issues without knowing better. I felt myself lock up inside, the way I did whenever I thought of my past. Over the years it’s been one crappy experience after another and I wanted nothing more than to run from it as fast as possible.
“Just leave it alone.” My voice reflected the icy feelings buried deep inside. Corey twisted me in his arms to face him.
“What’s wrong, Dani?” He searched my eyes for the reason for my sudden wall. “You can tell me.”
The blues of his eyes shone with the heartfelt meaning of the question. For just a moment I longed to tell him everything. Spew out the past hardships and let someone else bear the weight of it the way I continued to. But I just couldn’t do that right now. I needed nothing more than someone to take away the pain in the only way I could trust a man to do. Satisfy my physical needs as a way to come down from a stressful day or take my mind off my problems. To include him in the deepest parts of my life was the one thing I feared most.
“I don’t want to tell you; I want to go home.” With that I pulled his arms off me and stormed out of his place to wait for my cab; away from his welcoming eyes and comforting arms.
* * * * In my past I’ve had relationships with several different men. Sometimes the relationship lasted a couple months and others much longer. They all cheated on me, lied to me and/or made me feel like nothing more than a fool for believing the words that so easily spewed from their mouths. Turner, Jasper and Robbie were simply mistakes. Isaac however, was my first New York boyfriend after having my heart ripped out by Oliver, the guy I’d thought was my first and only love.
Isaac and I’d met when I was 19 and broke up 3 years later which was just long enough to cause permanent damage. The relationship was terrible and the hold he had over me was poisonous. There was nothing about us as a couple that was worth holding on to—yet that’s exactly what I did. I had never before felt like such trash as I had on Isaac’s arm, but I had been so absorbed in him. It made my skin crawl just thinking about all I’d gone through. The only good thing about our relationship was that it was over. Isaac stole away the confidence already dwindling inside of me after the assault on my heart from Oliver. With Isaac I felt as though I couldn’t breathe when he wasn’t around; I was needy and vulnerable. The only time I felt content was when I was near him but even then, things were horrible. We fought constantly, egged each other on with volatile amunition. When I finally broke away from it I felt free but my confidence and independence were seriously broken.
Oliver was on a completely different level of personal pain but he wasn’t even the first man that broke me. That honor went to my father; the one man a girl should be able to rely on, but he ended up being the first to show me I couldn’t trust the opposite sex. Those were two topics I wasn’t ready to face yet; not in my mind and definitely not with someone else. After I came home from Corey’s, I immediately passed out and when I awoke the next morning the first thing I did was submerge myself in a hot bath. Even with candles lit around me and calming music filling the small space, nothing eased the tightening in my chest when I thought about the men that had broken me.
All I wanted was to forget all the crap in my life and be a girl that believed in love again. Was it too much to ask for the chance at a normal relationship? At 25-years old, was I already destined to be one of those bitter old women? Screaming bah-humbug at any young couple in love at the park; busting out in a deep laugh when I heard someone say I love you, as if they’d just told the funniest joke? That seemed too tragic to be a reality but the scars left on my heart, felt as though love itself was the tragedy. No longer was I open to a world of sunshine and rainbows. I wanted to submerse myself in my