“So, I need to be painfully honest here.”
Those are never words you want to hear at the start of a conversation like this.
“When you took me back Friday, it was the lowest moment of my life. I don’t know how I didn’t sleep with you, because I was in such a fucked-up spot in the head. But when I woke up on Saturday, even though you left early, I felt like I had found the strength to better myself. Maybe it was just realizing I had survived my lowest point, I don’t know. But I do know that right now, LeCharles? If I may be frank, my focus isn’t on you. It’s on me.”
That was a completely fair thing for her to say, and I had no room to argue it. It was also a very painful thing to hear her say, especially considering how things had started when she moved here and how they had changed.
“That’s why I’m applying to a second job, so I can save up money and build toward something better. So that’s one thing. And the other thing? You realize it is really scary to let myself commit to the idea of us trying again, right?”
Put like that, yeah, it was scary. The idea of us trying to do something that had failed so spectacularly before was terrifying. I had gone through a shitload of stress during our first breakup, to the point that my blood pressure spiked to extraordinarily high levels when I was at my fittest.
As I slowly started to separate the fun I was having from what may lay ahead, I began to empathize with her.
“It’s going to take me some time to come around to us being a thing,” she said.
And then I said the words that I would live to regret, ones uttered in frustration, ones that weren’t indicative of how I really felt, but ones that Rose would nevertheless use to define us.
“It didn’t take you long to come around to nearly sleeping with me.”
Fuck.
Me.
I knew I’d made a mistake as soon as those words came out. I didn’t even need to see her eyes go wide and her nostrils flare. I could have been a blind man, and I could’ve been able to tell by the way her breathing increase.
“So that’s what this is all about, isn’t it,” she growled. “You’re just playing the fucking long game so you can fuck me?”
“No,” I said, desperately trying to regain control of the conversation. “If that were the case, I—”
“You what?” she snapped. “You what?”
Shit.
“If that were the case, I would have just fucked you on Friday. But I didn’t—”
“Oh, some hero you are.”
I was trying my best to keep my cool. But now it seemed like Rose wanted to take the gloves off.
So you know what?
Fuck it. Gloves off.
“You know what’s funny? I really am something of a hero to you.”
“Oh, I can’t wait to hear this.”
All stoicism went out the window. There was no self-control at this point. I was just utterly and completely devoid of any calm.
“I gave you a second chance when you came out here,” I said. “For the way you treated me, I should have burned any memory of you. If memory erasers existed, I would have paid my life savings to forget about you. But I thought, hey, maybe she’s changed. And then you acted like a fucking beggar around me. And still, I rescued your ass when God knows what would have happened at Brewskis.”
“Oh, fuck off.”
“I’m about to at this rate. For the number of chances I’ve given you, you won’t get another one.”
And then she did the worst thing.
She laughed at me.
