Under My Body

chapter seventeen

            The next morning, I hadn't moved from bed. It was 3 PM, and yet I was still lying there, staring at the ceiling fan spinning lazily above me. Everything felt distant, blurred, like I was seeing last night through a fog, except for one thing—the kiss. I couldn't stop thinking about it. The way Asher's lips crashed into mine, the heat, the anger, the rawness of it. It replayed in my mind, over and over, like a broken record I couldn't turn off.

But along with the kiss, something else gnawed at me—his words. The venom in his voice when he spat them out. "Whore." The word rang in my ears, piercing through my thoughts like a knife. Out of everything he could've said, he chose that. He looked at me and called me a whore. I tried to push it aside, tried to focus on the kiss, on the way his hands gripped my waist, the feel of his body against mine. But the sting of his words refused to fade.

A tear slipped down my cheek before I realized it was there, quickly followed by another.

Why did it hurt so much?

Time had a strange way of speeding up when you were with people you liked, filling days with distractions and fleeting moments of joy. But after last night's disaster—with Jaseo's intoxicating charm pulling me one way and Asher's painful rejection slamming me into another—I needed to take a step back. A real one. I needed to breathe, to get away from everything and everyone.

Everyone meaning Asher.

Part of me felt like I was giving up on him, abandoning someone who was clearly drowning in his own struggles. But another part of me whispered that maybe I was right to step away. Did that make me a horrible person? 

But then again, why should I be the one to save him? Why did it have to be me?

Was I wrong for feeling this way? For wanting to retreat when things got hard? My mind flashed back to Derek, to the four years I spent pretending to be someone I wasn't. I thought I loved him. I did everything I could to be perfect for him, to mold myself into the woman he wanted. But all that effort only led me to hating myself more. The person I became for him was someone I didn't recognize—a stranger who despised every inch of her reflection.

Asher, with his own demons and traumas, didn't need another burden. And I... I was one. My past, my insecurities, the weight of my self-loathing—it all dragged me down, and last night, it broke through the surface.

I replayed the past moments in my head—the desperation, the way I threw myself at Jaseo, begging for affection from Derek, and asking for love from a man who clearly couldn't give it. How humiliating.

I had let my insecurities control me again, seeking validation from someone who wasn't in the right place to give it. I wanted him to love me, to crave me the way I craved him. But how could he when I didn't even love myself?

Three weeks. That's all it had been—three weeks of knowing him. What was I even doing?

Tears welled up again, and this time, I didn't try to stop them. A sob broke from my throat as I wiped my eyes with the back of my hand, but the tears kept falling. I was exhausted. Exhausted from fighting myself, from this endless battle to be perfect, to be someone worth loving. The pressure of it all—my weight, my image, my own mental baggage—it was suffocating me. Why couldn't I just have one single night where I didn't fall apart?