Love & Ruins (#2)

Chapter Nineteen

Chapter Nineteen: Maggie

He instantly noticed that I gave up trying to be respectful.

I don't know what he was expecting, just because you care about someone does not mean that they're incapable of getting under your skin, and for Evan's case, as much as I still empathize with him, if he's so hell-bent on not wanting to act like adults about this, then I'm not going to make the effort to do so anymore.

That doesn't mean I'm gonna start being patronizing for that matter, no, it just means if he wants to behave like he's the only person struggling to cope with our recent dilemma, I can have a victim complex too. Two can play in this game.

He knew he fucked up, let's start with that, resulting in his futile attempts to redeem himself after our altercation a few days back by dialing down on his antagonism, but it quickly went down the drain when I responded to them with blatant disdain, not even trying to hide how pathetic I thought of him and his half baked efforts.

Reacting with occasional snide remarks here and there such as "Oh, so you've finally decided to acknowledge my existence? Who knew the day would come." Whenever he responded to my queries about the project, the indignation on his face visible but he just let it slide.

But then I thought, you know what, let's take it up a notch.

It went from poking fun at his unreasonable rudeness to simply just being a jerk myself, throwing around past indiscretion that nobody else would catch aside from him, to being straightforward with my scornful tactics by bringing everybody in the group coffee whenever we meet up except for him as I come up with some flimsy excuse that he slipped past my mind, for example.

Even though he's the only one occupying it.

But I can't admit that. I want to teach him a lesson, and I know, it's immature considering I was the instigator, the traitor disguising oneself as the victim, but there are so many layers to our story that don't just stop at him being left behind on that one winter morning.

He's acting as if I made the choice myself, and that it wasn't imposed on me. He should know me better than that by now but deep down, I know he is aware. He's not ignorant as most people and he's probably more informed about my family's background than half of my friends combined, and I'm not going to act like I didn't contribute to the fact that Evan Williams knows me that well because I've allowed myself to strip bare all my weaknesses to him.

That's what makes what he's doing now so spiteful because it's one thing to use the knowledge you have of someone to your own advantage, but it's another to just dismiss everything you've learned about them and have the gull to act oblivious to their trials and errors, the ones they wouldn't have told you about if they didn't trust you well enough.

... You give up so much of who you are only for it to be treated as something that they could care less about. As if it was more of an unwarranted invite they can just as easily throw in the garbage, rather than a gift you decorated just for them.

Then again, it's not like I'm exempt from that. I was aware of his issues regarding abandonment and negligence yet had the audacity to throw it out the window when I had ditched him. In the end, neither one of us is just as innocent as the other, we're just one gigantic grey area, despite how much we butt heads.

So maybe what he said was just his way of making things even between us, restoring balance to our dynamic, because we can never really overpower the other.

Again, all's fair in love and war. Especially war.

But much like all battles, you can't necessarily avoid bringing other people down with you when you decide to wreak havoc, and it was inevitable that the rest of the group became more and more affected by Evan and I's ongoing feud.