Then, I tried obsessing over every task on my to-do list that I hadn’t gotten to in the last six weeks. No one had to teach me that one.
Why does this always happen to me?
I was about ready to cry.
I thought about getting up and taking one of the sleeping pills I’d been prescribed, but the first kind had given me horrifying hallucinations and the other kinds had severely increased my anxiety. Insomnia was better than the sleeping pills—at least up to the point the insomnia started making me hallucinate. Besides, if I took a sleeping pill now, there was no chance I’d be up and able to work in a few hours.
I’d always had anxiety, but the last year hadn’t helped matters. The invasive viral chaos and all the stress of work should’ve been the key sources.
But it was that song.
Maybe everything else had weakened my defenses and that was just the blow that cracked my shell, but there was more to it than that.
I hope it haunts you still when you try to move on.
I hope you hear my voice when he sings you that song.
All alone in your bed, dreaming of me.
Turns out, I didn’t need you to be happy.
I was lying there consumed by insomnia, so frustrated I wanted to scream as the words played on repeat in my mind.
He turned my humiliation into a hit and it didn’t have the power of his first album, but it was catchy enough that even I couldn’t get it out of my head.
It had been three days since I saw him at Alex’s house. He hadn’t even done anything except try to talk to me, but I’d been livid. Mad at him, but more mad at myself for coming up with a thousand reasons to let it go, to answer the flirtatious twinkle in his eyes.
It made me want to do something rash, like dragging him into the pantry for hate sex, and I was long past that kind of behavior. I had too much to lose now.
So I’d taken a smaller risk and let the Key Club know I was open to some escort clients again. It felt like reclaiming a part of myself I’d lost in my relationship with Nate.
Sliding back into Helen’s impenetrable confidence after years of burying that side of myself was the escape I was looking for. I still worried someone would find out, but the Key Club clients had just as much to lose as I did.
Escorting grounded me when I was doing it, but it was just a crutch and it couldn’t help me right this minute. I needed sleep and only had one weapon left in my arsenal of tricks to try. A lone arrow in my desperate, desperate quiver.
Some oxytocin might just let me relax enough to sleep. Not in the mood didn’t begin to cover my mental state…but I was desperate enough to try for an orgasm.
I didn’t want to blast my eyes with light by looking at something on my phone, so I closed them and slid my hand down, trying to picture something that might get me even a little bit aroused.
Anything buthim.
I hope it haunts you still when you try to move on.
I hope you hear my voice when he sings you that song.
All alone in your bed, dreaming of me.
Turns out, I didn’t need you to be happy.
And here I was all alone in my bed.
Thinking of him.
Images of all the times we’d been together flashed through my mind, as relentless as they always were. Now I was turned on, but pissed at myself for not having any self-control. Not having enough dignity to forget about the guy who broke my heart and find someone else to fantasize about.
Nine years. How could I not have found someone besides that asshole to fantasize about in nine years?
Whatever.
