After You... (1st Draft)

Chapter 2 - Door 28, Apartment D

   

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                                     Chapter Two – Door 28, Apartment D

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"He's going to try to call you. Chances are when you stop calling him, when you cut him off, when you act like you've moved on as he has, he'll start to wonder about you, gradually start thinking more about you. Eventually he'll bring you up casually among mutual friends to see what you're up to, if you're seeing anyone, how things are. He'll start to wonder why you've stopped calling him, why you've stopped giving him attention, making him feel important. And then guess what? He'll call you."

That's what Kibbie had said to me.

Her words hung high over me like an expected cloud in winter. And this cloud was just as predictable according to my flatmate. It was apparently so very obvious, so very foreseeable. Even back then she'd seen it coming. And considering my circumstances right now and what just happened at lunchtime, of course she was right. She was irritatingly almost always right.

It was all because I never called him back or begged him to come back. That's what Kibbie would have you believe. All because I'd let him go. I didn't troll-cry in his face. I was "dignified". I'll admit I was proud of myself for that.

But, well, he'd clearly been wondering about me. You wouldn't contact someone out of the blue if you weren't. My absence made him want to call me. He was clearly curious. It seemed that distance and getting blanked for so long that I basically gave him nothing but air made him realise his feelings for me were stronger than he thought. Or so he'd have me believe. I gave him distance, he gave me attention.

At the time Kibbie had said that to me, it was around the time I'd found it difficult to let go, when I couldn't bring myself to push him clear from my life. The no-contact thing...I strongly suspected she'd played this game before, as if she'd played and won at ever turn of hand and was now handing me her winning rule-book.

At the time I knew why she'd said it but I went along with it anyway. What she said was supposed to be some kind of lightening bolt. She worded it as if to tell me that if I wanted him back, that was how I would get him back. All I had to do was ignore him. Act like he was of no significance. Act towards him as he'd acted towards me. Possibly even play the hard-to-get card.

She'd said it because she knew that I couldn't go through with the cut-off, and the only way I would do it would be to hold on to the belief that I was doing all of this to get him back. It would somehow spur me on to cut him out because then I'd have a purpose, an intention, a goal. Pathetically though, that was my goal. I know, how sad am I? But it was the push I needed to make it happen, though I didn't believe Kibbie ever had the getting-back-together intention on her mind. She didn't like Darius. There was no way she wanted me to get back with him.

But really, I had to totally prepare myself for the very real possibility that he would never come back to me. That it didn't matter what I did or didn't do, how long I kept away from the phone, from all my social networking, he would never return.

I had to prepare myself for the possibility that love had found him now. That that love came in the shape of a pretty/plain brunette named Lovelock. That I may not have been the love of his life afterall, and that he met his love too late. After me. That sometimes the real love of your life appears after you thought you'd found them.

Kibbie was ever the girl of wisdom, because when she said he'd call me, well...she was right.

Darius had called me soon after I left him at Sula's.