"I-I can't do this anymore."
"No, please. I need you. I need you so bad." Her eyes are big and blue, clear and piercing. She strings you along with those eyes- has strung you along for months now. You're too soft, too pitying, too sympathetic towards her. It's because you identify with her: the one you loved left you too.
Her hands rise up to caress either side of your face, and you jerk wholly away. It's not enough though. She follows you, makes to trace your lip with the tip of her finger. You shut your eyes tight to the sight of her. "This is sick. This is wrong."
She corners you between the wall and herself, her fingers intertwining purposefully with yours. It is sick, the way she touches you - she touches you like she loves you, she touches like she'll never let you go.
It's the one thing you want the most in the world, but not from her. And she knows. She knows of your love, and still she goes on, trailing her fingers through your hair, nails dragging along your scalp. Breath flowering along your collarbone, the heat of a kiss pressed into the skin there. Hope, she moans into your neck. Oh, Hope.
You feel your resolve slipping. The rise and fall of your chest is too quick. She does this every time - she'll call and tell you she's lonely, she'll come over wearing too little, she'll have you pinned against the wall after dinner and be panting beside you when the night ends. Every damn time she rips a bit of your heart out and bit of her own and the only way to forget about the pain is to do it all over again.
Her whimpers are needy and her fingers are flying - unbuttoning, unbuttoning, unbuttoning. You realize belatedly that your palms are pressed into the wall behind you. She's rid herself of her top, her skin flawless in the lamplight.
You might be inviting trouble. But you owe it to the both of you to say, "What about Snow?"
Her head is turned down - looking at the stilettos that she wears to turn you on - and she says, "What about Snow?"
You clench your fingers, taking paint off the drywall. You nearly yell and you hate yourself because you never yell, never at her. As much as you hate this, you can't hate her. "Goddammit, he's your husband! This is wrong, and you know it!"
She tosses her skirt away and it smacks limply into the far wall. "I want you," she says, like this fixes things, and her lips land squarely on yours.
And this is where you fall. You curse your weak, weak will because - as she always does - she kisses you like she loves you. And if you let the gathering tears blur her a bit, you can imagine that she's someone else. That the lips on yours belong to that someone else, that the hands you hold are hers, too. That the body beneath yours once shielded you from the world, and the cries you hear are borne from the love and desire she feels in return.
After it all, you pull the sheets tight around you. She transforms back into the person you know she is, smaller and daintier than you'd have her. She falls asleep - in her sleep she sheds silent tears. Next to her, you shed your own. In these moments, in the darkness and the quiet it is never clearer - they aren't coming back.