We were
on the bed, and Asher was 3 seconds away from dozing off when I realized this
night marked the end of a full year of not having seen Chance. My last
encounter with him happened late-April ’14 in the parking lot of the Lenox
shopping mall at 10pm—not difficult to fill in the tawdry blanks. Since then, I
had cut off contact with him for good and struggled for the rest of the year to
not think of him every day as my emotional interior mended itself bit by bit. An
entire year without setbacks or reneging. I didn’t text him, call him, or try
to contact him in the obscenely numerous ways I could have through social
media. I didn’t look him up to see the latest updates in his life either. All I
had to myself were a very mixed bag of memories.
Half of
them were filthy and exhilarating; the other half was one long lesson in
manipulation and neglect. When I wasn’t over-the-moon happy, I was miserable,
waiting for him to reply to my messages and photos, pretending to hate him,
vowing to end things and not, arguing with him and feeling the sting when he’d
ignore me afterward for days, beating myself over what I’d *maybe* said or done
to upset him. It was a miserable year with a wretched human being for whom I had
very strong feelings. The ordeal was over though. I would never have to make
feeble excuses for his toxic behavior again, never put myself through the
wringer for someone who couldn’t give half a shit about me, never look at him
and wonder what went on inside that abusive mind. It was all fucking over.
The finality
of it hit me then.
I silently
cried while staring up at the ceiling as the tears slid down the sides of my
face and onto the sheets.
Asher
heard me sniff too loudly, and at seeing my face, a deep line appeared between his brows. He didn't look shocked. “What’s wrong?” He was already half-asleep.
I
sighed. “It’s been a whole year since I ended it with Chance.”
He only
nodded and rubbed a tear off my cheek. I leaned into his hand, closing my eyes.
Maybe this entire set-up—talking about an ex like you still miss him while in
bed with your current partner—would have felt wrong with anyone else. The next
words slipped out without warning.
“Do you
like me the same way I like you?” The question hung in the air. I cringed at
the neediness in my voice. Was it so bad, craving a bit of certainty with the
people you care about?
“I do,”
he rasped softly.
“The
exact same way?”
“Exact
same way,” he repeated.
I
blinked back more tears. My “okay” came out like a sigh.
The
night was late by then, and the moment briskly segued into dressing ourselves
and me getting in my car for the hour-drive home. I didn’t think much of that
night at the time, figured we had an intense moment and that would be that.
Thinking back on this months later though, I think this is when something in
our relationship shifted—a subtle deepening of how we relate to each other,
laying the groundwork for what I told him at the end of the summer.
This is
probably when I knew, deep down, that I love him.