a woman of Lita's caliber. He doesn't think it that far-fetched that she might go for a man of means like her doctor pal now that she's got the bad boy fantasy well and truly out of her system.
He doesn't have much time to think of that though, because the next thing she says arrests his attention completely.
Like so many things about her, her words both delight and destroy him. What she says implies that she's not over him, not completely, that what she felt once still lingers there despite it all. But it also implies that she's trying to, and that one day she will. He hates that he can't stop her. This is no battle he can fight and win, no enemy he can war against, no force he can conquer. This is inevitable. The feelings that linger in her will be lost over time, until someday she won't even entertain the thought of taking his call late at night, of letting him call her sweetheart and read her to sleep. He'll be a long gone regret, and maybe she'll be kissing another man the way she once kissed him. Maybe not. Either way, it will never be him. Never again. Having her here feels like chewing on a canker sore-- all pain with no resolution, no cure. Yet there's something that keeps him biting down, some sick and twisted pleasure at having her here beside him that he can't deny. Maybe it's because he knows it's probably the last time he'll ever be this close to her.
He can't look at her after she says that. He just can't. It's all crashing down on him now-- the pain he feels for his camp that bleeds, the disappointment in himself for not preventing this, the failure that dogs him and manifests now before him in this woman that left him. This woman that is better off for having gone. The apology he's given her hasn't sunk in, the explanation he offered just rolled right off her like water off of steel. She listened, but he doesn't think she believes him. He doesn't think she believes much of him at all. And why should she? He's never done a damn thing right by her. He feels like he is little more than a terrible misfortune in her eyes, a monster who misled and manipulated her into believing he was more of a man than he is. With the anguish pressing down on his chest, he doesn't even feel the prick of her needle anymore as she finishes sewing him up. Maybe he's projecting all of the guilt he feels into this right now, but through the agony of it all he can't quite think straight.