I’d scratched his back bloody. Literally. A few of the deep scores were bleeding.
He’d be wearing evidence of me for weeks, and though it hadn’t been as deliberate as he would no doubt assume, I wasn’t sorry.
I paused when I was dressed and ready to go.
I couldn’t help myself when he was sleeping like this. I moved closer to the bed, my eyes on his downcast, peaceful face in slumber.
I let myself watch him for a time, my mind worlds away and years ago, recalling a time when his beautiful face had been beloved to me.
This was the problem. Even with all the hate I had built up against him, being in his proximity brought back those other feelings, the ones that had nothing to do with hate.
To counteract such poignant, debilitating regret I felt like I should do something else, make some statement that he’d see in the morning that would further cement my victory here.
I thought about ways to humiliate him while he slept. Throw some dollar bills on him, draw a penis on his forehead, get creative, have some fun with it.
But alas, I was short on cash and I didn’t have a Sharpie handy.
I settled for leaving a short message written in lipstick on the bathroom mirror.
NICE TALK.
DON’T CALL ME, AND STAY OFF MY FLIGHTS.
I figured between that and the scratches, he’d understand that I knew I’d won this one.
I had to take this round for myself, but not for the reasons you might think.
Not to win. Not even to conquer. But to endure. It was imperative.
Because even when I won with Dante, I was defeated.
Because, to this day, I had a hard time walking away from him.
Something inside of me—some insidious thing, deep down in the dregs of my soul raged against every step that took me in the opposite direction of him.
Even after all this time, it raged.
CHAPTER
SIX
“Proud people breed sad sorrows for themselves.”
~Emily Brontë
I don’t sleep well. I never have.
My subconscious hates me. It exploits me at my weakest moments. When I can’t control my own mind, it conjures up new and old nightmares to taunt me—ruthlessly and consistently.
My dreams like to trap me. Take me back to places I badly want to leave. Back to feelings I desperately wanted to forget.
That night my sleep was particularly wretched, as I dreamed about Dante and the way it used to be. The could haves and the what ifs were my own personal hell and had been for a very long time.
I liked to blame Dante for everything that went wrong between us, and when I was in my right mind, I did. But my subconscious had other ideas. How much of our end had been my fault? And worse, how much of it had been preventable? He’d started the avalanche that ended us forever, but it was a fact that I’d fed that disaster once it had started rolling.
If I was brutally honest with myself, I’d even helped to start it. Not deliberately, but I’d always just been so insecure.
When I was a child, I thought that no one would ever love me. For the longest time, I was certain of this. It was me against the world, and the world was cruel.
But then.
Then.
Dante.
He loved me so deep and so hard that I was blinded by it.
I thought it was a miracle. I was so young, so impressionable, so infatuated.
So stupid. For years and years, all I had the sense to do was bask in it.
I let our love rule my life. It was everything to me. He was. I became possessive of every part of him. And it didn’t take much for that possessive streak to turn ugly. My jealous rages were infamously brutal on us both.
How much had that desperate insecurity contributed to pushing him away? If I’d been less difficult, less needy, less fundamentally fucked in the head, would things be different?
I tossed and turned all night with those impossible questions tormenting my overactive mind. I’d have been better off just staying up all night, but I was paralyzed, frozen to the hard hotel mattress until my alarm freed me.
I reported for work in a hell of a mood.
“I take it things didn’t go well,” Leona finally asked me as we strode through the terminal, headed for our plane. I hadn’t said a word to anyone on the ride from the hotel to the airport. Not so much as a good morning for a one of them.
I didn’t look at her as I answered. “Everything went according to plan. I won, he lost. He shouldn’t bother me for a while.” My tone was curt. It was my leave me alone voice, and she knew to do just that. It was one of the reasons we could hang.
I was a loner by nature, and she was a nice, friendly, sociable girl that never seemed to have a bad day. When I’d first met her, that had annoyed the hell out of me. But over time, when I’d realized it wasn’t an act, that she was just somehow inherently good, the girl couldn’t help it if she tried, she’d started to grow on me. And over time, as I’d given her a shot, and found that she didn’t expect me to be like her, I’d become dangerously attached. More so than I usually allowed myself. It was her tolerance that got me, when I normally had no problem staying aloof.
If she saw a storm brewing in me, as it inevitably did, she had the sense to give me space. I’d never been a girls’ girl. I didn’t keep female friends for long, before Leona. She was the first girl-friend I’d ever had that did that, that took the time to understand me enough to just back off sometimes.
As though taking her cue, Demi and Farrah did the same. They didn’t know me or my situation with Dante like Leona did, but they knew enough.
My mood improved a bit as we started to work. Keeping busy was distracting enough that my mind began to clear from the fog of my dreams.
Still, I was looking over my shoulder constantly, some part of me sure that he’d show up again.
But he didn’t. To say I was glad to shut the doors on my flight without a Dante in my cabin the next day was a vast understatement.
I was so grateful that I didn’t have to deal with him again I was thanking God, my knees weak with relief at the respite.
It was done. I’d warded him off for the foreseeable future. It was enough.
CHAPTER
SEVEN
“Love isn’t something you find. Love is something that finds you.”
~Loretta Young
PAST
I was waiting outside the vice principal’s office again. For fighting. Again.
I’d actually been doing pretty well lately, so this was now a rare occurrence.
There had been some major changes in my life.
After that day when I found out Dante was fighting for me, we were near inseparable.
We just fit together, he and I. Not necessarily in a sweet or romantic way. We were both thick skinned and sharp tongued. A tad too jaded, a touch too sarcastic. Hotheaded and stubborn to an extreme.
Dante was just as prickly as I, just as jaded, more sarcastic, more hotheaded, but thankfully, not as stubborn.
Which meant that when we clashed, as we invariably did, I won more.
I needed more wins.
We both knew it, and he was kind enough to let me have it. It was one of many reasons why we fit so well together. Despite all of his flaws, his sullen moods, his tempers and rages, he showed me an enduring compassion that no one else ever had.
We were in our early teens. It was that age where the sexes had separated to a polarizing degree. Boys hung out with boys. Girls played with girls. Those were the rules. There was some general flirtatious banter, some note passing, and lots of brief, teasing interactions but other than that, there was a clear segregation of the sexes.