The joke was on me and I was the fool.
What I had with Craig was nothing. It was just an occurrence that happened.
But it wasn’t the real thing.
I never knew until tonight that it was never the real thing. The thing I thought I was trying to have even though it didn’t work out for my parents.
This was it. What I had with Ryan was love.
It was love and I was the fool because I was the instigator of it. I created the path for him to know me. The real me.
It wasn’t Craig I’d given my heart and soul to it was Ryan.
It all dawned on me as I watched him drift off to sleep. Then panic welled in my throat.
Within the stillness of the black silence that surrounded us the icy tendrils of fear twisted around my heart.
It started there and worked it’s way throughout my body knotting up my insides.
When I agreed to this no strings attached relationship I really did believe it would work. But tonight showed me I believed what I wanted to at the time.
I belived whatever my mind told me because I wanted so badly to be with him.
And now this had to happen…
My heart was full of him.
I’d experienced a lot of firsts with Ryan, and I realized it was because I’d allowed him to reach my heart. Somehow, he’d gotten past my defenses and reached me.
I didn’t even notice when it started happening but it was my fault. My games. I was the one who started the whole Brooke 101 game with him.
It was just a manner of speaking. Me being sarcastic at the time when I ran into him at the store.
I didn’t know it would blossom into something else. Something I feared so much.
Love.
I’d liked Ryan from the get-go. That spark and the chemistry was there. It was all there, and I fed off it with sass, teasing him and allowing myself to think it was just fun. When we’d first started seeing each other, that whole way of thinking we were just fooling around was shit, and me agreeing to no-strings-attached fun was shit too.
It was all bullshit.
This feeling in my heart told me that. It also told me I hadn’t gotten into this relationship to sabotage it. What kind of woman got involved with a man who had a sixteen-year-old daughter and loved them both if she was going to leave?
The feeling in my heart, the swirl of emotion that gripped me when I looked at him told me I was completely in love with Ryan. He was it for me—
It was so easy to love him. I did it effortlessly.
But, this wasn’t supposed to happen and I wasn’t supposed to feel this way.
I wished like hell I could have entertained the possibility of me trying this and seeing where it would lead. A normal person would just do that. It made sense to do that.
Except I freaked out.
It freaked me out.
Love freaked me out because I didn’t want to love and lose.
That was it. that was the reasoning behind my fears.
