A/N: Next chapter up promptly! Don't expect it to be this quick normally, because finals week is coming and I'm expecting it to kick my ass.
Side note, I feel like a lot of you were expecting me to take it a different direction after the first chapter, so I'm curious to see what you think...

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Chapter 2 - Withdrawal

"I, I can't get these memories out of my mind,
And some kind of madness has started to evolve."

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Pain is weakness leaving the body. My idiot father had told me that for years when he'd attacked me every morning before breakfast- whether he'd been saying it for my benefit or his, I'll never know, though I'd usually ended up hurting him more than he hurt me.

Regardless, that piece of wisdom had ended up getting me through some of the roughest months in my life.

Withdrawal is a bitch, and not the kind that has her moments, but the kind that rears her ugly face every day just so that you never forget she's there.

Trust me, I couldn't have forgotten if I'd tried. Which I did.

Try, that is.

Grimmjow and I had gotten into a nasty fight my last year of college. We fought from time to time, about random things, simply because we were both blindly stubborn and of volatile tempers.

And had raging jealousy issues.

He had accused me of being too 'uptight' when I hadn't smoked yet one evening, blaming my sobriety for the anger that had flamed when another woman had touched him flirtatiously while we were out. Maybe I had over-reacted, but the argument and who was right or wrong ceased to matter the minute I heard him say that. It was then I had finally, finally realized how dangerous my dependency had become.

Whether I had been more worried about my dependency on Grimmjow or my perpetual high, I wasn't sure, but it inspired my attempt to quit both cold-turkey.

One, unsurprisingly, had been much easier on me than the other.

Renji and I had been the only of the group who were still in college, and the minute we graduated I disappeared. I moved to the city, bought an apartment on my own, and took a gamble on my own private rehab.

I tried to remove everything that had been my life for the past year, anything that reminded me of weed or Grimmjow.

I tried to move on.

During those months I never dreamed about weed. But, more often than I cared to admit, I would wake up at three in the morning rock hard from the most intense dreams about Grimmjow. Not all of them were sexual, but all of them made me crave him in a way that I no longer should have wanted him.

I even cried over him, more than once.

Sometimes I would wake up with tears in my eyes and an ache in my chest, and my mind would immediately go to him. Sometimes I wouldn't even remember the dream, but I knew emotions that strong could only come from the place I tried to suppress.

Sometimes I would wake up in a blind rage.

Most of the time I barely recognized myself.

Pain is weakness leaving the body.

It was my mantra. I should never have gotten that wrapped up in him, shouldn't have let myself get carried away. With Rukia studying abroad I hadn't been able to talk to her, there were things one couldn't even try to explain over the phone. I didn't even have Renji anymore, my long time best friend, because I knew that seeing his face would bring everything back.

Instead of avoiding all the phone calls, for a while I had just turned off my phone and went without. For months, I cut myself off from the part of society that was hooked to technology. Yeah it sucked having to cut out Renji after giving him a heartfelt apology and half-assed explanation, but it was part of removing Grimmjow. The other guys had been Grimmjow's friends first, so I hadn't felt so bad leaving without saying goodbye.

Either way, it felt like I'd taken off my own leg, and I was struggling to learn to balance without it. Walking was almost inconceivable, but I was determined to get there.

Though I knew Grimm had been pissed at me when I'd told him I was leaving, he'd scoffed.

"I'm not going to make you stay with me if you wanted to leave."

So cool and unaffected.

His eyes, however, had burned with the same passionate fire that they always did when he looked at me.

It was a challenge, I had known it then, he was testing me. But I was strong enough to leave him- just barely, but I was. And that's what mattered.

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3 years later, I still hadn't truly recovered.

6 months after I'd left, I turned on my cell phone and deleted all the messages, missed calls and voicemails without reading or listening to a single one. None of them had called me since.

That didn't mean they were gone.

Blue eyes haunted me every time I saw the number six. I could still remember the taste of his skin where I had often traced the outline of his gothic '6' tattoo along his lower back. It made my eyelids dip in pleasure to even think about, and my cock twitch wistfully in my pants.

It's amazing how difficult it can be to cut a bad habit, even if you're healthier without it.

Sometimes, life just isn't fair.

Hell, most of the time it's not.

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For two of the last three years I'd been working as an event marketing coordinator at a computer software company. Which basically just meant that I spent workdays trying to make sure everyone was on the same page and working with the same budget- nothing got approved without my consent or me running it by my boss.

Life was better. Even… good.

Memories of Grimmjow, however, seemed content taking up permanent residence in my dreams.

I supposed it was too much to ask for them all to go away, so I busied myself with making friends at work and pretending that there was a year of my life that didn't exist.

Except I couldn't.

My sex life, in particular, had taken quite a hit. Apparently Grimmjow had not only ruined me for women all together, but I wasn't attracted to men either.

The bastard had a monopoly on my sex drive.

I went on casual lunch dates with girls, just to keep up the shambling façade of a romantic life, but I always had to turn girls down after a few dates for fear that they'd actually get interested and then I'd be the asshole who broke their hearts. Most were fine with it, and I actually had accumulated more female friends than male. Rukia was back in the country and stopped by from time to time, Orihime was a secretary in my office that I ate lunch with every day and Tatsuki was a longtime friend who went cruising the bars with me on the weekend. She was the most fun to go out with since she never pressured me to find a chick. Or a dude. She didn't judge me, and I needed that.

Truth is, I'd taken a girl home once after I'd been drinking at a bar with her, and I hadn't been able to get it up. The spark, the excitement, the constant challenge I'd seen every time I met Grimmjow's intense gaze was burned not only into my mind, but into my body.

It no longer responded to anyone else.

He would always be that part of me that I couldn't quite get fucking rid of, no longer how long I stayed away or how hard I tried to forget. He was burned into me deep enough my body didn't remember life before Grimmjow.

I may have mentally gained control of my addiction enough for everyday life, but it felt so fragile… so superficial.

So fake.

Like I was lying to myself by even pretending that he wasn't there in everything I did, because he was.

Grimmjow would probably always be there, because he is my drug. Was my drug.

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There's a phrase: absence makes the heart grow fonder. I'd always liked that phrase, until its truth became inescapable.

I had figured that removing myself from the problem would help eliminate the pull, to alleviate the constant desire. At least eventually. A year later, two years later. No longer.

It hadn't.

I'd resigned myself to it, knowing that as long as I didn't see him again it would never be a problem. It's not like I still had his phone number, or knew where he was living or what he was doing anymore. He was probably holed up somewhere doing the same thing as the last time I'd seen him.

Four years older than me, he'd apparently given up on any working ambition- after all, how was he going to ever get a job it he was smoking all the time and had no experience on his resume?

He was smart, I had never doubted that- to be honest I might not have given him a chance in the first place if I hadn't thought so. Snobby it may be, but intelligence is important to me. My dad is a doctor, and even though he's a complete idiot in his personal life, his professional ambition was always impressive to me.

Grimmjow had graduated from college with a 4.0 GPA mostly, he said, because he hadn't expected any less of himself. His straightforward perspective had intrigued me, as if willpower alone was enough for him to achieve any goal.

Of course, the willpower really was the issue- by the time I'd met him he'd taken up a hedonistic lifestyle that got him through the day to day with no long-term plans. That was one of the reasons I used to make myself leave, since I'd needed a lot of arguments to convince myself that it was worth it.

I needed more, and I knew that if I'd stayed any longer I would have gotten complacent in my own life goals. Addicted or not, my behavior had grown self destructive.

And so I left.

But back to the point: Three years later I'd finally realized that as long as I didn't see him again, I could call my addiction abandonment a success. I couldn't call it a recovery, even I wasn't that stupid.

Recovered addicts could see that which with they were addicted and resist temptation- and I knew I couldn't.

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A/N: Review and let me know what you think! I'm curious :)