Emotions swarm in my chest at the thought of him wondering what I was doing and if I would come back. I always walked away because he was so quiet and distant. There are only two times we were together when I felt like he let me in. Like he showed me a piece of him that was just for me. Which was so unfair, because he had all of my pieces. He knew everything about me and every vulnerability.
In all four years we were together, there are only two times he dropped his guard and let me in.
The second and last time was the night he came to my apartment, the night I left him. I sought him out because I knew he could make me feel better and then I ran away, hating myself for using him, hating myself for going back to someone who couldn’t give me a commitment. Every low moment I had, I ran to him, and I couldn’t keep doing it. Especially not with what had happened that week.
I knew I shouldn’t have been with him that night the second he was done fucking me in the alley. By that point I couldn’t stand to look at myself in the mirror, so I ran to my ex. The same ex who had never told me he loved me during the four years we were together, the ex who never once called me his girlfriend. The ex I let call me a whore as he fucked me in an alley. It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to know I was fucked in the head and needed help.
I knew going to him because I was in pain was wrong. I was falling into an old pattern of behavior, relying on a bad habit simply because I felt a gaping hole in my heart I knew he could fill. And when I realized that, I knew it had to be the last time.
So when he told me he’d enter the bar after me, and back to an old group of friends I’d missed so much since I’d last seen him nearly two weeks prior, I gave him a small smile and kissed the edge of his lips, noting how rough his stubble felt against the pads of my fingertips. He didn’t realize it was goodbye, or that I already missed him. I said I’d go to the bathroom first and he should go in before me.
I liked being his whore, his submissive, his… whatever you’d call it. A lot of people called me a lot of things. Both to my face and behind my back. The sex was always amazing, whether it was sweet or dirty; slow and sensual, or hot and rough. But it crossed lines I didn’t know how to avoid. And that night, I felt dirty. I felt like I was beneath him in the way I always feared he saw me. I felt like I was only a poor girl he saved once, a pathetic girl who kept coming around because she had no one else. That’s how I felt, and although something deep inside my heart screamed it was more than that, there were no words to prove it to me.
I didn’t expect anything at all from him when I escaped back to my place, but certainly not him banging on my door, demanding for me to tell him what happened. After all, I wasn’t his girlfriend and whenever we got into a fight and left, he didn’t follow me. So why follow me now, when we hadn’t seen each other in weeks and it was just a dirty fuck?
I’d never seen him worried like that. Especially not over me.
I didn’t expect him to search for me when I never went back to the bar; I didn’t expect him to be so angry, so hurt, since he never was before. He never came for me ever. And he never yelled at me like that either. Maybe that’s why I slammed the door in his face.
I was going through so much, that having the one person I knew I loved scream at me was something I couldn’t take.
Time changes a lot of things, but it’s never changed the way my heart feels when I think of the look in Madox’s eyes that night. When I told him I regretted being with him, and that I wished I hadn’t seen him that night. I pushed him away as hard as I could.
I told him I wished I’d never opened my heart to him again, to a man who had no room or need for me in his life. It was my own fault, and I told him so. I’m not sure how much of that is the truth, and how much is a lie.
I was a silly twenty-year-old girl, suffering through life and running back to my first love every time I felt alone. Since I was seventeen that’s what I’d done. Madox Reed was a hard habit to break, but I broke it that night, three years ago.