Aftertaste, noun
Af·ter·taste
: persistence of a sensation (as of flavor or an emotion) after the stimulating agent or experience has gone
There was once a time she was running away from her life, from people, from everything and everyone; running a...
Oops! This image does not follow our content guidelines. To continue publishing, please remove it or upload a different image.
Alexander's POV
Everything is shit.
I can't sleep. I can hardly eat anything. I was tossing in the bed and I just decided to get up and go sit in the living room so I wouldn't wake Gabrielle up. She needs her rest.
I sit on the edge of the couch with my arms on my thighs, my head bowed down. Just sitting in the silence. Thinking.
These past days have been wild. The fucking race at Friday. The pictures. Drugs. And Gabrielle's concern she might be pregnant. I swear to God, my whole world stopped when I learned that there's a possibility I could be a father. And a realisation hit me that I'd easily get an award for being the shittiest father that exists. And it also made me realise that I don't want that. I don't want to be a shitty father.
And all those realisations lead me to a new realisation that I still have so much unresolved shit going on inside me that I am unintentionally making shitty decisions and potentially hurt everyone closest to me; Gabrielle the most, but not only her.
I act irrationally sometimes just because I have this fucking hole inside of me that I want to fill. And I fill it so I do stupid shit that makes other people mad. I can't go all psychological because I have zero ideas of why I love to fuck things up for everyone. And that's why I don't know how to stop doing that.
I'm not stupid, though. Gabrielle might be an angel, a saint of all saints, but there is only so much shit she can take from me. There are only so many mistakes she will decide to forgive me for. I know she has her limit. I also know that my foolishness could make her go so far that she'd leave me; and when she did, she wouldn't come back. That's the person she is. She's forgiving; too forgiving sometimes – which I can be lucky about – but when you cross a line with her, that's it. You're on your own.
That's been eating me alive since Friday. I didn't do drugs on Friday, it's been sometimes since I took them and it was only because I was in a too fucked up state of mind to say no, but, hell, Gabrielle is right. If I wasn't careful, I could go to jail for that. Not only that, but I could lose her. And that's so much worse than being locked up.
"What are you doing here in the dark?"
My head lifts to where Gabrielle's sweet, quiet voice came from. I can't see her, but I see the outline of her body, standing by the couch. She's nervously playing with the hem of her shirt. "You should be sleeping," I tell her, my voice rough and low, my throat dry.
"So should you. I don't sleep that well when you're not in bed with me," she admits and sits down beside me, putting some distance between us and that kills me. Wrecks me.
