He’d finally cut the cord, ended the surveillance by blocking out all of her potential spies, and now he could speak freely without worry of having everything parsed and ill-contextualized by those with a malevolent agenda. His words had never penetrated to her heart anyway, falling upon a mind that twisted them into something else. Her heart was twisted. 

He was sorry for what had happened and always would be, but he knew that she was aware of why it had happened, aware of her own actions. Yet that didn’t matter to her. Nothing did. She was not sorry, and she had made that abundantly clear with her silence, causing his feelings of culpability to wane, though he was not a hypocrite like her. She had made such a monumental drama of relatively nothing that she could never take it back, and, though it would taint her life no matter how much she ignored it, and the more so the more she did ignore it, she was forced to live with it by her unwillingness to set things right. She knew what she had done, but, if she told herself that she had done nothing, then she was too delusional and dishonest to be taken seriously by anyone, especially herself. He knew that she had been prompted in it. He knew it was the case, as her entire demeanor had shifted out of nowhere, on command, and she had never been one to make her own decisions. She had let someone else dictate for her as she’d always done, and they led her to lie, led her into a mess no one had ever had to slog into. But, if that were not true and he was only giving her an excuse that didn’t exist, then she was simply pathological and irredeemable. 

Maybe she had, at least, finally learned not to flirt with and put her hands on people she wasn’t actually interested in, though she had been interested in him. She had given herself away on that count on more than one occasion. That was the truth, but it died with her lies. Now she was simply belligerent, unbending, not even appreciating that he had refrained from making her face the same travails that she had foisted upon him. And she would have been convicted. He had the incontrovertible proof, proof she would still deny in her petulance. She thought she was above reproach, and her friends bolstered that conviction in their ignorance, cooing warm excuses and senseless rationalizations into her ears, the men using it to their advantage. They even continued to harass him by phone, when he knew who they were and where they were. They were imbeciles, but she must have believed she could control his mind, his words. She couldn’t have been more wrong, and, somewhere in her subconscious, she lived that truth. But she would simply twist everything to excuse herself, deem him a lunatic and a liar, when it was her own actions that epitomized that behavior.

He had fallen in love with her. He did not know how it happened, and he had fought the initial urges, the pangs in his heart. He told himself that she was not what he wanted, but it was a simple truth: people were drawn to the right ones through a mutual attraction, and, though she would deny it until she died, that had existed, even if only for a second. He was not some fantasizing creep, pining away for someone far out of his league, and he was not emotionally unstable, as she had decided to invent to cover her story. If anyone were unstable, it was she, dramatically so, and she was aware of her own neuroses, which she consciously played upon. He had, against his conscious will, loved everything about her that made her unlovable to other men, and his desire for her had been real, not convenient. But it didn’t matter to her. Her choices were circumscribed for her, and he did not fit the prescribed criteria. Her fantasies did not include someone like him, though those they did include were people she could never have, or people whom she, in her mind, turned into men that did not exist. She imagined white knights, but, beyond her fog, their armor was soiled by feces and urine and they raped at will. 

In her time, decades, she had never learned that those she preferred were not great men, no matter how much they owned. She thought herself better than she was, and she projected that belief onto them—adult infants, vulgar men, those more flawed than she was. She desired liars, sexists, the religiously hypocritical, and the juvenile, men who would invariably end up treating her like dirt, because she was the same way and let them. She had been raised to be that way, but she had never come to grips with the reality that it just hadn’t worked for her. She had chosen those who subscribed to perverse cruelties, not even hiding them, but she never saw the sickness through her fantasy until it manifested outright and bit her. And she had never been able to put two and two together and realize that it was the exact traits she thought admirable that went hand in hand with that disease—men in finance, men in realty, men who preached Bible quotations and wore their religion on their sleeves, men obsessed with the military, men who openly patronized porn and BDSM, extremist false conservatives, men who talked badly about women, men who acted like frat boys, men who bought useless but expensive toys, and men who expected to be obeyed … all selfish adult infants and none of it was normal nor healthy. She could not identify a narcissist to save herself, and she might have been one herself, given her inability to admit that she was wrong and her incessant craving for attention. It was all she knew, and she feared deviating from it for something real. She rejected anything real. He had realized too late that she was not what he had hoped, a lost soul like him. She was bigoted, self-abasing, and at sea in her own ignorant biases. She unthinkingly repeated utter morons. She was like the men she chose, likely made that way by them. He had imagined her a much better, a much stronger person, and that was his own fault. 

He had thought the world of her, but, in her mind, as he did not have what she had been taught to desire, she saw that as weakness. She saw his love as weakness, and it did not occur to her that it meant that what she sought in other men was not love. It was a disease of mind that affected too many and was more than prevalent in her world. And she could neither see it nor overcome it. 

So how did he feel about her now? He didn’t. There was no one real for him to feel about one way or another. But he could not let go of what had happened all the same, because the damage she’d inflicted did not go away. Unlike her, he could not pretend that it was all in the past, and he lived with it every day, the horror of it, the viciousness of it, the needlessness of it all. It would stay with him until she admitted to her actions, and that would never come to pass. Yet, some tiny sliver of him hoped it would. Some atom in his body, which he could not find and root out, still hoped that she would, hoped she was a better person than she had shown herself to be. It was a hope in vain, but it kept him from hating the world, kept him from entirely giving up on everyone. He was still a man, and, so, he still dreamed. Though he did not love her anymore, and she would not allow it anyway, he still thought about taking her, showing her a passion she’d never know. He could not help it. It was an invasive thought that plagued him. But she had her child men for that, and he was sure they did it badly, selfishly. He still would have liked to see her in the raw, something she had made a big deal of, though a perfectly natural desire, and one to which she had not been adverse and had joked about with him, though she feigned to be disgusted by it later. It was a normal urge, and she kept men as friends whose urges went far beyond that, beyond anything healthy, and she did not balk at them. She was a hypocrite, born and bread, but that was all he would have wanted. Though she owed him an immense debt for her lies, she would not even apologize, so any hopes of her deigning to do anything for him were nothing more than fanciful daydreaming. She would never do anything to make him happy, never even smile at him again with sincerity. 

Knowing that was the eternal situation, knowing she would seek to erase him from her mind, he, instead, hoped that she would find the man she wanted, the base, imbecilic, lying, emotionally abusive lout with a fat wallet whom she desired, another man who would enslave her, with all the worst connotations, and make her do and bear the unspeakable, trying to live up to some insane version of a time that never existed. And she would bear it for sake of appearances. And he hoped that she would be miserable, not because he wanted her to be miserable but because that is what she wanted. He wanted her to find what she sought.