Day 17

We went out to run errands for the day, and by the end of it she was tired. She asked me if I'd like to stop by the café next to our building for a hit of hot, black caffeine before we went home. The fact that I was small enough to swim in a shot glass - much less a venti-sized coffee cup - notwithstanding, I didn't have a problem with it.

Violet sat at a counter, waiting for her coffee to cool and giving her feet a rest from the last few hours. I guess, with me in her ear, she wasn't wearing headphones to warn off would-be conversationalists among the café's clientele. If I hadn't been secured to her earring, the next sound I heard would've made me fall out in shock.

"Hey, um... Violet, right?"

I couldn't see well through a curtain of chestnut hair, but that was Camille.

My ex.

This couldn't be happening. "Please don't tell her about me," I begged. Violet gave an almost imperceptible nod -- imperceptible to people not secured to her ear, at least -- before turning to Camille, to whom she gave a much showier one. The second nod, incidentally, nearly threw me to my feet.

"Mhm. Camille, right?"

"Yeah. Um... I don't know how to say this, so I'm gonna do it quickly then go away forever." She took a deep breath before launching into her anxious spiel. "I heard that Ivan left you and I'm so sorry and if I'd known that he was such a dick I definitely would've warned you and I'm so sorry and -"

Violet cut her off. I don't know what it was - her tone, or maybe it was the rising flush of her ear that surrounded me - but she was definitely getting off on this situation. "It's totally okay. It... was sudden, but it wasn't totally his fault."

Camille, her tumbling speech having been abruptly stopped before reaching the bottom, sounded confused. "It... wasn't?"

"It wasn't. It wasn't even mostly his fault. It took some thinking, but I decided... I need to be the bigger person. I did what I did, and I need to own it." Violet's ear was definitely warming up.

Camille sounded uncertain, but apparently she was willing to let it go. "Are you sure? If you need someone to talk things through, just let me know."

"Thanks, Camille. I will."

When we got home, Violet said she needed to relax. She pulled out a skyscraper of a vibrator from one of her drawers after placing me on our bedside table. "Do you want to watch?" I said that of course I did. She had already accepted that I couldn't really participate, so these mini-voyeur sessions were the closest thing to sex that we'd had since that day.

Because everything always seemed so much bigger to me nowadays, it was hard for me to be certain about it, but: Violet sounded louder than usual this time.