Falling For Casual

Chapter 19

I couldn't decide whether loving him was enough for everything he was doing. Or, I guess, everything he really wasn't. I had to come to terms with who the guy I claimed to be my own was. Who he truly presented himself as outside of the courting and trying to win my affection. Was he really just a guy? Just someone who wanted me because he liked the idea of me more than he did me?

    I struggled every day trying to figure out if I should ask him what he genuinely liked about me. I didn't want the answer to be something that would turn my stomach. After the months of swallowing down all the hurt and betrayal I'd felt that night when we had our first real argument, I didn't want him to say anything else that would hit a nerve. I wouldn't be able to take it. I wouldn't come back from it this time.

   So, as the days together turned into months of our relationship, the chill in the air deepening and the leaves changing, Texas and I remained the same. The weather changed but we kept still. Frozen almost. I think it was because I couldn't move on. Not from him, but from the hurt I'd felt all that time ago.

   In reality, I should've taken that one night and let it be our last. I wasn't so enamored with him that I was stuck, and I wasn't so in love with him that I couldn't have just walked away. But something in me wouldn't let him go. Sometimes, when I stared at him from across the table while we worked on our own things, I pondered the thought that maybe I was afraid to ask him what he liked about me because I didn't truly know what I liked about him. Was the deep-rooted fear that he only liked me as a girlfriend because that's what I felt about him? That I just liked the title of having a boyfriend and didn't want to lose that?

    He was my first, after all. Boyfriend. Male partner in the sexual aspect. The first one who was actually taller than me, so I felt smaller than him in every way. But he was also my first in a lot of the negative ways. First person I couldn't argue with because he would over explain his answers, which would frustrate me to no end. The first person who solely reminded me of my mother in that regard. The first person who wouldn't let things go no matter how much it made sense to.

   With all those bad things piling up, I couldn't justify being with him anymore. Yet here I was at his place, cuddled up in matching pajamas that I'd bought for us. He wasn't all bad, but God, when he was bad, he was fucking awful.

   I had started writing in a journal for him. Someplace I could put the words I couldn't say to him somewhere. Like letters that he would never see. It was sort of freeing. I jotted down every truth, every lie I had to come clean from, every hateful but also loving word I couldn't bring myself to say to his face.

   Did it help? Not really. The frustration with him was still there, and he couldn't really know how to fix things when I wasn't opening my mouth to tell him what to actually fix. But it was also better than having all these thoughts in my head. The lack of trust I now held for him, the disgust with the actions that didn't back up the things he was saying he was going to do for me. All of it was poured into that book.

   "Am I ever going to read it?" he asked one night while I laid my head on his chest, listening to the slow beating of his heart.

   "Absolutely not," I told him. There was no way in hell I was going to air myself out like that to him. Especially when things were going so well currently.

   My stomach twisted at the thought of him reading one thing in particular. The endless pages and smudged ink behind the words that held one truth I knew would hurt him the most. One that many men in his situation would look at me with disbelief.

   He hadn't made me in orgasm in months.

   I'd been faking it with him since after the time in the park. Every moan, every tremble of my body against him, was all performance. Trying to let it go and not allow it to fester into resentment was harder than I'd thought it was going to be. It felt as though every chance he'd been given to try to make me reach that point was for nothing. He couldn't even come close. There was no pleasure in his kiss, no shiver of euphoria from his tongue caressing in between my thighs.