A/N: Chapter 2 is done. I am not very pleased with the ending but I can't work on it any more or my head will explode. Thank you for the reviews. I just hope you like this story.
He wakes up that morning and looks the side of the bed that she had slept in only to find it empty. He knew this would happen, he knew that she wouldn't stay. He keeps telling himself that because he doesn't want to admit the fact that he wished that she had stayed and he could have made her coffee and they could have had breakfast together and maybe they could have worked up a way to start over. But she hadn't stayed and he tells himself that it's better this way because everything with them is so fucked up and twisted that they could never work it up. So he glances at the alarm clock on his nightstand and lights up a cigarette and silently curses because it's her fault that he started smoking again and it's her fault that he is messed up again and it's her fault that he feels seventeen and filled with hate again.
He gets out of the shower thankful for the fact that it's his day off and that Kate is working and won't come by all weekend because her marks are still on his back. He looks around for his Clash shirt but doesn't find anything but the pieces of what used to be her t-shirt, the same t-shirt that he had ripped away from her body and images of last night come rushing into his brain, images of her screaming his name and of her pale skin against his own but he throws them in the back of his mind like he throws her shirt in the garbage and puts on a gray shirt and lights up another cigarette.
He walks around the room thinking of a way to spend his day. He picks up a book but quickly puts it back in the stack on the floor because reading reminds him of her, and that's the last thing he needs. He curses her again because she might have just ruined Hemingway for him again. She might have just ruined his life again.
He sits down at his desk and smiles at the irony of the fact that the only thing that he can do to get his mind of her is work. He opens the latest attempt of a novel that he has to edit and picks up his red pen that makes him feel like a schoolteacher and looks down at the pages in his hands. But the pages aren't the ones that he expected to find, the pages that tell a twisted story that he somehow has to make readable but the ones of his own novel, our at least attempt at one. And he looks down at them and thinks that if the first one didn't remind her of anything she had read this one might remind her of something she had lived. It was cliché, the story of a teenage romance gone wrong but it was a story that he had to write. Closure, healing whatever you might like to call it. But seeing it on paper hadn't closed anything, hadn't healed anything. It had opened even more wounds then he knew he had and it had made him regret his decision to leave. And the question that had haunted him for the past years springs back in his head: could they have made it? He throws the pages in one of the drawers of the desk and lights yet another cigarette knowing it was to late to change the past or to hope for a future.
He ransacks his desk until he finds the manuscript that he was looking for and picks it up. He tries to understand the words he sees in front of him but they all feel foreign and the letters seem scrambled and his hands are gripping harderuntil there are only pieces of plastic left of his pen and he throws them on the floor and punches the desk, in search of a different kind of pain. But it's not working, at least not in the way that he wishes it worked. So he throws these pages away as well and grabs his jacket from one of the chair and goes out. He walks around for hours, until his feet start to hurt so he enters the first bar he sees and sits down at a table and gets a beer.
Many hours and beers later he gets out of the bar and gets in a cab and goes home, where he lies in his bed and tries to ignore her scent that still lingers on his sheets and he tries to remember the last time he got this drunk but the room is spinning and the bed is spinning with it so he closes his eyes trying to keep them in place and he falls asleep.
He wakes up the next day and walks to the medicine cabinet and takes two aspirins, in the hopes of killing the headache and goes back to bed and reads, ignoring the thoughts that attack him and promising himself that he'll never allow her to ruin anything in his life again.
