I can't stop the words from spilling out. I'm surprised I held them in this long. "Stop," I whisper, and it hurts to say, but not as much as the last few weeks have ached and burned, threatening to tear me apart.
"Siri—"Remus sighs. He's confused, I can tell. "Siri, I thought this is what you wanted…"
My lips ach for the kiss I cut off, my fingers twitch in anticipation, and I feel like I should jump him right then and there. "It-it is," I inform him. And it is. I want him to love me so much that it's eating me up, and he's giving me exactly what I want but…
"So what's wrong?" He asks, his brown eyes shining in their perfect Let-Me-In sort of way. Moony has his moments of being totally big-bad-wolf to my little-pig…. Did I just call myself a pig? Oh well… "If this is what you want—"
"It's not what you want." I say, and I have no idea if he hears me. I can't feel the words leave my mouth. But I can feel the tears that stain my face.
His face falls, his perfect lips forming a grimace of guilt. I know he hears me. "I want to love you," he tells me. It's amazing how just a few months ago, this wouldn't have bothered me. But it does now.
Why? WHY DOES IT HAVE TO BOTHER ME?
…maybe because I love him so much that I can't breathe without him…
And Merlin how I wish that he loved me. But I know I don't want him to go through the motions.
That's what these few weeks have been. My constant stream of love notes and confessions of love and proposals of marriage finally wore him out, and he turned away from his asexual nature to allow me a few hand holds, sweet-nothings, and entwined limbs, as he tries so hard to make one shred of my life that seems to be falling faster than I can follow make sense. As he tries to save me from myself…
And it was bliss, utter bliss. On the surface, but I guess it's because when I love someone, I memorize everything about them, and I know their every reaction before it happens, and I can see that deep down, Remus doesn't love me.
Well, he does, but not the way I want him to. Not in the soul-ach, heart-racing, masochistic way I love him.
"I really do want to love you…" He says again, like the more he says he wants to love me, the more likely he is to start loving me. And I feel guilty that I wish that was how love worked. You say it and its true. "Really truly, I want to love you with all my heart." And he turns to go. As he should.
It's not fair for me to be strung along by someone who tries to love me because he feels obligated to. It's not fair that I should have to watch him pretend to be sexually attracted to me when we both know he likes that fifth year girl, what's-her-name-with-brown-hair-and-mismatched-eyes. And it's not fair that he gets all my love, without ever returning the favour by really, truly loving me back.
"I want to love you," he whispers, a final time, and walks away.
Then my words come out, with no regard to how I feel about the subject. "I want you to love me too…"