Page 127 of Perfect
“Can you please just listen to what I’m saying?” she asks, her voice pleading.
“Iamlistening, and you’re lying to yourself again,” I say, failing to keep the edge out of my voice. She shakes her head slowly, maintaining eye contact with me.
“I’m not lying to myself, Theo. You are.” My temper breaks.
“No, Alexandria, you’re fuckingwrong,” I snap, pulling my hand out of hers and running my hands back through my hair. “Fuck, Alex! I thought we worked past this! I thought we finally got you over these bullshit trust issues of yours and got you to stop fucking lying to yourself. I don’t know why you’re so insistent about pretending this is something other than what itis, but you need tostop. We’re fuckingconnected, and we’resupposedto be together. Iknowyou can feel it, so you need to stop fucking fighting it.” She stares at me, her wide eyes pitying.
“Oh,Theo,” she says sadly, “That’s the basis of your delusion, isn’t it? You think that we’reconnected? That’s not real.”
“You need to stop with your fuckingbullshit!”
She flushes angrily and points back at me. “No,youneed to stop,” she snaps back. “Listen to me, Theodore.You’rethe one who’s lying to yourself, okay? You’redelusional. You trapped me here and forced me into this fucked up situation where you get to be in somethinglikea relationship with me, and you want it to be real so badlythat you’ve been lying to yourself the whole time, but this is adelusion.”
What is she talking about? Why is it making me so angry to hear this?
“What the fuck are you saying to me?”
Alex makes a loud, aggravated sound. “You hijacked my fucking life, Theo! I deserve to have my own life, and I worked so fucking hard to build something for myself after I left Danny, and you took it all away overnight! I struggled so hard to get to make choices for myself, and then you fucking took awayallof my choices. Don’t you get that?”
That sounds horrible. I would never do something like that to her. Her words start sinking in deeper, and something clicks a little bit.
What she’s saying seems almost possible.
No, she’s lying to me and manipulating me. That’s what she’s doing. I didn’t do that to her.
“Stop fucking lying to me, Alexandria.” Why does my voice sound like that? That’s not what I sound like. Why does she look scared?
“You know what’s so frustrating, Theo? I really liked you when I met you, and I wassoattracted to you, and I wouldhave said yes if you’d justasked me out. You could have gotten to know me like a normal person, and then this would have been a real relationship for both of us, but whatever this is, itisn’ta relationship. Itneverhas been.” Nothing about what she’s saying makes sense, except that it seems like itcouldmake sense, like itshouldmake sense, and that scares the shit out of me. My skin is crawling, and I start to shake involuntarily.
I grab her face in my hands and pull her towards me a little too roughly, and her breath catches. I can tell that she’s afraid of me right now, and I hate it so fucking much, but I need her to stop.
“I’m begging you to stop lying to me, sweetheart,” I say, my voice soft and shaky, and her face contorts in pain.
“I’mnot, and you know that. I know you can tell when I’m lying, so look at me, okay? You did all of that to me. You stalked me, you deluded yourself into thinking this was a relationship, and you trapped me in this situation. This isn’t real, Theo.You took away the option for this to be real.” I stare at her mouth in horror as her teeth don’t touch her bottom lip.
Did she learn her tell?
She has to be lying.
“Please don’t do this to me, honey. This is real, okay? Youloveme, Iknowyou love me, so stop fucking lying to me,please,” I say, my voice cracking on the last word. Alex starts crying and reaches out for me, her hands gripping my wrists hard, her face devastated and angry and resigned. I don’t know why she looks like that, but it scares me. I want to fix it, but I don’t even know what’s going on. I’m so confused.
“Idon’tlove you, Theo.”
Time stops.
“Ican’tlove you,” Alex says quietly, and something deep inside me breaks apart. “It’s not that I don’t want to, because Ido, but you’re so fucking damaged that you needed to take awaythe option for me to leave you. If I can’t choose to leave, then I can’t choose to be here. You choseme, but you won’t let me chooseyou.”
She doesn’t love me.
No, that’s a lie. It has to be a lie.
“Teddy, I need you to know I would have chosen you, okay? If you’d given me the option, I would have loved you. Ipromise.” She’s speaking quickly, like she’s trying to get it all out as fast as she can, and the resigned tone of her voice makes me instantly panicky. “I need you to know that,” she says, her words cracking with tears. She looks so sad and terrified, and everything she’s been saying is bouncing around in my head, crashing into things and knocking them loose. I don’t understand anything she’s saying, but it starts to seem more and more solid, making everything feel less and less real.
She doesn’t love me.
I try to make eye contact with her and ground myself in her presence, but she’s crying too hard to look at me. I don’t want to make her feel like this. I want to make her happy. My understanding of things starts fracturing, and I try desperately to make sense of everything as a black hole opens up in my stomach, pulling in everything good that exists between us. The only thing anchoring me is Alex, but she’s starting to slip from my fingers, so I hold on as hard as I can.
She doesn’t love me.
