It was sadness.
Sadness that someone who had so invigorated and excited me had turned out to be nothing more than a wild one-night stand. Sadness that the person in my head was not the person in reality. Sadness that I was still on the prowl for someone I could love, trust, and confide in.
OK, maybe that last part was a little sissy.
But...
Well, not like I had anyone in this world right now that I could genuinely say I loved. That was probably a little fucked up... probably.
Just get it over with, you pussy. Stop bitching.
I pushed open the door to my place. At first, it just smelled like my apartment.
And then I got to the bedroom, and immediately, her scent blitzed my nostrils. And fuck... it was so pleasant. She was so great...
She was different.
No.
Shewould’ve beendifferent.
She would have been the woman that I finally felt comfortable going after. Because, see, there was one thing that I had never admitted to myself, let alone Jess. It wasn’t just my father’s presence that made it difficult for me to seriously date—it was the lack of my mother’s.
Her absence made it difficult for me to trust women. I never assumed that one would stick around for a long time. I would never let myself get close, even when being one of the young guys made it easy for me to draw certain gals at the club. Simply put, I always knew how the story played out. Girl meets boy. Boy and girl connect. Boy falls in love with girl.
And then girl is never seen again right when boy is ready to start feeling.
Maybe Jess, being a bartender and being something of an “unavailable” target just made her that much more alluring. Maybe I always knew, somehow, someway, that she would push me away in this fashion, making it easier for me to keep coming to her. Maybe, maybe, maybe...
Didn’t matter what the reason was. What mattered was that I was hurting.Will hurt for a while. And I don’t know when...
The harder I try to feel better, the worse I end up feeling.
I ripped the sheets off the bed as I cursed loudly, trying to keep them all by my hips so the smell wouldn’t hit me any harder than it already was. I stuffed them into my washing machine, threw a detergent pack in there, and had the lid half-closed.
I took one more sniff.
Damn, at least Jess smelled really fucking good. At least if this was the last time I had any sense of her, it was nice.
And then I closed the lid, turned on the washer, and grabbed a bottle of Febreze. Making a path through the apartment, I must have sprayed so much of the bottle I’d probably choke on the damn thing if I didn’t leave. Just for good measure, I made a second run around the place.
I then grabbed all of the clothes I’d worn the night before, including the ones I had on still—except for my cut—and stuffed them into the washer. I didn’t care if it ruined anything in there; I just wanted it fucking cleansed of any scent. There could be no memory, no trace, no evidence Jess was ever here.
As soon as I had found everything that I had worn, slept in, or rested on and thrown it into the washer, I pulled open my phone and found her number. I deleted all of our texts—which, surprisingly enough, were not that long or fleshed out—and then hovered over “Delete Number.” This wasn’t like I had a vault of information I could pull out and work my magic on. Once I deleted this, that was it—
I pressed it and confirmed the deletion before I could change my mind.
I tossed my phone on the couch. I walked like a zombie over to my bedroom and sat on the edge of the sheets-free bed. I let out a very long sigh.
I’d erased Jess’ presence from this apartment. I’d erased her from my phone. I didn’t have social media, but it wasn’t hard to imagine that I would have deleted her from there if I’d had the chance.
But for all of that, I could still “see” her just as easily as I saw her last night. She was still a presence that I couldn’t get rid of, maybe didn’t want to get rid of. She was mine for a night, and though she may have taken control, I was the one who let her have her way. I was the one in charge.
And suddenly, despite running things, I was the one being run around. Funny—and sad—how that all worked.
* * *
It was now night, and it seemed like a cruel addition to the world that the sky above had filled with clouds that threatened to start raining at any moment.
