Page 122 of Bad at Love
“A friend?” I manage to say. “You love me as…afriend? Just a friend? After we’ve been fucking each other for a month, you love me still as a friend? That’s all I am to you?” My voice is getting higher, shriller, with each note. “You’re a liar!”
He glances at me with bloodshot eyes, swallowing hard, and shakes his head. “No. Marina, please. Don’t make me hurt you.”
“Don’t make me hurt you?” I yell, grabbing the sides of my head as if that will contain the rage, the hurt. “You’re telling me you don’t love me! You’re…you’re breaking up with me. Right? Right, this is what this is, you dumping yet another girlfriend of yours because that’s what you fucking do, you fuckingcoward!”
“Hey,” he snaps at me, eyes wild. “This hurts me as much as it hurts you.”
“Oh my god! Oh my god, did you seriously just say that to me? How fucking dare you? This hurts you Laz? Then don’t do it!”
“I don’t have a choice. I don’t fucking love you!”
Dying.
I am dead on my feet, dying inside.
His words have acted like a knife, straight to my heart, and now the serrated edges are slicing down, ripping and tearing and shredding everything good inside me.
The pain is…
indescribable.
I want to fall to my knees, curl up into a ball and shove something deep inside my chest, reach into the cave it’s become, wrap a tourniquet around the wound until I feel whole again.
“Marina,” Laz says quietly.
I can only stare at him, the tears flowing down my cheeks in rivers.
I’m flayed in front of him.
He reaches out to touch me.
I stumble backward. “No,” I whisper. “Don’t…”
“I didn’t want this to happen. I tried…”
“You did NOT try!” I am seething. I am both indigo pain and white-hot anger. “You didn’t try Laz and you know it. You got scared. You got scared and you ran because that’s what you do.” My throat starts to close up but I manage to get the words out. “You’re right in that you don’t deserve my love. The man who deserves my love is someone who gives as much as he takes. Who faces the fears head on and moves past them. Who has hope. Who tries. You, Laz, you’re stuck in the past. Stuck with what’s easy, what’s shallow. You sing songs that don’t belong to you, you pen poems that you don’t let yourself feel. You’re a fraud, even to yourself. You don’t even know who you are.”
I’ve hurt him. I can tell, see it in his eyes. My words are weapons and he’s feeling them, he’s feeling them.
Good.
It’s about time he fucking wakes up.
“Now, if this is it, if this is what you want, to break up with me, to leave me, then go.” I point to the gate. “Get the fuck out and go.”
He stares at me.
“If you don’t love me, if you don’t even want to try, then go! You are nothing to me anymore, you got it? Not your lover, not your girlfriend, and definitely not your friend.Neveryour friend. Friends don’t play with each other’s hearts but that’s exactly what you just did.”
His mouth opens to say something.
I don’t care anymore.
“GO!” I scream, the word ripping out of me.
His eyes widen.
He turns.
