The Boy and His Ribbon (The Ribbon Duet, #1)(115)

Ha!

Even now, that lie doesn’t work. I tried to convince myself that if Ren was my age and available, I wouldn’t truly want him. That I’d find him boorish with his rules and stuffy with his diligence.

But yep… it doesn’t work.

I didn’t want Ren because I couldn’t have him.

I wanted Ren because he was everything that made me appreciate, adore, and burn for. He was utterly perfect from his snappish temper to his doting devotion, and yep…I’m back on the crazy torment-myself-with-falling-all-over-again-for-the-boy-who-left-me train.

God, I’m crying.

Why am I crying?

This…ugh!

No!

I haven’t cried since the day he left. I didn’t let myself and now…now I can’t stop.

I…I can’t do this.

I need a break—

*

Sorry.

Jeez, I seem to be apologising to an assignment a lot.

I couldn’t finish yesterday. Not unless I wanted to drown my laptop in tears and have to buy another one. It seemed I had a weak day, made worse by a brain that refused to stop thinking about Ren, Ren, Ren.

You know? Some days, I literally do hate him. I hate his damn guts. Those days, I feel somewhat normal and can honestly say I don’t want him to come back. Leaving was probably the best thing he could’ve done for me.

Because I now have no choice but to get over this stupid infatuation and move on.

But other days that hate transforms back into love and, holy ouch, it fills up my heart until it bursts with need, infecting my entire body until I feel as if I have the flu.

Funny, huh?

The love flu.

Stupid man has made me eternally sick, and there is nothing I can do.

Right, enough feeling sorry for myself.

Today, I’m determined to tell you about Halloween.

Where was I? Let me just skim over what I wrote yesterday and try not to roll my eyes at the patheticness of unrequited love.

…

Ah yes, okay, the party.

We arrived.

Tom got me some punch that unfortunately was alcohol free, and Tina and I bounced around in our skirts and fanned our pretty fans, enjoying the stares of young students and wiser university goers, steadily growing more and more silly as the night went on.

For an hour, I refused to let myself think about Ren.

I pretended I didn’t care if he didn’t come. I spun and laughed and flirted all for me, not to get back at him. So it killed me to realise how fake I turned out to be because I knew the moment he arrived.

My skin prickled. My heartbeat quickened. And everything inside me slipped from chaos to calm.

In the middle of a manic Halloween party filled with Frankensteins and vampires and zombies, I knew the second the matching piece of my heart arrived.

Sad right?

Poetic?

Star-crossed?

Screwed up?

Probably all the above.

But probably not as screwed up as the next part.

You see, I knew the second Ren arrived, and instead of going to him, being a good hostess, and smoothing over the troubled waters between us, I grabbed Tom and clutched him close.

We slow danced with werewolves and fairies, and when he gathered me closer, I mewled in invitation, and when he grinded his hips against me, I gasped in appreciation, and when his head lowered, and his eyes sought mine, and his lips crashed down, I dove my fingers into his messy sable hair and threw away all the decency and morality left inside me.

I became a husk. A chewed-up disgusting person who willingly kissed a boy all the while pretending it was someone else.

And by pretending it was someone else, I kissed harder, deeper, sexier than I ever had before. My first real kiss, and it was with a ghost of the boy I truly wanted.

I let go. I lived my fantasy.

I clawed at his hair, I tangled my tongue with his, and I fell so deeply in love with my illusion that when I opened my eyes and snuggled into his chest, I breathed the wrong name.

“Ren,” I moaned with my body aching and breasts swelling and wetness gathering.

And Tom had pulled me away with a terrified look in his green gaze. We’d stood motionless on the dance floor while others swirled around us as he stared into my ripped apart secret and knew.

He knew.

And there was no going back.

*

I wish there was more to the tale.

But I’ve sat here for a while thinking what to write, and honestly, there isn’t anything else.

I wished I could say that Ren came stalking from the mismatch dressed up crowds, yanked me out of Tom’s arms, and planted his mouth on mine in punishment for ever kissing another boy when I’d always been his.

But it didn’t happen.

Tom went to get us more drinks, this time with alcohol laced in its sugary depths, and Tina and I continued to dance, but my smiles were brittle and my laugh hollow.

Tom stayed close, but things had changed—awareness had been shown, harboured secrets blown wide apart. His touches were just habit, and that night, we agreed that it was fun and all, but it was better if we went our separate ways.

I wasn’t sad. I was relieved. And that was yet another nail in my otherwise rotten coffin.

Meanwhile, as I was getting dumped for hurting two people in one, my heart constantly zeroed in on where Ren was.

Occasionally, he’d appear in the crowd, arms crossed and leg cocked over the other as he leaned against the perimeter, an outsider to the party, a watcher on the wall, close enough to protect me from harm but willing to let me make my own stupid mistakes.