Bad Wrong Things

by C.P. Harris

Of all the “what-if” scenarios I’d gone through, what-if my lover fucked my kid wasn’t one of them. What-if my son wanted my lover for himself hadn’t occurred to me either.

You’re Superman, Clint. You can do anything.” “There’s always that pesky kryptonite,” I’d said with a self-deprecating grin. “Anything meant to hurt you would have to go through me first.”

“I’m saying we need to find a way to move past our love because I can’t forgive you, I can’t forgive myself, and I won’t choose you. I can’t. I promise.”

“I love you,” he said hatefully, finally starting to regret it. “When you get over this, and I’m gone, it’ll be my love for you that’ll linger forever. That is what you’ll die wishing you could forget,”

I was wrong, but I was angry. I hated him, but also wanted him. I was going to hell, but I’m taking him with me.

I didn’t want to recall a life where he wasn’t in love with me, even if it meant my future recollections would be of the scraps we’d now been left with.

The moments before replayed in my head. “Get the fuck off me.” “Stop.” “No means fucking no.” “Oh, God.” My mouth parted in a silent scream as the implications sank in, and as Clint’s eyelids slammed closed.

“I wish I’d known I would have had a chance with you, Clint. I would’ve saved everything for you.”

I popped the top on the red dry-erase marker and crossed number seventy-two off my growing list. Raven Miller 45 East Port Ln Portland, OR 11278

He probably changed his last name back

“I want you back, and I don’t want to pretend I don’t. It’s been eight long years. I won’t spend another eight seconds beating around the bush or lying to you or myself.”

Tell me what the last two thousand nine hundred and ninety-nine days four hours and,” he checked his watch, “twenty-one minutes have been like for you.

“Remember, we’re not enemies, Raven. We can be as much or as little as you want us to be. We can even be nothing. But we aren’t enemies.”

He’d lost the safety he once found in me, and sometimes, when lying in bed, I could feel it there next to me in the space where it went missing.

“My mother never wanting me doesn’t make me unwantable. It never did,” he whispered over my face. “Her not choosing me doesn’t make me unchoosable. And I no longer need your obsession, or your skin and bones, or to compromise myself in order to feel loved, be loved or to prove my love.”