Make Me Hate You

by Kandi Steiner

“This is me saying that I would set myself on fire to bring light to all of the dark places within you.” – Beau Taplin

didn’t know a heart could break like that. I didn’t know it was possible to feel every sensation of your chest splitting wide open, of your heart bleeding out, without a single puncture wound being made. I didn’t know there was a pain worse than your high school boyfriend breaking up with you, or your childhood dog passing away, or leaving a school with all your friends to go to a completely new one. But it turned out there was a worse pain — one of a parent leaving you, abandoning you, waving goodbye to you in their rearview mirror like you were just an out-of-town friend they were visiting all along.

But now that I was here, I just wanted to be held. I just wanted to know that someone wanted me in this world.

“You are spectacular, Jasmine Olsen,” he whispered. “Don’t you ever forget that.”

I watched his lips as he rolled them together, his nose as he let out another long, slow, shaky breath.

It was me who should hate him forever, not the other way around.

That’s what his gaze did to me, what it always had done. It stripped me bare.

“You are spectacular, Jasmine Olsen,” he whispered, his eyes closing as my chest split open. “Don’t ever forget that.”

Because I miss you. Because I have missed you, ever since the day you left. Because it kills me to be around you and not touch you, laugh with you, to not be engulfed with everything that you are.”

“I told him he was an idiot and a jerk for taking advantage of you in a moment like that. I mean, sure, I knew he had a crush on you — he had since the day you two met.”

“I would have run to you,” he said softly over the rain, his lips touching mine as he did. “I would have pulled you into me. And I would have never let you go.”

words knifed me between the ribs. “You are my weakness, Jaz,” he husked. “You always have been.”

I couldn’t be just friends with him. And I couldn’t be more. Which meant we only had one option of what we could be. Nothing.

“It’s you who brings me pain. It’s you who is killing me. It’s you, and us,” I added, motioning between us. “It’s this thing that never was, but always is, that never will be and will never not be.”

“I have tried to forget you, Tyler. For seven long years, I ran from you, and from that day, and from all those years we had together. I thought I’d grown. I thought I’d left you behind. I thought I’d succeeded in forgetting you, in giving the fantasy of us up.”

“Please, just make me hate you.”

“Only if you make me hate you first.”

I didn’t notice, and as soon as we were lying down, he backed me up until my head was in the pillows, until he was so deep inside me I felt him in every pleasurable and uncomfortable way there was. It was painful, it was too deep, and it was the most gratifying experience of my life.

We’d always choose this, time and time again, over and over, no matter what.

He’d ruined me. Thoroughly and utterly destroyed me in every consumable way. And I had never wanted anything more.

“After a year went by and you didn’t come back, didn’t answer my texts or my calls… I knew I needed to let you go.” He shook his head. “But fuck, I never learned how to. You’re impossible to forget, Jasmine. Impossible to get over.”

And I fell to my knees, letting out a guttural cry at the devastating pain of losing him again. As if I’d ever really had him, at all.

I felt that kiss like an ice pick to the heart. And it stayed there the rest of the night.

“Loving you has been torture,” Tyler said, stepping fully into me now. His hands swept away from his pockets and reached for me, eliciting a wave of chills over my entire body when his skin finally made contact with mine. He palmed my arms, holding me just above the elbows with his dark eyes searching mine. “But it doesn’t have to be anymore.”

“This isn’t effortless love, but it is real love — and I refuse to let it slip through my fingers again.”

“I’m saying that you are spectacular, Jasmine Olsen, and that I love you with everything that I am.”

So much time wasted, so many moments lost… But our forever was just getting started. And I had a feeling it’d be the best damn one to ever exist.