How fucking stupid am I?
I know better.You’d think I learned after the first time.
I learned it the night we crossed a line and never figured out how to step back over it.When I let Monty inside me and felt something crack open that never closed again.When I realized I could love two people at once and the world would still only give me space for one version of myself.
The version that only liked women—never men.
I almost begged him.
Begged.
For a touch.For his mouth.For something I wasn’t even brave enough to name.I know that for a few unbearable seconds, he almost gave it to me.
That’s the part that guts me.
I’ve been with women since then—men too.
I’m not confused about that.I never have been.I like women—love them, even.Their bodies, their softness, the way they touch me like they’re allowed to.
And men ...men scratch an itch I pretend doesn’t exist.Discreet hotel rooms.Low voices.No names exchanged.No feelings invited.
My needs are always met quietly.
Because if I don’t let myself feel, I don’t have to remember what it was like to open my soul and watch it be rejected by the future before it even started.
But Monty—Monty isn’t a need.
He’s a memory.He’s the only man who ever made me feel seen instead of just used.The only one who touched me like I was something worth keeping.Like I wasn’t a secret, a phase, or a mistake to be folded away.
Like he could love me, and maybe he did at some point, but had to stop.
And Vesper ...fuck.
Ves is love and all the good things I can never have in my life.
We were young, but what we felt was real.
I loved her.I loved him.
And I’ve spent every year since pretending those loves didn’t change me.
I adjust myself in the seat, painfully aware of my body’s betrayal, of how close I came to ruining everything.
My chest feels tight—not with panic, but with grief.Old, familiar grief.The one that settles in your bones and teaches you how to smile through it.
I drag a hand down my face and force air into my lungs like I can bully my body into behaving.
You almost kissed him in a fucking car, idiot.
Worse—you almost begged.Like some feral teenager with no sense and no pride, like you didn’t already learn how this ends.
Not again.
I can’t want him again.
Because wanting him means wanting a life that doesn’t exist.A life where we don’t choose silence just to survive it.A life where love doesn’t turn into a battle over the same woman because that’s safer than admitting we want each other too.The three of us as one.
And it means his rejection.
