𝐒𝐄𝐌𝐏𝐈𝐓𝐄𝐑𝐍𝐀𝐋 || 𝐆𝐈𝐑𝐋 𝐂𝐑𝐔𝐒𝐇

14.2 | ONE LAST TIME

【 FOURTEEN 】
➤ ONE LAST TIME

❝you and i will always be
unfinished business.❞

oOo

THE SIGH I LET OUT WAS NEITHER of sadness, nor of relief. It was entwined somewhere in between both, though I couldn't place which side of the scale was tipping.

Some days, I was William Wordsworth, stringing poetry together with every emotion, be it sad or happy. Other days, I was Hippocrates, saving the world in a white coat and Converse. Most days, however, I was Atlas, with the weight of the world forever hanging upon my shoulders, the ghost of a destiny I had long since chosen to ignore. 

With a single tap, my fingers rested on the side of my decadent flute of champagne, daring not to let myself think, in fear that my thoughts would wander to her again. 

Every night, I either kept myself busy staring at my pager, praying for it to go off so I would not have to be left alone with my thoughts. And on the nights such as this, when I wasn't on call, I would usually drown myself in alcohol until I could barely remember her name. 

Oh, I had seen it all. The photographs she put up regularly on her Instagram, that I had no heart to unfollow when I broke up with her almost a decade ago. The gorgeous landscapes, and her angelic profile, accompanied, of course, by him. 

Aillard, was the name my brain coughed up. Aillard and [c/n] James, the perfectly Instagrammable couple. The love of her life, as she had referred to him in multiple posts, and her husband for nearly two years now. 

I took another swig of champagne, my heart aching at the mere memory of her and that rascal. Oh, how I wished I could simply  bleach those images out of my brain! To know she was not mine, was a little better than knowing she belonged to another man. 

A sudden buzzing rose me from my drunken stupor. Horror clenched at my heart as I reflexively assumed it to be my pager, but then I remembered that I had the night off. Still, I fished the device out of my pocket, and making sure it was still quiet, I reached for the phone I had angrily thrown somewhere amidst the covers.

The name scrawled across the screen sent simultaneous waves of frustration and longing through my entire body. I stared down at my phone, warring internally with myself, before I simply thrust the device far away where the distance would hopefully muffle the annoying ringtone. 

The memories of our last interaction were far too fresh in my mind for me to be able to pick up that call right now. 

Warm fingers closed around my wrist, and although this should have been something that set off alarm bells in my head, I could only pause to try and remember why those hands seemed so familiar, as if they belonged on my body, where they were.

"[y/n]," she spoke softly, but it did not fail to send butterflies coursing through my alimentary canal.  I gazed up to meet her swirling [c/e/c] eyes, not bothering to disguise the pain and heartbreak written over my face.

"What?" I asked finally, crippled by exhaustion, and tired of pretending. Her arms wound around me stealthily, reflexively drawing me closer to her as we sank into the darkest corners. Every inch of my conscience was going berserk, screaming into my mind, "THIS IS WRONG!" 

I made the terrible mistake of ignoring it. 

"I missed you," she smiled dazzlingly. I stared into her soul, laid out for me in her lovestruck eyes, silently trying to judge whether she was gifting me lies as she had done all those years ago.