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He was mine first.

Okay, so I was with Roy. Big deal. If he really wanted me he could have done something about it.

Oh wait.

He did.

Stupid casino night. I will curse that day forever. It was the day I said no. And I didn’t only say no to a guy, but a life. A life of love and passion. A life of endless summer afternoons on picnic blankets on warm beaches. A life of practical jokes and laughs by wintertime fires. A life of happiness. A life of Jim.

But I’m an idiot, too consumed with my own life (and how I thought it should be since high school) to change it to the way it should be.

“Hi Pam,” says Jim very curtly. She’s at his side.

She is Karen. Karen, the beautiful brunet who stomped into our office and strode into his life, pulls at Jim’s coat jacket as his eyes linger for a moment too long on mine.

My heart pounds, as it usually does when he’s around, so I focus my attention to my computer screen and the reprimands of Angela as she tells Kevin to “stop spilling the M&M’s all over the floor! I’m sick of having multi-colored disks on the bottoms of my shoes!”

But then suddenly, as always, his voice fills my head and I’m lost again and again to its allure.

“What are we doing tonight?” he asks her. I pinch my lips as if they were being threatened by the tools of a dentist.

“Whatever you want,” she smoothly replies, in that stupid, innuendo-filled tone that makes me nauseous with the brightest green envy.

“You,” he replies. Oh, how I hate life! I push my pencil deep into a sheet of loose leaf and close my eyes, praying for a way out.

“Ditto” she says like the teenage version of herself from the eighties, but combines it with a little flirt to make him cave. Her chin is resting on the palm of her hand, a sultry look that I’ve been practicing; Jim smiles whenever she poses like that.

He sits up straight, leans across the desk and whispers, with his fingertips hovering over her chin, “Oh, I like you.” Each word is accentuated with the secretly wicked notion that he knows I’m listening and wants to give pay back for the years that I didn’t.

I talk to my mom later that day during my lonely lunch break, outside on the bench by the loading docks. I pray the for five minutes straight that Darrell doesn’t come out and see me looking as pitiful as I am now. I’m sure he’s still friends with Roy.

“He’ll change his mind,” my mother assures with a hopeful voice but a heavy heart, for she knows the burdens of what I lust for.

“I don’t think so,” I mutter in response, my eyes dark with solitude.

Heartbreak, emptiness and a certain type of ache that just can’t really be explained swathe the novels I read, the scribbles I draw and the tales I hear, but every day as I sip my tea, I wonder why it’s not me.

I stand, stretch my arms and walk back inside, slow to face him again. But here they come, walking toward me. I pause for a moment, wondering if he’ll notice my slouch or the gloom in my eyes. Maybe he’s too busy laughing about her joke, or thinking about what they’re going to do tonight. Maybe he’s too tired to see me standing beneath the tree, or worrying about the work he has to finish within the next four hours. Or maybe he just doesn’t care anymore.

They don’t see me and he reaches for the door. He holds it like a gentleman, his smile courteous and charming as she steps inside. Before he follows, he turns toward me as if he heard something, as if he heard my thoughts screaming his name, pauses for the length of a breath, and trails behind her, his mind left unknowing of my presence.

And all the while, as each minute becomes a battle, each day a war, I remind myself that he was mine first.
Chapter End Notes:
That's it! Hope you liked it!


Dwangie is the author of 25 other stories.



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