The favor he didn’t mean to do

a little piece of flash fiction for you

Please, he begged, Please don’t turn away from me.

But I did. How could I tell him about the pain that had ridden inside me for months before I had begun spending time with other boys becoming men whom I could never trust because he had betrayed our love, asking for a break from our engagement when I could see in his eyes that he had other women occupying his mind. How could I tell him about the loneliness, about vomiting my despair into his parent’s toilet that night, with his mother worrying over me, unable to believe that her son could hurt this girl she’d hoped would be her daughter-in-law.

But even more than those months hoping for his return were the two years of growing away from that young girl he’d wooed so desperately in high school. In all that time I came to realize the enormous gap between us, with my good grades and high aspirations and his mediocre performance and devil may care attitude. I looked at him that day and saw that his disdain for my father’s profession would have kept me from pursuing a similar path, out of a misplaced desire to protect him, while my disdain for the military, and for his recreational drug use, would have created tension between us until our too early union exploded, leaving us both deeply scarred.

Even so, I felt a deep sadness when I told this no longer quite a boy yet not yet a man, to whom I had given my virginity back when I still believed in his love, that we could not try again because I had moved on and in fact was in love with another, though my subtext was that I would never give you my heart again you jerk. His jealousy and anger flooded over me, his nasty words against the new lover he had never even met creating a wall I would never care to breach again in this lifetime, not even when we saw each other across the room years later.

Well what did you expect? That I would wait for you?

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