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

I was the product of that night — a constant reminder of the most brutal violation that can happen to a woman.

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

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

which told me that Tyler didn’t ever look me up. I didn’t matter at all to him. And if his actions seven years ago didn’t prove that, the simple statement he just made hammered it home.

I swallowed as I waited for Tyler to respond, the flash of that life-changing moment hitting me like a semi-truck. Still, I stood tall, chin high, and when he didn’t take his chance to explain, I turned on my heel and made my way back inside the house without another look in his direction. He didn’t try to stop me this time.

Healthy relationships were weird.

“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.”

“Maybe, at the core of every human being, there’s a dark, hidden world. Maybe it’s not what we do for a living or our hobbies or our background or our family that makes us who we are, but rather what exists in that dark little world that no one sees. And we can’t ever show it to anyone — not to our best friend or our family or our significant other — because we know in our gut that if anyone ever saw what truly existed there, they’d run. They’d run and curse us and scream at us to stay far, far away.”

“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.

And I knew without a second thought that this would be the hardest thing I would ever do.

“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.”

“Do you know how badly I want you, Jasmine?”

“I guess I’m the collateral damage you don’t mind having in this whole situation?”

“He was a good man to you,” she whispered. “It breaks my heart that you couldn’t see that.”

“You know, you remind me of your mother sometimes. Of when she was younger.”

“It’s the kind of love Morgan’s parents have, the kind of love we all dream about, the kind of love you do everything you can to hold onto.”

Everything comes easy, as if loving that person is as natural as breathing, and just as necessary to live.”

I smiled for what we had. And I promised myself to let go of what we never would.

“But what I thought about most?” he whispered. “Was how you said you loved me. I replayed it a million times — the way your lips formed around the words, the way your eyes were glossed with tears and pain that I’d caused you, the way I felt that declaration so deep inside me that it might as well have been a tattoo on my soul.”