Make Me Hate You

by Kandi Steiner

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

“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 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.”

“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.”

“So, that’s it, then?” he asked. “That’s all you want to say to me right now?” I love you. I need you. Please, be with me. Choose me. Fuck everyone else. I don’t care who we hurt. I don’t care as long as it’s us in the end.

“They might be more devastated than us.” “Never more than me,” Jacob whispered. “Never more than me.”

“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.”

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

“Did you notice I was wearing sneakers?” he asked. “I was prepared to run you down and pin you to the ground, if I had to.”