In Between Seasons

CHAPTER 7: Sasha's Misery

The moment she heard it, everything went black. Her hopes and faith died. The years they spent together, filled with fights and make-ups, were buried ten feet in the ground in an instant.

He didn't love her anymore. It's as simple as that, but trying to figure out how and when the falling out happened was what made everything difficult for Sasha. He stopped believing she was someone who could make him happy until the end. Sasha went upstairs and packed her things. It was almost past midnight. He was standing at the door, watching her take all that pain inside her suitcase.

As soon as she reached home, she broke down in front of her mom. She was struggling, not knowing what to do. She was so lost and was so down that it felt like she was about to get sick. Suddenly, Sasha's bones lost all their strength and her body felt like a vessel of severe pain. She didn't know if there was anything that she could do to escape this part.

"I am going to beat up his face!" Sasha's mom was so full of anger.

Sasha was crying so hard that she was having a hard time hiding her pain. "It hurts everywhere, Mom. How am I going to stop all these heartaches from crashing all at once?" She sounded so helpless, and that was the first time Sasha finally broke down into painful pieces.

"He let you leave his apartment in the middle of the night knowing you were in your mess? Where the hell did he go?"

She slept through the heartache of knowing that her life would no longer be the same. Tyler hasn't even dropped a call to ask her how she was, nor gave her a visit knowing she was completely torn up because of what she found out.

Her two friends stood beside her the next day. Jenna skipped her work so she could rush to Sasha's home. Hailey was out of town and immediately booked a ticket back home. Both of them never left the house until she fell asleep.

After a week, she decided to get up from her bed and wanted to come to Tyler's apartment so they could talk about the chances of trying once again. She promised herself that she would calm down and she would try to listen to him. She swore she would not cry and would try to face him with a braver heart.

The sun was almost setting and she knew she was waiting for nothing outside their office. She came into sight, and he was holding the hand of the same woman she saw in the café.

It was the greatest wave of ache she had ever been through. After all the years she protected herself from having the same fate as her mom, she ended up suffering the same way again. Perhaps it was even worse.

"Tyler. Can we talk?" Sasha approached out of desperation.

"What are you doing here, Sasha? I told you I don't want any trouble."

"I just want clarity."

"I already told you everything. What do you want?"

"Leave us alone," the woman intervened. Sasha gave her the sharpest stare. Just as much as she wanted to drag her out, she knew.

"You leave us alone. You're the one who came into the picture and took him away from me. We were happy. We were enough. Not until the day you put yourself in the middle of our picture." She was fuming from anger that her voice was too loud and that she was turning red.

"Just let us go with peace, Sasha. Now is not yet the time to talk. You're still mad." Tyler, shameless as he was, tried to shield his other woman.

"You gave me so many reasons to be mad, Tyler. You told me you would never turn out to be like my dad, only to find out you were worse than him."

"Here you are again, bringing back what your dad did to you! I am so sick of it! Call me worse. For six years, I made you happy. I never skipped a day! I stood beside you even on days when your sadness was too much for me to bear. You hurt me by hurting yourself. I wanted to believe that I still love you, but you can't force a heart to beat the same as if it was not tired. I am tired of us, Sasha. I am sick of you. I tried to prove to you that I should be the perfect one. I am tired and Courtney was here to make me feel like there's still life other than your misery. She's here giving me the attention that I never got from you. She's showing me so many reasons to save myself from you. I can't stay in love with someone who always recalls the heartbreak that her father gave her. Courtney and I are engaged. I am sorry, but you need to go on with your life without me. I am not what you need."

"Please, Tyler," Sasha, in her wishful thinking, pleaded, as though there was no pride left in her. "Let's start again. I am willing to begin again and I want us to forget this chapter. We will forget her. We will forget everything I saw and everything I heard. I promise, you will never hear me bring this thing to the top of the table. Come back to me. Forget her. Just come back to me."

"I should've done that, but how about me, Sasha? Should I stay because that's the thing that makes you happy? But what if your happiness is my sadness? There's nothing we could do to save what was already damaged. I ruined you and you ruined me as well, without you knowing it. I wanted to believe you were the one I needed, but I was wrong. I am sorry, Sasha. You can change my mind, but never my heart, and you know I will always follow what my heart wanted me to do. It wants Courtney now. Only Courtney."

It was their last conversation and confrontation. They walked away, leaving Sasha perplexed and wrecked for the second time around. She didn't cry. She never shed even just a single tear. Maybe because she was already dry and the pain was just too cliché.

Months passed and there was never a day that Sasha stopped thinking about him. Months became years and her wounds remained as wounds instead of scars, dug deeper by the memories she should have buried alive. Sasha wanted to replace the hurt with anger, but she missed who she was when she was with him. He made her a different person when she first met him, and now he put her back in this dark room filled with ugly thoughts and screams from her broken anticipations.