Mister West by R.J. Lewis (animal farm read .TXT) 📕

intending to. I hadn’t dared confess that to myself, that’s how much I’ve been hiding from myself. Now it’s out there in the open and that storm cloud is crackling above us.

“Alright,” he finally whispers, nodding to himself. He won’t meet my eye. “Alright, Ivy.”

“Aidan…”

He looks down at the sidewalk, waiting.

I lick my lips. “I don’t want to ruin us. I want this to work. I do.”

“But?”

“But I need –”

“Time,” he finishes for me, looking into my eyes now. God, he’s in pain. “You want time. Time I originally offered you from the start. Time because I wanted you to think before jumping into this. Ivy, this is what I didn’t want to happen. I opened myself up to you, baby, I gave you everything inside of me.”

I nod, feeling awful. “I’m sorry, Aidan. I’m not trying to leave you, though –”

“No, but this is a kind of hurt that’s hitting deep right now,” he interrupts, looking exhausted. “I let you in and it wasn’t so that you can turn around and pull away and leave me pining in the dark. If I’d known, I would have held back, Ivy. I would have protected myself.”

I don’t answer because he’s right.

This is entirely my fault.

“Do you want to leave me?” I ask sadly. “Because I understand if you do.”

He stares at me then like that’s inconceivable. “I didn’t say that.”

“I think you deserve more than me –”

“Enough.”

“Then what’s the alternative?”

“I wait,” he responds back without skipping a beat. “I fucking wait, okay? That’s the alternative, Ivy.”

That alternative is shit.

“So you wait,” I repeat, doubtfully, “you wait in pain while I, what, live with you and share your bed –”

“I don’t know what the answer is, okay?” He looks exasperated. “I just know I need you in my life.”

“Even if I’m not emotionally available for you?”

He doesn’t respond now, but that hurt is back again in full force.

It’s getting colder the longer we stand around. I cross my arms, shivering, but Aidan is completely fine. He’s too heavy in thought to feel the temperature dropping by the hour.

Finally, he says, “I didn’t know I was waiting for you my whole life, Ivy, but I look back, and I see it. I see myself through the years being destructive, vile, a filthy drunk who was pushing every person away. I tatted myself up, put this bullshit on my skin so that I’d wake up to the ink and try and understand myself at my lowest. I think…I think while I was pushing every one of those people away, I was secretly waiting for the one that would fight back.”

He sighs sadly, staring at me intensely. “I’ve been waiting for you to come along, and now that I got to call you mine, I have to watch you leave? Is that what you’re telling me?”

I step closer, and he watches the action closely, looking guarded now. “I wouldn’t be leaving forever.”

He doesn’t look like he believes me.

I shiver again as a gust of cold wind sweeps through us. He frowns, noticing my discomfort. “Let’s go home, Ivy.”

*

The drive home is tense and quiet. When we get to the apartment, Aidan disappears into his office and I shower. When I lay in bed, I can’t sleep. I wonder what he's doing, what he’s thinking, how he’s feeling. I feel so fucking bad for what I said.

This isn’t working.

I shouldn’t have told him to let go. Now I’m responsible for his pain.

I’m fucking things up, but my body is resisting for a reason and I have to listen to it.

He comes into the room way past midnight and has a quick shower. Then he falls into bed next to me. My eyes are open. I suspect his are too.

I suspect we’re both drowning in the silence.

Aidan

There’s no fix to this. I can fuck her all day long, poke around her soul, beg for her to open up to me, and it would be futile.

I can try talking to her, digging through her layers, but she stops me from going in too far. Ivy is stubborn and broken and she doesn’t know up from down.

She needs time.

Time to get over her hurt, to move on from that chapter she closed behind her, but…I’m worried during this time she might not long for us anymore.

Because time can be healing, but it can also be the enemy.

It’s only when you love something so fucking hard that you can’t live without it does the panic manifest and the paranoia follows, delivering its blow quietly, bit by bit.

I feel that darkness looming inside of me, fighting to take over, to protect me from heartbreak. It still exists, still thrives on my weaknesses.

This fucker loves to watch me fall.

Thirty-One

Ivy

“Are you sure about this?” Ana asks me, standing in my closet as I pack my clothes.

“He’s miserable,” I answer, growing numb. “He won’t even look at me. It’s been days of nothing, Ana. I’ve ruined everything.”

“I doubt that.”

“Well, I don’t.”

She looks at me, concerned. Then she reaches out and grabs my arm. “Stop a second, Ivy, and think about this, okay?”

I look back at her, determined. “I’ve thought about this. I’m tearing him apart.”

“Leaving his apartment is what’s going to tear him apart.”

“He gets out of bed and paces all night long, Ana. Sometimes he calls his grandmother in the middle of the night and when he comes out of the bathroom, he’s wrecked. I can’t give him what he wants, not yet, and I can see he’s hurting for it.”

“Ivy, calm down, okay? He’s giving you space like you wanted, and he is right about what he said to you the other night; you do need to talk to someone about your issues because they’re mounting. You’re still not yourself even after you left that apartment. You’re keeping it all in, bottled up. You need to talk in order to heal, Ivy.”

I know that, but I just can’t talk right now.

She