She's The Wild West

CHAPTER TWENTY

CHAPTER TWENTY

    I fell asleep thinking about her. I wasn't doing anything while I thought about her, but it was kind of funny how, in a way, I was following her instructions even when she wasn't around. I laid in my bed and I thought about our intimate moments together, but I also thought about her quiet laughs, her sarcastic remarks, the rude way she went about caring for people.

I fell asleep thinking about her warning.

    In my dreams, we did everything we did in real life and more. We finally kissed. Her lips were soft and they tasted like apples and I couldn't get enough. She touched me, encasing me in her sweet vanilla scent, and I touched her too for once. I held her, cupped her cheeks like she always did mine, caressed her body. We moved further and further, faster and faster and eventually, we had sex.

I woke up in a cold sweat, rushed into the bathroom, and nearly threw up.

It had been a year and half since the last time I had been intimate with anyone.

Don't.

It had been a year and half since the last time I had touched anyone.

Don't think.

It had been a year and half since the last time I had sex.

Don't think about her.

It had been a year and a half since I let a girl named Diamond Ruth ruin me.

I left the lights off in the bathroom, but there was enough streaming in through the shower window for me to catch my own reflection in the mirror. I looked different and I looked the same. I looked tired, eyes slightly puffy with that faint purple hue hugging the skin underneath. Lately, the color didn't always fade in the mornings. I turned away from myself and sat on the edge of the tub, hands pressed to my knees, shoulders tense and head down as I tried to make myself calm.

When am I gonna move past this?

    Diamond Ruth was usually the reason for my late night runs around campus, when my mind and I couldn't agree on what to think about. She was my unnecessarily long gym sessions and my studying things I already knew and my desperation to find a job because I couldn't seem to sit still without my mind seeing it as an opportunity.

    Some of it was my father, but most of it was her.

    I never really let myself think about it fully, because the thoughts and memories made me feel weak. They had a way of teleporting me back in time to my lowest moments and I always felt like I was exactly the same as I was back then. It wasn't true. I moved away, I came to college, I made new friends and had new experiences and I didn't think that everyday would inevitably turn sour anymore, but still, I avoided the thoughts in fear that they'd somehow take away my new normal.

You tell yourself not to think about it, yet you think about it all the time.

    The bathroom was cold and quiet, and the porcelain was freezing as I climbed into the tub, legs stretched as much as the space would allow, back flat against the edge. I closed the shower curtain and stared straight ahead. The pale blue tiles stared back at me through the dark.

    I met Diamond Ruth during my senior year of highschool and she was the first girl I ever fell in love with.

    I knew it wasn't a common experience, but highschool was fun for me. Good grades came easy, although I never put in the necessary effort to excel and be one of the "smart kids". I had friends and I was popular in the sense that everyone knew me and I could fit anywhere. For a long time, I didn't even realize that it was odd, or that it wasn't like that for everyone, but it had always been easy for me to just slot my way into any group of people that I was around. I suppose I knew there was a hierarchy, but I didn't feel it when I interacted with people, and life was more fun that way.