The sharp and sudden inhale of her breath sent a rush of panic through me.
“I’m not using you to hurt myself. I’m using you to feel again. But if you’re expecting me to paint you some pretty picture of what came before this, I can’t do that. You’re going to look at my life and hate the things you see.” My voice wavered as I fought the tears. “You will absolutely be disappointed in my decisions. You won’t like the man I was. And you will despise the things I was willing to do. I promise you will. And I’ll want to hide it all from you, because I’ll want you to see the good in me the way you always did when we were young, but I’m going to make it so … fucking … hard on you.” I sucked in a shaky breath, barely holding it together.
“I don’t know how to deal with this.” Her words were cried out desperately.
I gritted my teeth, shaking my head. “You don’t have to,” I finally conceded. “You shouldn’t have to.”
“That’s all you have to say?” The anguish in her voice was painful to hear.
“We can’t… We can’t keep yo-yoing around with each other, Hell.” I shook my head. “I’ve made too many mistakes. I could spend the rest of my life doing nothing but saying I’m sorry to you, and I will. If that’s what you want, what you need, I will.” I was silent for a moment. “But it won’t make you happy.”
I listened to her cry, and tears ran down my cheeks too. I held the phone away from my head for a moment as I gave up stifling the emotion, and I covered my eyes, gripping my temples with my fingers as my chest shook.
When I held the phone to my ear again, I paused, saying nothing as I focused on keeping my voice level. “I am always going to love you, Hell. And you will always have a place in my world if you want one. But your disappointment in me hurts. It’s completely valid, but it fucking hurts. And that’s not going to end. There are things in my past I can’t expect you to cope with. I can’t…” I didn’t know how to finish that sentence. Actually, I did. It was an ultimatum I didn’t want to give her, because she didn’t deserve it.
She didn’t trust me, and she wasn’t a woman who could survive life with a man she didn’t trust. She’d said it plainly enough, but I didn’t need her to tell me to understand that about her, because I knew her. And I couldn’t give her what she needed. And it was going to be worse the more she learned about me. I’d given myself a deadline on this life for a reason. What the fuck had made me think I had any business going back on that?
I finally hung up on her when the emotion became too much to bear, and I pulled my pillow over my head as I groaned out this half scream half grunt.
“Fuck,” I roared loudly as I hurled the alarm clock across the room. It exploded in pieces off the closet door, falling to the floor, and I lay gasping for air as every muscle in my body tensed for a moment and then finally relaxed again. “Goddammit,” I breathed out, and then I stared into the dark, my breathing slowing and my heart rate returning to normal.
I fantasized about a world where Helene and I made sense. It was a beautiful world where she trusted me and I deserved her trust. It didn’t take long for me to drift away; the exhaustion was just too much to fight against. That didn’t mean my sleep was easy, and I tossed and turned for hours. I must have slept, but whatever it was, it sure as fuck didn’t feel like sleep. It felt like hell.
I’d lost her. Hadn’t I? Had I been the one to end this? I had. I’d ended it because I knew she eventually would when she learned all my secrets. I’d done this. Me. It was all … my … fault.
The thoughts swirled, kicking up a gut wrenching cloud of panic as they ebbed, swelled, and circulated through my brain. My eyes would fill with tears as the notion of giving her up again set in, and then I fought it tooth and nail, clenching my hands into tight fists and then pounding them on the mattress beside me as my body went rigid with tension. And then I’d fall into an exhausted stupor again.
There surely must have been sleep in there. But then I’d come to and remember how hard my life made it for her to love me. No part of my life deserved to be loved by her. And the cycle of hell, or Hell as the case was, would start all over again.