After You... (Official Edit)

Chapter 2 - Door 28, Apartment D

Chapter Two

Door 28, Apartment D

This was the start of what it meant to be gutted all the way home. The moment your hopes shouldn't have been so full in the first place and your ex might as well have said don't pin your hopes on me because I'll use that pin to burst them.

How many ways could I tell myself this was all for the best and I just needed to see it? To truly see it. Then maybe when I chuckled in this guy's face who'd just stopped me on my way out of the station to ask for a lighter I didn't have, I could laugh like I meant it.

"Course you don't smoke. Nice-looking girl like you."

Fancy having your mind so far back at Sula's that you have to pretend to see into this guy's face but can't? Like really see him. His eyes could be any colour. His smile could be crooked, or teeth stained, but I couldn't register anything other than words I made an effort to zone in on. I shook my head when the smoking thing finally sank in.

"Yeah, not any more."

The next trainload of commuters off-loaded and filed out in chaos onto the street by the time we were done talking about when I once did smoke my lungs out. Uni was a riot. And in those twenty minutes of banter I'd forced my mouth into a tug of war smile and threw my head back for laughter that didn't come from my belly, just so I could act like I was truly in this moment. Yet I glanced up past his shoulder at the time on the travel board more often than I didn't, and my smiles strained more to keep this up.

"So, how's about a number then?"

I looked into his face like I could manufacture an attraction way too quick to be real on anyone. I saw him now. His eyes were blue.

"I better get going."

"Ah, come on."

"I'm good." I backed up, he wasn't bad looking. His teeth white too. "I just got out of a-"

I'd used that line before. I just got out of a relationship. Ten months later and I still said it like it happened days ago. Going cold, I closed my coat into the center of my waist through my pockets like I could disguise myself as just physically cold. Nothing deeper than that. I backed out of there.

"Thank you though. I'm flattered."

All because I wanted to pretend I hadn't been cold under the pretend warmth for the past half hour. But this guy couldn't distract me.

Turns out feeling gutted carried itself all the way home with me. The only way I let it go was to chuck it through the keys I'd dashed as soon as I got through my front door. Had me flinging my coat in this direction and my bag in that one, so now I was re positioning things I hadn't broken through some miracle.

Turns out I could go out and spend money I didn't have on crap like this canvas sitting under my arm. Cheap blue mass-produced paintings that looked like Tracey Emin upchucked and called it the ocean. Turns out I could buy a £20 table lamp too just for the fuck its. Because I didn't know what else to do with myself if I wasn't kicking myself.

It then so turns out I could spend the rest of my day rearranging my room. Call it a make over. Call it a bad one. Call it a bad attempt at forgetting my wasted time. It involved binge-eating gummy sweets while pontificating on the best place to put this one framed blue canvas that meant diddly squat to me. I stared so hard at it that it became that one sentence you read before realizing it's the same one you read twenty minutes ago. Going nowhere.

Once a light early evening hit, my slack-collared neighbour of five weeks with his tie loosened and flipped over one shoulder banged on my door. The prick couldn't even be bothered to put his iPhone down when he dropped off a rent letter that fell in with his post.