"Take your fast car and keep on driving..."

[delga]

Title: Choices

Summary: Because beneath the charade is the pain and inside the pain there is a reality - why don’t love me? Why don’t you want me?

Rating:? R, I guess, for language

AN: Today has been plain awful. So, to deal with that, I'm posting a story that I wrote at the beginning of the year. It's a story that most of you have read but Denz asked me to post it so I am. Non-fandom. Would apreciate feedback but is totally unecessary :)

~* *~

 

Choices
 
~* *~
 
"I'm an excellent liar, it's my job. But you stand up there with your hands over your goddamn heart like you, you, forgive me? Like you grant me absolution? Fuck you."
--leaving fingerprints by august
 
~* *~
 
She opens the door and he’s there. Somehow, she can’t bring herself to be surprised so instead she settles for something quietly resembling anger. Dressed in an oversized t-shirt that she’s kept since university, she stands aside, whisky glass dangling from her right hand.
 
He walks into her apartment, self-possessing and sure. Always so damn refined, so controlled until that moment when he looks at her and his world shatters like glass all over her floor, her skin; leaving her to pick up the shards and try to piece him back together.
 
She downs the shot and slams the door.
 
In silence, she goes back to the mini bar and refills the glass. She sets one aside for him but leaves it empty, not conceited enough to even begin to presume what he does and doesn’t like. The glass is there and she doesn’t think of moving towards filling it for him, leaving him with his choices open, just like always.
 
That isn’t why he’s here anyway.
 
It has been a long week, she thinks, long and hard, just like always and they had started as they’d always meant to go on, yelling at each other. She is still furious at him; furious at the way he sees life in monochrome; at how he is always simultaneously so confident and so absolutely wrong; at how he can’t - no, won’t - push beyond her surface to see the life within.
 
He used to push her.
 
Hard and rough, he used to push her against the door or the wall or the floor. He used to hold her there until they were either satisfied or too tired to move - whichever one came first - and she would cry, too bruised to make sense of this world, this way of life.
 
God, how she hates him.
 
She spins around to face him again and marvels at how little he can surprise her. He isn’t even looking at her. She knows that he had been; knows that he had turned away at the same time that she had turned to him. He’s staring out of the window, watching the world beneath them and the millions of lives that go by as theirs continues, coarse yet unnoticed.
 
They’d started, that morning, by running rampant over status and rank. He uses his title as his shield and she is so pissed at him sometimes that it never seems to matter. She hates his obnoxious countenance and the silent dividing line that breaks between them both. He always draws it in the ground and she always steps on it, across it even, to show him that she doesn’t care about what he thinks or what he does; doesn’t care about what he has to say. So he yells, trying to get himself heard and they move from status and rank to the fine difference between friends, lovers and enemies.
 
Of course, they are never that explicit. Out loud, the words could be battling over the rights of man over woman and the ethics of doing what they do for a living but the subtext… the subtext is the key to their anger. That’s where the party really is.
 
Because beneath the charade is the pain and inside the pain there is a reality - why don’t love me? Why don’t you want me?
 
“It’s nice, Alex,” he says, breaking the silence, hands stuffed into his pockets. “I like the view.”
 
“Fuck you, Murphy,”
 
She wants to sound harsh but the words aren’t backed up by force or spirit. She’s too tired to play this game, to fight over him again. She feels like she should hold her hands up, tell him that he’s won this round but instead she says nothing, scowling at his back.
 
Suddenly she’s struck by the unfairness of it all and she feels like asking him to leave or at least to hold her, as if it would make a difference to the way that they are and inevitably, always will be. He always manages to wear her down to the bare minimum before allowing himself to be seduced by her, as though leaving her defenceless is something of a triumph for him. Because he comes, takes and leaves in an arrogant fashion and there are never any choices left for her; he makes all the decisions.
 
During the day she can pretend to have at least some power, some control. The arguments, the frustrations: they’re all just ways of getting back at him, ways of marking him with her words and her wit and her incessant rage at his casual demeanour, wry expression and frank betrayal of her feelings. She isn’t such a fool but he speaks to her as if she always is; as if he always knows better - because, of course, he is always right.
 
And she hates it.
 
She hates being the stupid one when she’s the one with the degree and the doctorate and name and the title. She hates how he makes her feel so small sometimes that she hardly knows herself to exist. He comes often, after hours, knocking on her door, walking into her home and violating her space interminably before leaving the same way he enters, closing the door gently behind him whilst she lies tousled amongst the bed linen crying into the pillows with harsh, breaking sobs that never seem to end.
 
She remembers a time when her life was much simpler: when being happy was having free afternoon on a sunny day and being sad was moaning over stupid records and even more stupid bands. She remembers a time when being worthy was simply a matter of dress code and being worthless was not having the right pair of shoes to match the handbag. But that was all before the days when he came through her door with a hidden agenda and stood with his back turned, looking out of the window.
 
“No, really, it’s nice.”
 
Bastard.
 
He’s such a coward, she thinks, almost as frightened as she is except that he has all the power and she has none, and he can make the choices because she’ll leave them there for him to make. She’ll spend the week building up her defences only for him to walk in and mow them down in one foul sweep until all that she has is her mind, and even that she tucks away in the recesses of her body so that at least she can say that she has her own identity; her own sense of self. Because he makes her hurt and he breaks her barriers and he seems to set her world in motion, telling her what to do and when; what to say and why. She sets her clock by him and he uses her recklessly, impassioned by her silence to take her to new levels of physical desecration, mental abuse.
 
She finishes her second drink and puts down the glass. She leans against the wall, waiting for the act to run its course.
 
She can always make the choice to leave. Right now, the door is still open; the cards are still open to view if not immersed completely by her palms. Right now, she still has her bastions and barracks and miles of barbed wire and she can make him leave if only she could just tell him to do so.
 
But she can’t speak and so she doesn’t. And when he turns to her, the walls fall effortlessly under his gaze and she stands there, immobilised by his very presence. The fact that he can still turn her to stone, even though she isn’t afraid of him - never was afraid of him - makes her cringe. When he moves towards her, she switches to that state of autopilot that she has to use whenever he gets closer than a metre away from her body.
 
And as he’s pushing her against the wall, she’s retelling stories in her head of better times and better men and she’s cursing at herself for letting things get this far to begin with; letting him have the control and letting him make the choices. As he pulls away the t-shirt and throws it to the side, she’s yelling at him in her mind, protesting at this grotesque form of infidelity; in that one piece of her that’s still herself she’s hating him and hating herself and hating that this life is how she made it, how she let it become.
 
Perhaps she’s terrified that this is what she’s left with: terrified that this is all that remains - midnight meetings that stink of dispute and pity. Because she looks at him as she did the first time and she still thinks to herself that they’re from entirely different universes. She looks into those bleak eyes and can’t understand why she keeps forcing herself to return and why he bothers at all anymore.
 
As they move from the living room to the hall, she wishes that they could undo the choices they’ve made. She wishes that he doesn’t leave when it ends and that her world doesn’t seem so small when he closes the door after himself, no matter how many times she begs him not to. She wishes she could let him know that she’s angry and hurt; let him know that she feels betrayed by his callous manifestation and that when this finishes, she wants him to stay, wants him to hold her; that if she suffocates in the process, at least it will be in his arms.
 
So when he leaves - quietly, without looking back - and she’s crying painfully into the eiderdown, she’s not annoyed that she didn’t take the choices when they were open to her but rather she’s upset that after so many years of knowing and loving and hating, he still doesn’t leave the door open when he goes.
 
~* *~