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Challenging me.
My finger kept tapping. My gut kept wanting. The reservations in my mind kept on dancing. Reminding me of the last time I’d believed I’d wanted someone this much. Because I had. I had wanted someone with every scrap of breath in me. I’d wanted someone enough to sacrifice the regular road of my life for, no matter what the consequences.
The memories were vivid. Powerful. Hungry to remind me all over again what I’d learned about such wants in this lifetime once already. What I’d learned from thinking my future was with a girl who seemed to want me with as much vigour and strength as I wanted her. Who was enough to put everything on the line for, only to discover I was wrong.
I was so fucking wrong with her.
The pang from that betrayal and disappointment was still vivid enough to push me back in my seat with my fingers clear of the mouse button.
Was Paige Emmerson really different? Different from Amelia George? Would she hang me up and out to dry when the stakes were high enough to break me? When a different out came along that looked oh so grand? When she thought the grass was greener in another field somewhere?
Because she would think that one day. It was inevitable, with or without people out to cripple your dreams and prove you wrong. Someday the grass would always seem greener. That’s life. Life, the universe and tempestuous human emotion.
Amelia George had. She’d snatched after the dangling carrot without giving two shits for my tearing heart as I watched her cast me aside, leaving me to bleed in the aftermath while my father laughed at my stupidity.
Learn from this, son. Learn early enough to save yourself the road of heartache. Women aren’t worth it. They never are.
Your mother certainly wasn’t.
The venom in his voice as he talked about my mother was enough to convince me he’d gone through a fair round of heartache himself when the stakes were high. That’s all I knew about it. All I’d ever come to know about it.
I couldn’t remember my mother, not even glimpses of her, and neither could Eric. There was only us and our father as we grew up. The three of us and the housekeeping staff at various sites across the country. Well, that and the string of pretty young girls who’d drifted down from his bedroom on the walk of shame early most weekend mornings.
I was barely more than a toddler when I’d realised it was pointless trying to engage with anyone on their way out of our home, even if their smiles were bright and their arms were open. They never came again.
I guess that’s why Amelia George was the first female soul who ever really captured me.
It was relatively late in my youth when we first crossed paths. I was nineteen when I first met her, and she was just a few months younger. I thought I was a world savvy man and not a boy when I first ran into her on our staircase one summer and her beauty blew me away.
I thought I knew about girls and cavorting and how to give a good fuck. I also thought that was all that would ever really matter.
Neither Eric or I had been raised to be particularly social. My father was all handshakes and professional contact, but rarely about genuine friendship. Eric and I had had friends at school, but they were guys to compete with and share sports news. We hadn’t had friends of the opposite sex. I didn’t have any real knowledge of girls as genuine individuals. We’d been to boarding school, boys only. We’d been motherless and pushed hard to follow our family name through the world of business and political success. It had largely served me just fine. I’d had the same meaningless conquests of pretty girls in back alleys and park shadows as plenty of my school friend associates, but never any illusion that any of them meant anything.
Until her.
The timid young maid who’d crossed my path back at home during a particularly busy summer politics campaign that saw our father out on the road with Drake through weeks on end.
Eric was on some college social study, and the house was just me. Me and her. At least she was the one I noticed.
I guess it was her smile I noticed first.
Her laugh when I finally managed to engage her in conversation.
The way she was so scared to speak with me, let alone respond to any advances.
The way she evaded me. The way she spoke and thought and acted like an individual soul without any of the upper class glamour.
She was creative. Poetry was her passion. She’d quote it throughout our burgeoning friendship and it would set my world alight. I was scared to push us onto other territory, scared to lose the connection to such an amazing creature as the one who set me on fire.
