Gaslighter

34

CHAPTER THIRTY-FOUR

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2022

          Every word that came out of Chase's mouth was a shot to the heart.

          Bullet after bullet, he kept aiming right at my chest and hitting me right where it hurt without even having to think twice, a harsh reminder he was the only person in the world who would ever be capable of doing so. All that trust I'd placed on him had done me no good; in fact, it was proving to have been quite the opposite. I'd given him the knowledge of how to properly crush and destroy me, believing him to not ever be capable of that much cruelty, and he'd taken the opportunity.

          I supposed that was the nature of love, though. You gave someone everything they needed, every weapon in the world to use against you, and trusted them not to do it. No one ever told you what to do when that trust was shattered, and no one ever taught you how to pick yourself back up and gather the million pieces you had been broken into. They expected you to know better from the start, like anything could ever prepare you for that sort of betrayal.

          I wanted to beg him to reconsider, but the way he refused to look me in the eye as he devastated everything in his path told me everything I needed to know and answered every single one of my unvoiced questions.

          This hadn't been a spur of the moment decision. It had been considered and reconsidered, calculated, and I truly wanted to give myself some credit by believing, with every fiber of my being, that there had been a point where he'd thought against ending things. The problem with this was that it would also implicate a moment where he'd decided I simply wasn't worth pursuing anymore, wasn't worth the effort, and that would be yet another hard blow to my self-worth I feared I wouldn't survive.

          If I were braver, if I were more self-assured, I would tell him he couldn't do this. I'd sit there and remind him of everything we'd both sacrificed for each other, of all the beautiful things awaiting us after graduation, and how all of it had to mean something. I would tell him nothing in the world would ever matter to me like he did, but that didn't mean he could do this to me, handle me this carelessly.

          I wasn't that strong. I sat there and looked up at him, dumbfounded, like all of it was happening to someone other than me—the way I'd been living my life for so damn long. I was too passive, too scared of getting emotionally involved out of fear of getting destroyed, and none of it even mattered in the end. There I was, broken and devastated and miserable in spite of how badly I'd broken and bent myself to avoid the heartbreak.

          It had always been inevitable. I'd never been worth it; he had just become well aware of something I'd known since the first day.

          "What?" I croaked out, in a voice that didn't even sound like mine.

          I realized how desperate I'd be to sit there and beg him to love me like I loved him, truly convinced this decision had hurt him as much as it was hurting me, but I'd grown comfortable in our routine. Past the disbelief and my lack of confidence in myself, past my inability to believe my luck when the man who ended up becoming the love of my life loved me back, I'd grown used to it.

          It sounded horrible to admit it, like I'd been taking him for granted all along when I knew it wasn't the case, with my self-doubt constantly threatening to ruin the beautiful thing we'd built together, but it was true. On the good days, the days I hadn't managed to sabotage and had allowed myself to truly enjoy the moment without thinking about the incoming end, when I would lose it all, I'd been perfectly content with everything. He was mine and I was his and nothing else mattered. The bubble—our private bubble—was heaven, no matter how painful.