Page 46 of Goalie interference

It felt awful.

Silence was somehow so much louder than yelling.

All I wanted was to hear him argue with me–I never thought I'd actually be hoping he’d argue, but I would have even settled for a fuck off or something when I took his jacket when we walked in the door.

Anything was better than acting like I was invisible.

“Ash,” I tried one more time, stopping him from dragging himself to our bathroom to brush his teeth before bed. “Can we just–”

“Breaking that promise, too?” he asked quietly, blinking lifelessly at me until I let his arm go.

He brushed by me again, shutting our bathroom door calmly.

He wasn’t angry anymore.

He was just hurt now.

Chapter 23

Ash

I didn’t want to be here.

That was a tough realization to come to–this had been the only place I wanted to be for months now. I’d wanted to be here every day, living my life alongside Thayer and the comfort he used to drown me in.

Now it was cold here.

His bed was cold.

Thayer gave me space when I was out of the bathroom, taking longer than needed to brush my teeth because I couldn’t go out there with obvious signs I’d just been crying. I couldn't show him how sad I was–hurt, yes, upset, sure, but sad.

It was like I was watching our breakup happen in slow motion, only I was still in it. I was still in the part where we tried to salvage this, only to find out in a week that it was a Band-Aid on a bullet hole.

You didn’t come back from broken trust in a normal relationship, but definitely not one like ours. Ours needed a lot more trust than a vanilla one…and I didn’t see myself trusting him again.

So, what was left to salvage?

That logic didn’t seem to match the action of lying in his bed. I could know in my head that this was destined to fail now…

But I still craved him. I still wanted him so badly–I wanted this to be a thing we laughed about tomorrow.

So badly.

Thayer didn’t try to touch me when I got in bed, but I felt him shift, so I knew he was awake. A little part of me wanted him to try one more time, but I was glad he didn't.

I would have caved.

His bed had never felt that foreign to me, but tonight, the sheets were scratchy. The blanket wasn’t long enough, and the pillow didn’t form around my head the right way–the mattress was lumpy, and cold, and wrong.

It felt the way I would have assumed my first time in his bed would feel…not my hundredth.

And that was my last seal.

Pathetically, I turned on my side, away from Thayer, and coughed out the cry I’d been biting back since I laid down. It took that one little crack for the floodgates to open, and suddenly, I was crying into a pillow that no longer felt like mine.

“Ash, baby,” Thayer whispered, hesitantly moving closer to me and resting a large hand on my back.

It wasn’t controlling in any way, but it wasn’t comforting anymore either.