His life isn’t my business.
He isn’t mine.
But I can feel it. This terrible disappointment. This tingling in my eyes. This unbearable pain in my heart that pushes down hard, making it difficult for me to breathe.
I feel it all.
Again.
And it’s all his fault.
I should have known he was a bastard, just like he told me he was. I keep telling myself this: and yet, I get up, grab my purse and run outside. I look in the street searching for the man who just walked past me and, God, there he is. I could spot him even five hundred metres away.
“Riley,” Kate joins me outside. “What is going on here?”
I stop myself just in time to see her worried eyes.
“I’m sorry, it’s just that I saw something, someone…and I need to sort something out.”
“You’re scaring me.”
She’s right. I’m scaring myself too. I’m afraid of my own thoughts and of what I’m about to do.
“I’ll call you later, okay? I have to go now.”
I kiss her cheek and start walking quickly through the crowds, unaware of the hard shoulders I’m getting as I make my way through. I’m in a trance, lost in my own madness, needing to know who that woman is, what he’s doing there with her and why he’s hugging her.
Why he’s hugging her and not me.
I reach them in front of the bus stop. He kisses her lips before she steps onto the bus.
And then he turns. He passes me without seeing me and I stand there, frozen in the middle of the street, gasping for breath, with the terrible sensation that I’m going completely mad.
I watch his back disappear into the crowd and I feel as if I’m going to drop to the pavement in desperation.
I feel numb, crumpled, as if I’ve just taken a few kicks to the stomach. I’m angry, disappointed and hurt. I just chased a perfect stranger down the road, ready to cause a big scene, yell at him and give him a piece of my mind.
I can’t believe it.
I was so close to doing it. Getting hysterical. Screaming. I can’t hide what I’m feeling. I can’t hide behind my silence. I can’t find comfort in my solitude.
I was about to lose control.
I didn’t lose it when Jamie would cry, holding onto me every night. When I protected him against everyone who wanted to hurt him. Not when they pulled him from my arms.
But I was ready to do it. For him.
And all because he’s in my head, my body and my damn heart.
Ian is everywhere.
Ian makes me feel everything.
It’s unbearable now.
I hate this labyrinth of emotion and sentimentality. I hate remembering, I hate feeling, I hate hoping and I hate what I’m feeling right now.
I hate what I want.
Him.
