Fucked

"I can't do this anymore."

Those five words had been in my mouth for hours. Days. Weeks. I don't know that I'd really intended to let them out. But now they were there, hanging in the air between us.

His fingers stopped moving, stopped knotting his tie. His eyes moved from his reflection to mine in the mirror. I never could have said those five words to his face.

I told him how I was starting to have feelings for him. How I didn't want to get hurt. How I hated missing him all the time. Hated not being able to talk to him, see him, when I wanted to. Having to sneak around and lie and hide. How I knew that he was never going to leave her. Never leave her for me, at least.

"I know this was just supposed to be...fun. And I'm sorry, but--"

"But you're not having fun anymore."

I felt that familiar catch in my throat. Heard my voice change. Completely give me away.

"No."

The one syllable was all that I could manage. I said nothing for a moment after that. For several moments. Trying to still my racing heart. Trying to still my racing thoughts.

"I want something that you don't. And I know I wasn't supposed to, but I do. So I need to get out now, before I can't anymore."

His reflection stopped looking at me. His fingers busied themselves with his tie. "So that's it then," he said.

I nodded. No words left in my mouth anymore.

~

I know it's what I should do. A film reel I should take out of the cutting room of my mind and play for him the next time we're together. I know it's what I should do. And I know it's what I won't.

"You were not designed for illicit trysts," Margarita concluded the other night. She had thought, at the beginning, that I could handle it. That I was in control. That The Latin would be my conquest. She'd thought those things because I kept insisting that they were true.

And we'd both been wrong.

Or she'd been wrong; I'd just been lying. To her, to him, to myself. Because I knew. I'd always known. I'd never have gone to bed with him if I hadn't had feelings. If I didn't want to be with him. If part of me hadn't wanted him for the past two years. Even if the other part hadn't realized it.

~

"What are you doing here with me," he whispers. Our faces pressed together as he holds me in bed afterward. Brushing a stray curl back behind my ear. "You're girlfriend material," he tells me.

He says these things, or some variation, every time we're together. Every time he calls me at work. Reminding me of what a bad situation this is. Of how I deserve better. How foolish I'm being. As if he wants me to stop. Wants me to stop him.

"It could always be worse," he says later. After I've turned my back to him in anger. A playful imitation of an emotion I should be feeling in earnest.

"How could it possibly be any worse than it already is?" I wonder aloud as his lips work their way up my shoulders to my neck. Sweet, soft kisses that dissolve me utterly.

"You could fall in love with me."

His words are warm against my skin but they send an icy shock through my body. I say nothing. He says no more. But in that silence, I tell him that it's already too late.

In that silence, he tells me that he knows it too.



written May 7, 2009