A Hundred Ways to Break a Heart

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Summary: She wasn’t stupid, she knew that much, but somehow she let him break her heart anyway… over and over again, no less. It all begged the answer to one question: why couldn’t she just let go already? Her head wanted to, so why wouldn’t her heart let her?

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Chapter I: Prologue

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You know that moment… that penultimate moment when you realize that everything around you is just about to crash and burn, the walls are going to just collapse all around you?

Well it’s a bitch… so much so that it even drives my usually level-headed self to cursing. It’s a bitch and it even hurts like one is all I can say in regards to it…

I had to sit there, watching him watching her as if she were the savior he’d been waiting for all of his life, the one that would rescue him from this perpetually hellish reality that had been thrust upon him. My heart broke at the realization that he’d never looked at me like that, he’d never wanted me like that. My heart was torn to pieces with the epiphany that I had always looked at him as if he was that for me, but he had never once spared me even such a glance. I had wasted years on a man who forgot me in a second.

“You still love her, don’t you?” I finally got up the courage to ask, dreading the answer that I just knew would come, but still unable to stop myself from uttering the words that had been plaguing my mind since the second I first noted him staring at her.

His head snapped up in surprise and he discretely tightened his grip on the plastic cup, but I noticed it nonetheless… I always did with him. Every little detail was permanently ingrained in my memory, whether I liked it or not—and at that specific moment in time, I abhorred it. Ignorance is bliss, after all.

“Who?” he asked, feigning ignorance, and I hated him for it, for disrespecting me so much by doing that, pulling that act with me of all people. Damn bastard.

I swallowed the quickly growing lump in my throat and tried to ignore how my eyes were beginning to burn as the wells filled with that damning and embarrassing liquid that I would hold back if it was the last thing I ever did. “You know,” I answered knowingly with a notable undertone of resentment.

He gritted his teeth, his jaw tightening with the action. “Let’s-”

“No,” I stopped him, my voice holding a noticeable tinge of anger no matter how controlled my tone may have been, no matter how restrained. “Don’t fuck with me now,” I ordered, letting out a rare curse, an allowance that he immediately noticed as his expression turned to one of shock. “Don’t of this to me, not anymore, Carter… just tell me the truth for once because, obviously, everything up till this point has been a lie… I’m not some damn idiot; I can see it, so… so just respect me enough to tell me the truth for once.”

He winced, obviously regretting his decision to ever bring me with him and I hated him for that, the fact that he so clearly wished he had prolonged this, continued hiding this truth from me hurt. It was, after all, about time I finally knew the truth and him clearly wishing he could have delayed this killed me.

Had he always been such a selfish bastard? How had I been so blind for so long?

He sighed, raising a hand to pinch the bridge of his nose as he closed his eyes. He stood there like that for what felt like ages, but most likely, I would later admit to myself, was only a minute or so.

Finally, though, he opened his mouth and “yes” was his throaty reply.

And at that moment I heard my heart break, I heard it fall to pieces as I ran out of that hotel ballroom in tears, and without anyone calling after me no less.