“No.You’vemade it perfectly clear.Youkeep reminding me that I’m leaving at the end of my contract.Yourefused to let our relationship get deep.Youcouldn’t even decide if you liked me enough to keep seeing me until you hooked yourself up to a goddamn EEG machine. And nowyou’rerunning. All because you hate yourself too much to let yourself live a little.”
Until those words, my temperature and my volume had been rising with my rage. But he’d thrown a bucket of liquid nitrogen over me.
You hate yourself.
“No, I…No, I don’t.”
He wouldn’t be deterred. “Yes, you do. You hate yourself so much that you sabotage every chance you have to be happy. Relationships, work, your friends. The man who nearly destroyed you showed up and you didn’t even have the strength to hold your head up when he talked to you, much less give him a piece of your mind. And when I try to care about you, when I try to get you to see that you’re not the worthless nobody you seem to think that you are, you run. Ihavemade it clear that I want there to be anus, but you don’t know how to let someone love you because you can’t fathom it being real. You despise yourself, deep down, all the way to the core, and assume that everyone else should, too.”
And I’d not realized it until now.
Ididhate myself.
Maybe because of the way I’d been treated as a child, maybe because of those years of loneliness growing up, maybe because of Lloyd and what happened at GalacticSolutions. I didn’t know. But…yeah, I hated myself. Deeply. Abidingly. Maybe it wasthe only thing I’d been able to count on. I wore that self-hatred like a winter coat, clutching it tighter whenever the wind got too sharp, and sweating in it through the summers.
I hated myself.Constantly. Immovably. And yet I hadn’t ever been able to face that reality before.
Now I had nowhere else to look. And the truth stared back at me with big, wide, understanding, loving eyes.
And I hated him for it.
“Don’t stand there and claim you want to protect me when you’re not even man enough to admit you love me.”
“What?”
“I went out with you last night, totally abandoning my work responsibilities, because I thought you’d finally say it. That you didn’t care about your contract ending or our agreement. That you want to be with me for more than just sex. I was so sure you would…but you didn’t. And now everything’s fucked up because of me and my stupid lack of judgment. Chasing after some guy who doesn’t even love me.”
I spit out every last word like it was poison. The hurt of the last week and a half, of waiting for a confession that might never come, bubbled to the surface.
Hudson reeled, falling back a few steps.
“Is that what you think?” he asked.
“Yes.”
This time, it was his turn to spit the words. “You don’t know anything.”
That was, I’m sure you’ve noticed, not a denial. It wasn’t a love declaration. And it wasn’t what I wanted to hear from him.
“I know how to replace complex couplings,” I said. “So, if you don’t mind, I’m going to do that.”
A sigh. Long and labored. He pinched his nose, rubbing a few soothing circles over it. “If that’s what you want.”
No. It wasn’t what I wanted.
I wanted him to hold me and force me to understand that this wasn’t worth throwing us away over. That it was a small mistake. Fixable. That I wasn’t a failure. That Iwaslovable. That there was more value to me than my work.
I wanted him to fight for me.
I wanted him to love me.
Since I never got what I wanted, though, I retreated from the room, trying not to think about how the color went out from my world almost as soon as he did.
41
Cutesy Titles Are so Pre-Breakup of Me
Believe it or not, I didn’t sleep very well that night.
