Is it Possible to Love you More?

Chapter 7: Would it Hurt Less if I Did(n't)?

A/N: This is from the model character's perspective. Hopefully that should give more insight on the history between the two. This one is set a bit back in time.

I often wondered if I made the right choice. Because it felt that I never did when it came to you.

I was scared. Scared of your reaction. When I had let those three words slip free from my throat, the look of horror on your face was enough to temper all my desires. Terror flooded my body. I wasn't supposed to say that. Love was reserved for people who felt the same way about each other. For people who were serious. We weren't either of those. We were just teens messing around because we were bored and horny. Except that was never just the case for me. It was ridiculous how easily I had fallen in love with you. If you asked me how long I had loved you, it would be easier to count the days I hadn't. Just the years predating my fourteenth birthday, because every day, every minute, every second after that, I spent loving you.

And it hurt me when I saw you didn't feel the same for me.

The taste of cigarette's lingered in my mouth to wash out the taste of you after we'd slept together. The smoke that filled my lungs silenced and killed and blackened any I love you's that wanted to escape. You made me a smoker. Before I'd take a puff or two, to cement my image as a tough bitch. But it was only with you that I became in need of the sweet nicotine that would soothe my jumbled up feelings after we'd have our fun.

It's not something I've been proud of. But you made me an addict. First to cigarettes and then to your lips. It was almost comical how much I craved kissing you; I'd fantasize about farfetched situations in which we'd accidentally have to kiss, our lips joining together as you clumsily tripped in front of me and your mouth landing on mine as your hips were caught in my hands. Or situations in which I'd have to kiss you to save your life or something equally outrageous along those lines. As time went by they kept getting more and more ridiculous. More and more desperate. Thinking of kissing you would get me so aroused, more so than the thought of having sex with you, and it was all because it was forbidden to me. And what doesn't taste the sweetest but the fruit you cannot have? I badly wanted a taste of those lips; it was more than just a bodily need despite what you might think if you saw how I dripped down my legs. It was a desire I felt with my soul, with my heart, with my very being; as pitiful as it all sounds, it's true. But I didn't dare satisfy my own aching desire and kiss you, only to lose you. A repeat of that kiss could never once again happen, no matter how it tore me up inside to be refused this one object of my need.

I couldn't slip up like I had before. I didn't want to forgo you, because I thought that any form, any dose of you I could get was better than losing all this we had. I couldn't stand to lose you, so naturally I lost you.

And to such a pansy. I hated Edward. I hated him so much. He monopolized your time, kissed you, touched you like you had forbidden me from doing. But worst of all, I hated the way you looked at him. You looked at him the way you wouldn't look at me. Full of love. Adoration. Need.

I know we said we had only done all those things to get boyfriends but honestly I had wanted to be yours.

So what if I didn't sag my jeans, or have short cropped hair. I would chop all my locks, wear terrible clothing, if only you would look at me. But you never did. You saw in me a friend and I made a tough choice. I would distance myself from you. Perhaps we had outgrown our relationship. It happened even to the closest of friends, and we had never really been just friends to begin with, had we?

Still, I couldn't let go so easily. I found a boyfriend all in hopes that I could use the excuse of us going on double dates with our boyfriends so I could see you. Those dates...I was torn in half by pain and joy. Joy because I could see you. Happy, even if it meant I was suffering. For it was painful to see you dote on Edward, to see you give him what you wouldn't give me.

Eventually the dates became too painful to do either, so I gave up on them, focused on my own boyfriend, on my grades, on my classes. I didn't want to think of you. Didn't want to see you. As if sensing my reluctance to be with you, you pressed more to hang out with me. You wouldn't let me have my peace. I didn't want to turn you down but I had to.

As a sort of goodbye I slept with you one more time. Fucked you hard with a strap on, hoping when you finally slept with Edward, you'd realize he didn't compare to me; that I could utilize a member I didn't have better than the one he did have. And I finally caved into my desire to kiss you. Our relationship was already at an end. What would one more kiss do?

I couldn't stop the tears that flavored my kiss, but I was grateful you didn't comment on them. I think if you did, I would have broken down and confessed all my feelings for you in that moment. You didn't, so you spared me the embarrassment of a rejection.

I thought I was making the right choice by leaving 'us'.

But when I saw you at graduation, breaking down in tears and clinging to me like you were losing a lover, I began to second guess all my attempts at distancing myself from you. I almost wavered in my resolve- I was a stubborn one when the time called for it. But I didn't give in for it was already too late. I was off to travel the world and you were to stay here with Edward.

I no longer had a boyfriend to tie me down, for he had taken to breaking up with me when I called out your name once too many times in bed for it to be normal. And I didn't have the right to ask you to hold me back, for I had lost the privilege when I had turned my back on our friendship even as you tried to revive it back from the dead with friendly text messages and concerned calls and by showing up and supporting my fashion shows.

So I bid you goodbye and tried to ignore the devastation on your face. Instead, I thought of happy memories. Of all the funny hi-jinks we got up to high school, of all the time we spent intertwined together in sweaty and sleepy limbs, of all the times we would simply just be around each other. I was always content just to be around you. But I guess it was never enough for you.

I stayed away from Forks for one whole year before I had to come back. I'd just heard you broke up with Edward and I knew you could use a friend to talk to. But mainly I was being selfish. I knew you would be broken by your loss of relationship with him and that you would be weak and vulnerable and that with him out of the picture, we could go back to how things were between us.

I hated myself for taking advantage of you like that, for being vile and using your broken heart to heal my own. Even as I worshiped you from head to toe, made you reach the highest highs, I hated myself. Hated myself with every gasped breath and moan of my name. Still, I didn't make the choice to stop and if anything I only made it worse. I kept you on a chain and leash. Now that I had you, now that I could see how eager and happy you were when I was around, I wasn't ever going to let you go.

So I poisoned you. Delivered the venom with my lips on yours, tongue wicked and searching to pierce your heart. Broke your body so it could only respond to mine. Corrupted your mind so you would only think of me. I wanted you to love me.

I could never tell if you did.

Leaving you after our nights together was never easy. I would always wonder if you would go back to Edward, if you would cheat on me with some other boy. Work wasn't a good enough distraction to keep me from fretting over that. What if you found someone new to love? What if you let me go again?

I sought comfort and forgetting in the arms of many high class lovers, all who were the opposite of what you looked like. I couldn't stand to make love to a person who looked like you but wasn't. I wanted the real thing, and if I couldn't have it, than it would be something as far as possible from you. But those relationships never lasted long. I only used them for sex, to numb the hurt and longing in my body and soul. And once I was bored with them, once they could no longer help me ignore the pain, I would move on and on, until I was moving on back to you, body aching tremendously with a need for you.

And you didn't know it. You would sit there as we talked before we went upstairs, and you would be all doe eyed and smiling and wouldn't know how much I had to restrain myself to give you some moments of civility before I tore your clothes off. If I had my choice, you wouldn't be wearing clothes as soon as you walked in through my door. But I didn't want to frighten you with the strength of my irrepressible urges.

Sometimes I was worried I was too rough with you in bed but I couldn't help it. I wanted to claim every inch of your flesh as mine, wanted to erase thoughts of anyone else from your mind, wanted you to melt right into me, wanted to fill the hole where the heart you had taken was. You kept my heart locked up with you. I don't know where it is, and I sort of don't wish to find it.

My lips are branding irons, my touch is hot coals and I feel like I am consumed by flames every time we touch. Yet I want this fire; I want to burn alive.

When you touch me, it's always soft and gentle. If I am scorching and burning, you are the aloe, cool and soothing, that tempers the wound. Your touch is calming, and it assures me you need me as well. You paint your desires onto my skin with your pink lips, write your stories with my gasped breaths, sculpt me out of shape with soft and skilled fingers.

And in my mind I think, I love you. Would it hurt less if I didn't?

Or, if I could tell you openly, would it hurt less if I did?

These words, these feelings, are a burden. And I do not know if I will ever be rid of them.

For now, I can't care.