The Last Petal on the Daisy

You knew it was the last time, but you didn’t tell me. You knew, flipping me on my back, that we’d never do this again. I should have known it from when you did that. You’d never looked into my face before. I remember your green eyes looking down on me, and I remember thinking that you seemed different. That you were trying to tell me something with your stare. You were. “This is the last time,” you should have said. “I love you and this is the last time.” But I put the stare away. I figured I was imagining it. I looked to the side, letting you pump into me without looking at you. Letting you look at me, it seemed for the first time. You’d never wanted a boyfriend. You told me that. You told me you just wanted some guy to fuck every once in a while. I believed you. Every other time, you bent me down to the floor or the table or the bed or the couch by the back of my neck and fucked me hard like a machine. And I would argue with myself. He loves me. He loves me not.

He loves me not, I’d finally driven into my stupid skull after a few weeks with you, showing up at my door and dropping me to my knees. You’d jerk off over my face and I would close my eyes, waiting for the shot of hot, then cold. That was the convincer. When your come turned cold on my face before it dried.

You saw that I wouldn’t look back at you and you turned me on my side. I know that now. You had burned that hope out of me, you see. I’d killed it, torn its heart out, stabbed it with an olive pick and left it there to jiggle. Whatever you thought you could suddenly get me to do I had no muscle memory for. You saw what you did and you turned me on my side so you wouldn’t have to look at it. All I knew was that you were deeper in my ass than you’d ever been, my leg straight between yours, your balls dragging on my thigh. To me it was just another fuck. To you, it was as close as you ever came to telling me.

That I think of you all the time hasn’t been a surprise. I fall in love so easily. I have this way of being in love with someone all the time. I don’t expect anyone to love me, doubt that they ever could, really. I don’t tell them. I don’t want them to know. They’ll leave, you see. And it’s better if I have them near me, even if it’s slowly shattered me into a million pieces. When they leave, another piece is gone and I walk around without it as if it were never there. I’m a fucking Swiss cheese of a man now, just structurally sound enough to be able to bend out of bed in the morning. You took a very large piece with you. I think about you all the time and it hurts where it was.

I should have known, my eyes scrunched shut for the pain of you so deep inside of me. I should have seen that this was the last time. It had to be. When you came you said “I… I… I… I….”

I love you too. Please, fuck off now.