Your Mark on Me

One Hour (part 2)

"What?"

"What you just heard."

I quickly glanced around. My house was about twenty minutes away now. I could have easily taken a bus from nearby - the L2, to Forrest Hills, I thought, dumbly, as if that was what mattered just then. Mark's fingers started tapping impatiently on the edge of the steering wheel.

"I haven't got all day. There's a flight I need to catch."

I felt ridiculous, pathetic and incredibly dumb. Again. I should have never gone after him. When the hell was I going to learn? It was the same thing, every single time. The same rejection. The same bitter taste in my mouth. The same feeling of unworthiness, of not being enough. And it wasn't right. Just because he didn't want me, it didn't really mean I was nothing, or that no one else wanted me.

And yet, that's how I felt.

There were tears about to spring out, and a big lump in my throat, and more than anything, hate. Intense, ugly hate. He didn't even have the courtesy to look me in the eye as I was leaving. My hands were shaking when I undid the seatbelt. I fiddled with it way more than I should have needed to; I must have been in a really deranged state, because I kept pulling it instead of pressing the button, and as I pulled and jerked, getting more and more frustrated, Mark kept staring straight ahead, not saying anything, just tapping his fingers, until I finally managed to undo the seat belt and got out.

"Well, fuck you, Mark." Before I knew it, I was shouting. "Fuck you and your mature decisions! I hate you! I wish I never met you."

I slammed the car door as hard as I could.

Shaking, I walked away briskly, trying hard to keep my legs steady, fighting the urge to turn and look back. There were noises around and people walking past, staring at me, and it was already warmer outside than it was in the air-conditioned car, and it smelled of grilled cheese and falafel from a fast-food place nearby, and there were other cars whooshing past on the street, and I felt like floating, in a dream. A bad dream. A dream in which I said all the wrong things.

There was an annoying bell sound, which increased in loudness in the span of seconds; I barely had time to jump back and avoid the collision. I absentmindedly watched the bike get smaller as it rolled further along the lane and heard the cussing of the man riding it.

Then, I felt my arm being grabbed.

I turned around. Mark's usually intense, dominant gaze was conflicted, his face pale, his lips pressed together in a thin, sober line.

"What more do you want from me?" I whimpered. "Let me go."

"Not like this. Not just yet."

"Then when? In twenty minutes? When you have to go catch your flight?"

"Whenever you've calmed down and you're in a frame of mind in which I can trust you to walk on the street without doing something stupid."

I laughed, a mad laughter of frustration. "Yeah, like you give a shit about me."

"I do. I do care, more than I let out. I'm trying really hard here, you know? Trying to do the right thing."

"The right thing?"

God, he was stubborn. There were two sides to it, and he was deliberately choosing to only see the one. It was so frustrating and there were so many conflicting emotions in me, that, before I knew it, I put them all on the inside of my palm and slapped them loudly and firmly on his cheek.

Mark ran his fingers over the place where I had slapped him without looking surprised at all, or mad. Instead, he pulled my arm and swayed me towards him. While I fought, my hands clenched into fists hammering on his chest with all the anger and frustration accumulated over time, he held me tight without moving a muscle, until my hits relented and lost their intensity and then stopped completely and I became a limp body leaning against him.