Page 16 of Look at Her and Die

Pinch at the corner of her eyes, and a thin-lipped smile.

At one point, I’d thought her beautiful. Now, every time I looked at her face, I only saw signs of disappointment.

Once beautiful blue eyes now seemed too sharp. Too uncaring.

I’d spent a year of my life with her, and where I’d once seen beauty, I now questioned what I ever saw in her.

Maybe it was time for me to get checked for cataracts.

Could you get cataracts at thirty-six?

“Why do you have to act like this is such a chore?” She rolled her eyes, and the muscles around her eyes didn’t move.

Botox.

Sigh.

She had so much of it that sometimes I didn’t even think that she could show any emotion at all.

“Because it is,” I stated. “I had to take time out of my day to come up here and talk to you when you could’ve just accepted the first talk. Or the seventh text. Or the fourth phone call.”

She sighed, long and loud, as if she was incredibly over my attitude.

Probably, she was.

But there were only so many ways I could say “I’m really not getting back together with you” before I lost patience.

“Posy, listen,” she pleaded. “We’re good together. I’m sorry for asking you to go to that function with me, but who else was I supposed to go with?”

I prayed for patience.

“That’s not the only reason we broke up,” I returned. “And you know it.”

“Your parents love you,” she started.

“My mom loves me, sure,” I agreed. “My stepdad couldn’t care less about me. He’d rather that I disappeared off the face of the earth.”

“Posy…” she ground out. “He’s a good man.”

He was an asshole.

But I didn’t bother to say anything.

What would be the point?

I’d been saying my piece for what felt like forever, yet it felt like every time I explained, she turned it around on me.

“This has nothing to do with him. Or with the stupid fucking ball you wanted me to go with you to. Or the desire to give you the life you’ve come to want. What it’s about is I don’t want to be with you anymore. I don’t love you. I don’t even like you. You exhaust me. You make me cringe every time I hear your name. You make me want to rewind the last year just so I could walk the other way when you walked into the room I was in. I don’t want this.” I gestured between the two of us.

She sighed. “We don’t have to like each other to have a successful marriage.”

At that, I laughed. “Go fuck yourself, Elisha.”

She growled, which was the first sign of a crack in her armor.

“Why are you doing this, Posy?” She threw her hands up in the air. “My god.”

I shoved the keys to my bike into my pocket and said, “Stop calling me. Don’t show up at my house. Don’t call my mom and ask about me.”

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