My Boyfriend The Assassin: HIS

How to tell her?

June 26th - Prague

Every time I call her, I'm out of breath, and I'm starting to worry that she might suspect something. 

I always wanted to tell her.

That is to say, I'd always intended to tell her. It's just hard,  you know? It doesn't necessarily come up in conversation. You're interested, and then you're seeing each other, and then you're dating, and then it's a proper relationship. And when you do the things that I do, you can hardly be honest with your family about your job, let alone your girlfriend.

Still, I'd meant to tell her.

She was special. She was different, and I didn't want to keep it from her.

In my line of work,  you meet a lot of women.

I can't really explain why. Even when you can't tell them what you do, you still seem to give off this air of...I don't know...peril? Danger? Maybe it's the lingering musk of sweat, gunpowder, and blood. The scent that hangs around in the back of your sinuses,  no matter how long you spend trying to scrub it from your skin.

Somehow women sense it. Somehow they flock to you, exactly like moths to a flame: delicate things drawn to destruction. Before she'd come along, I'd had a long line of women in my life. Rarely had any one of them ever amounted to something as significant as a girlfriend.

That was my fault. If this line of work helps to attract women to the men who do it; it has a comparable ability to distance those same men from those women. I'd been doing this for a while, and I'd gotten pretty good at it, but it was a fact that every time I walked out my door in the morning, I did so not expecting to come back at the end of the day.

When you come to that kind of realization—that you are prepetually living on borrowed time—I like to think that someone with any shred of courtesy or decency takes on a defensive distance. What eventually came across as distraction or disinterested assholedom to the women I met was a carefully constructed division on my end. I always went into these things hoping that each one would be different: that maybe I'd meet a woman who could scare me straight: drag me out of my line of work and prompt me to become an accountant.

But it never worked out that way. I'd scare them away, or I'd wear them down with my distance, or they would eventually just stop calling. I'd know what was going on; I'd see all the signs I'd seen before; I'd accept it as my own fault, and I'd just move on.

Then there was her. Her...she was different. For some reason I could sense that it wasn't the peril she picked up on. She was interested in me—the real me, which I could barely place anymore. She seemed to be able to spot it through the haze of what I did.

So I wanted to tell her. Truly and honestly so.

How does one go about doing that? When is the opportune time in a relationship to drop that particularly incendiary bomb?

"Honey. I kill people for a living."

-----------------------------

This is a collaborative story. @DanielleThe and I had this crazy idea to write the same story from two distinct view points, with me taking the male side, and her taking the female side. Check her story "My Boyfriend The Assassin: HERS" to make sure you're getting the full picture.

This is a bit of a departure from my previous Wattpad Wednesday stories. This one's being written on a Thursday in honour of some very special writer guests who are joining us at Wattpad HQ for our Office Warming Party for our new space. We wanted to have the chance to write with some of our most successful writers, so we moved Wattpad Wednesday to Thursday. Also, the whole collaborative thing, of course, which we're really hoping we can keep up. This chapter has been a little more serious, but I promise I'll be having a lot more fun with this very very soon!