After.

Regretfully lying naked, she clung to him, wrapping one arm around his waist and the other up under his head. The skin of their bodies, which was giving off a cool blue shine as it reflected the street lights fighting their way through the crack in the curtains, stuck with sweat. Although she pulled herself tightly to him, something that would have been out of character for her a year earlier; he simply hung one arm loosely around her bare shoulders and stared coldly away. Although she stared up at his face, hungry to catch his gaze, it never happened. She could feel his leg move slightly next to hers and feel him start to grow restless. Eager to climb out of the bed, to get away from what they had become, he made his excuses and pushed her arms away so he could sit up. Watching him pull his shirt on over his head she let herself fall backwards across the bed, and bit her lip sharply to stop any sign of the hopelessness she felt being exposed.

‘Suze, get up,’ he barked at her, ‘get up and get dressed. You need to go.’

She sat up slowly and dragged her body across the sheets to the edge of the bed where she reluctantly gathered her things. She remembered a time when she would say she had to go and he would beg for five more minutes, pulling her back down beside him. A time when he would whisper to her while they made love, a time when they made love and didn’t just fuck, a time when he didn’t simply manoeuvre her body into positions and carry on without a sound. It seemed the more Suze begged for him to show that side of him again, the more it fell from her grasp while she clawed desperately after it.

Fully dressed now, he stood up and turned to the door,

‘I’ll be waiting downstairs, hurry up’.

‘Andy,’ he turned towards her, not willing to hide his annoyance at her taking up more of his time, ‘can’t you sit here while I get dressed?’

He shook his head and fell heavily upon the bed next to her, sighing at how inconvenienced he felt. Because it was torture just to be with her now.

And that’s when she grew angry, silently, it grew and welled within her while she pulled the tights up over her calf. She was beaten down. She was bruised and broken; she was weak and had become everything she hated. She was mad, but if even a word was set free from her lips she knew he would walk out, he wouldn’t listen; because that was the arrogance she was in love with. Maybe if she could just talk to him, she could try and fix it all, and yet she drowned in her own cowardice as it was just better to feel him sitting next to her than risk him leaving her side, no matter how much integrity she lost; No matter how she loathed herself for loving him. Because the truth was, she had lied when she said she believed him every time he told her he loved her or talked about their lives together. Yet she had let herself give up and change everything. She wasn’t angry at him anymore for changing so much, for becoming so cold. She was angry at herself.

The truth was, she was tired of sharing a bed every night with the stranger who was herself. She was sick of giving love to somebody who had spent a few months making her feel like everything to suddenly let her fall and make her feel so small, because the ones we love have the power. Whether you believe you’re strong or not, in the face of cruel love, you become weak and you have nothing. She was just very disillusioned with how she had become for somebody who knew nothing of what it is to burn.