He smiled then, and it was cruel.
“I say they’ve never met someone worth owning.”
He shoved me gently.
Not hard.
Just enough.
Then opened the door.
“I don’t want to own you,” he said.
And slammed it shut behind him.
So I am not worth it? I am not worth owning in his eyes?
I stood there staring at the door as if I looked hard enough, he might come back. Like maybe he forgot something; his shovel, his guilt,me.
No footsteps came. No hesitation.
But his words stayed in my chest.
Hecared. I know he did. Isawit.
He was my every reason, my every prayer, but I was never even a passing thought in his.
But caring isn’t the same aswanting, is it?
He never touched me. Never crossed the line, I beg without words. And still... I built a whole world out of nothing. I dreamed of us. I dreamed of one day I would be just his, and he would be just mine.
He was careful not to love me, and I was careless enough to hope that one day he would.
And now I’m choking on the ghost of something that never even lived.
God, I feel stupid.
I sat down on the bed and pressed my forehead to my knees, willing myself not to cry, not again, not over him. But the tears came anyway.
I made him a monster in my dreams.
A lover in my delusions.
A friend, to everyone else.
I turned him into everything I needed, even when he gave me nothing at all.
I remember once, he stood in the doorway to my room after a storm. I was curled up in bed, pretending to sleep. He didn’t say anything, just watched me. The way someone might look at something they weren’t allowed to touch.
And I thought… maybe.
But he never stepped inside.
Maybe I was always a line he wouldn’t cross. Mistake he didn’t want to make. Maybe I was just a wound he felt sorry for, not a heart he wanted to hold.
I told myself it was restraint. That hedidfeel it, he was just better at hiding it. Better at denying it. But maybe he never felt it at all. Maybe I was just convenient sadness to soothe. A girl he pitied.
How humiliating?!
