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Initially, I had come in here to make up. I thought maybe we should clear the air. But he wasn’t leaving me much room to be rational.
So I wasn’t.
“Why did you put something else over me when you had already made a commitment?” My words came out sharper than I intended, but I couldn’t help it. The hurt was too raw, too real.
“Olivia, I told you. It was a spur of the moment thing.” His eyes narrowed, and I could see the struggle within him.
“Then you should have turned it down!!” I shot back, my hands trembling with barely contained fury. “I thought I meant something to you!!”
“You think you don’t? Really?” His voice rose, and I could hear the anger bubbling beneath the surface. “You’re going to discard everything I said now?”
“What choice do I have?” I felt the heat rising in my cheeks. “I wanted to believe you—until you blindsided me!”
“Blindsided you?” he scoffed, his eyes flashing with a mix of hurt and fury. “You think this was easy for me? You think I haven’t been agonizing over this decision since that night?”
“Then why the hell didn’t you just talk to me about it?” I demanded, my voice cracking as tears threatened to spill from my eyes.
“Because I knew you wouldn’t understand!” he shouted, his own frustration finally boiling over. “You never do! You think you know what’s best, but sometimes you don’t, Olivia!”
“Excuse me?” My vision blurred momentarily with unshed tears, but I refused to let them fall. Not now. Not when there was still so much left to say. “I’ve always supported you, Alexander. But I deserve to come first! If you don’t think so, then I didn’t mean to you what you did to me.”
I watched as Alexander’s chest heaved with each labored breath, his eyes ablaze with a mix of anger and vulnerability.
“Olivia,” he started, but I didn’t let him finish. The raw ache of emotion inside me demanded to be heard, and I refused to let it be silenced any longer.
“Look, Alexander,” I gritted out, my voice trembling. “We can keep working together. That’s fine.” I sucked in a deep breath. “We’ve argued before. But this… this feels different.”
“Maybe it is different!” he shot back, his words cutting like shards of glass. “Maybe it’s time we both face the fact that we can’t keep pretending everything is fine when it’s not!”
“Is that what you think we’re doing? Pretending?” My words were bitter, laced with all the hurt and disappointment that had festered inside me for far too long. “I thought we were fighting for something real here, Alexander. Something worth saving.”
“Then why didn’t you fight for me?” His question hung heavy in the air, thick with accusation. “Why didn’t you fight for us? You turned around and walked away the first second you saw a reason to. You didn’t try to understand. You didn’t give me a chance to make it up to you. You just left!”
My breath caught in my throat. “I fought for you…” I gritted my teeth as I started to waver. “But you were the one that fucked this up.”
It felt wrong as I said it. I had a lot of doubts. I was looking for a reason not to open myself up to him. I was hurt, and rightfully so, but I might have clung to it a little too hard.
“Did it ever occur to you that maybe I was fighting too, Olivia?” His voice strained, desperation seeping into every syllable. “Fighting to keep myself from falling apart while I tried to hold us together?”
“Then why didn’t you let me help you?” My vision blurred momentarily as the tears threatened to spill over once more, and suddenly I found myself at a loss for words. “Why didn’t you trust me enough to let me in?”
“Because I was afraid!” he admitted, his voice breaking. “Afraid that if you saw just how broken I really was, you’d finally walk away and leave me with nothing.”
And there it was. Like a slap in the face. We both had walls up the entire time.
“Then you should have let me in, Alexander,” my voice was barely audible through the maelstrom of emotions that now enveloped me, “That’s what you do when you care about someone. If you ever wanted us to work, you had to let me in.”
But I knew I didn’t let him in either. Neither of us were really trying. We physically wanted each other, but beyond that? I didn’t think either of us knew how to let someone in.
And I wasn’t going to hurt myself again trying with someone I knew couldn’t.
“Then let me now–”“
“No!” I turned away before he could see the tears threatening to fall. I moved toward the door, grasping the doorknob. “The damage is done.”
“Olivia, don’t…” The desperation in his voice caught me off guard, but I couldn’t allow myself to be swayed by it. Not now, when the cost of losing myself in him had never been higher.
“Goodbye, Alexander.” My voice trembled as I choked out the words, a silent cry for help that he seemed unable, or unwilling, to hear. With every ounce of strength I had left, I turned on my heel and stormed away from the man who once held my heart so tenderly within his grasp.
