Stopping halfway to the kitchen, she sagged against the doorframe, listening to his diatribe with regret and pain deep in her stomach. Her fingers clenched around the wooden frame and felt the weight of the empty promise on her finger. How she wished she had never let him into her heart, how she wished she were more open, all the things he seemed to want from a woman. He had been through more in one year of his life than she’d gone through in ten and yet still thought of herself as broken and repaired. Abi thought herself an idiot for ever believing he could love someone as insignificant as her.
“Yeah, yeah, I guess I did make those rules up to protect myself…” she acquiesced, nodding her head slowly, “And I guess I did have to be drunk before telling you how much I felt hurt by your reaction to that changing face crap. But now you know why I did those things, Hemingway, you want to hear the very worst of me?” she gritted her teeth and looked up at him. “This is it. Me, being vindictive and sneaky and hurting you because you hurt me. That’s a truth of me, I lash out tenfold when I feel attacked. Truth number fucking one!”
Deciding that enough was enough, she walked up to him, got in his face, just poking and prodding at him to react. “A martyr to your pain?” she whispered, forcing the words out of her throat. “That’s how you see me. A martyr to your fucking pain.” She just nodded and stared into his eyes.
“Let me just ask you something, Ernest fucking Hemingway. Three nights, four nights, whatever it was ago, I woke up to your hands on me, groping me….” She refused to look scared of this. “Just answer me; if I’d have told you ‘no’, would you have stopped?” she spat out, trembling. “Because even though I said yes, I had to stop and ask myself why I was saying yes. Because I wanted it? Because I wanted to help you? Or maybe I was just scared of what would have happened if I’d said no. Because maybe… just fucking maybe, I know what happens when I try say no to a determined man.”