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  “We were together for just over a year. The sex was fantastic. We got along great. I’d had a bunch of short relationships that hadn’t been very deep or meaningful, but with George I fell hard. He was smart and funny, he had a good job, he had his shit together. I imagined myself baking him pies and making babies, doing it all up June Cleaver style, except instead of a white picket fence and an apron, I’d have a leather flogger and a headboard with permanent eyebolts in it.”

  Alex snorted soft laughter, but that was all right. I’d been making light, though I felt anything but.

  I shrugged. “He had this way of looking at me...he didn’t need to say a word. He’d just stare. Like he thought I was amazing and wonderful. I thought...” I paused, hating the way my voice rasped. “I thought I made him happy, you know?”

  “I understand. Totally.”

  Looking at him, I thought he did. “I let myself get lost in him, though. Addicted, I guess. Part of it was the sex. That power, the control. It was heady stuff I’d dreamed about for a long time but hadn’t really had, not in that way. He made me cockdrunk, but it was more than that. I was crazy in love with him, like you said, the key word being crazy. Loved, loved, loved, crazy mad insane with it, to the point where as much as I might have exerted control in the bedroom, I was totally out of control in the relationship. He was the one who was in control because he just...didn’t feel the same way.”

  “Uh-oh.”

  “We had this intense sexual connection, but for me it wasn’t always about trussing him up like a turkey or any of that other stuff. I mean, sure, I liked it, but it’s never been all about constantly topping someone for me. I know there are people who can’t get off without a script and a scene and all that, but it doesn’t have to be like that every time for me. There’s more to life than handcuffs and paddles.” I paused. “My switch gets flipped for all kinds of things, like the way he always opened the car door for me or got the things down from the high shelf. How he stocked his fridge with the kind of cheese I liked, even though I’d never mentioned it. He just knew. Myriad tiny things all making up the whole. It’s always been about that, for me.”

  “Who doesn’t like to feel they’re understood?” Alex asked quietly. “I get it.”

  “So we had this time, you know, this bright and shining time when he made me feel like I was the best thing that had ever happened to him. I didn’t doubt ever, not for a second, that George thought I was beautiful and amazing and wonderful.” I paused again, hating the sting. “And then one day, I wasn’t so wonderful anymore. He stopped doing all the little things. Then he stopped answering my messages. He stopped reaching out first. He started to cancel plans.”

  “All bad signs.”

  I laughed bitterly. “He stopped making me important. And I can forgive a lot of things, but not that. When I asked him where things were going with us—”

  Alex winced. “The conversation every man dreads.”

  I laughed. “You think women like it any better?”

  “I guess not.”

  “I had to ask. I didn’t want to. But I had to know what he felt about me. What he wanted. I told him I loved him and wanted to be with him, and I was willing to do whatever it took to make it work for us. He gave me the romantic equivalent of a pat on the head and a chuck under the chin. He said he loved me in his own way, but that being with me was like eating ice cream every day. You decide you like a new flavor, right? And you glut yourself on it. You eat it every day. You think you’ll never get tired of eating it. It’s your favorite flavor. You can’t get enough, until one day, you wake up and you decide you’re sick of that flavor.”

  “Ugh,” Alex said, but nodded. “He wanted a new flavor?”

  “Yes. I guess he decided he really wanted to try vanilla.”

  “Wow.”

  I nodded. “Right? He said he’d never been able to make anything work out, that he was always looking ahead for the next best thing.”

  “After a year, he said this to you?” Alex looked disgusted.

  I laughed, not because it was funny but because it was all I could do. “Yes. After a year, he said that to me.”

  “He was stupid, you know. You were the best thing that ever happened to him.”

  “Thanks.” I shrugged. “Didn’t feel like that, though. It felt like shit. It felt like he was telling me that everything we’d done wasn’t what he really wanted. It made me feel like he’d never truly understood me at all—that I’d been alone in this thing the whole time.”

  “What do men do when they fear women?” Alex asked after a second. “They make them doubt.”

  “He said he needed some time, but that we could just stay in each other’s lives while we dated other people. As if I could’ve handled that. And that maybe, after some time, if neither of us had found someone we liked better, we might get back together.”

  “Oh. Wow. The fucker. Jesus, Elise.”

  I drew in a breath, hating the sick feeling in my stomach. “He said we’d keep in touch. I told him he could go fuck himself with broken glass. He said good-night. I said goodbye.”

  “Good for you!”

  I laughed again, embarrassed this time, but hell, I’d owned up to everything else, I might as well finish the story with the truth. “I regretted saying it immediately. That’s the thing about crazy. It tends to stick.”

  “So does shit when you throw it at the wall,” Alex said.

  This time, my laugh was not bitter or embarrassed. A full-fledged guffaw burst out of me, hard enough to hurt. “You have such a way with words.”

  He grinned and buffed his nails on his shirt. “Thanks.”

  “He told me there was a chance, Alex. There was a maybe. And I...God. I’m such an idiot. I took that maybe, and I held it close to my heart, and I kept it there for the past three, no, almost four now, years. Because as long as there was a maybe, it wasn’t a no.”

  “Have you talked to him since?”

  “I used to talk to him all the time.” I frowned, not proud. “I’ve apologized. I’ve asked him to reconsider. I’ve asked him to tell me he hates me. I’ve asked him to tell me he doesn’t. He never answered me. He never told me to stop. He didn’t block or delete me. I know because the messages went through and because I still see him in my contacts list. He read the messages, but never answered. He just kept letting me hold on to that maybe.”

  “That’s fucked up.”

  I almost gagged on the thought of it. “Yeah. Stupid. Pathetic. Embarrassing, God, so fucking embarrassing. It was like a sickness with me. And I knew it, but I didn’t care. Because there was that tiny, teensy-weensy spark of hope. At least I told myself there was.”

  Alex frowned. He looked embarrassed then, himself. Then determined. “Look. I’m going to be blunt. Can I be blunt?”

  “If I say no, will you say it anyway?”

  “He put you on his C list,” Alex said.

  I blinked. I swallowed a sour taste. “Ugh.”

  “Look, I’m not proud to say this, but...I’ve been that guy. That asshole guy who keeps people around just in case.” He looked ashamed. “Sometimes you had to work a little harder than others to keep someone on the string, but sometimes all it took was letting them know you were reading their messages and just not answering to keep them around in case you wanted them, when you didn’t have something better.”

  I put my face in my hands. “Oh, I think I’m going to puke.”

  “Don’t,” he said. “If you puke, I’ll puke. It’ll be like the pie-eating scene in Stand By Me.”

  I peeked at him through my fingers. “So that’s my story. I’ve held on to a man who dumped me, hoping one day he’d come back around and we could have what we had when it was good. I fucked my way through half a dozen men since then and wouldn’t let any of them in, just in case one day George answered me. I met my lover, who was totally into letting me tie him up and do all manner of kinky things to him, and it was really great, until I found out he’s married with t