We used to know exactly what to do to each other, the aggressive unraveling that made the world go blank, explode, fill up again. Now I’m the girl who’s not your girl, who you’re shushing in your bed so nobody can hear that I’m there. I’m telling you please in a familiar humid whisper that makes me sound so soft and desperate. And now your fingers are in my mouth.

But you will not have me. This is not us anymore. This is your world. And I don’t belong in it, at least not in this way again—in your favorite tee-shirt, turned on for you, feeling the thick of your beard with my hands that crave to touch every part of you in a way that makes me forget my name.

But she does. She belongs in it.

Just let me. Please.

But you will not.

You tell me what you want to do to me. Every. Single. Thing. “If you think that I don’t want to fuck you, you’re fucking crazy,” you tell me. But my seduction does not work. You are a cocoon. I want to break you open, invade where I used to belong and never leave. But it is an impossible feat. You resist me with your eyes tightly closed, even though I feel how hard you really want me. It’s both evident and torturing.

But we are not the old us—two lovers obsessed, pure and uncomplicated, belonging to each other’s every gritty morsel, without the pulse of anyone else’s heart looming. I wish we could pretend. Keep quiet. Let ourselves believe it’s like old times by letting the buried romance between us live again on fire, if only for a little while?

But you will not. You can’t.

You were good to me. And you’ll be good to her. But if you think that I don’t want to fuck you, you’re fucking crazy. The sound of you saying that hangs in the air, heavy and echoing. It’s a mind-fuck, instead. But that doesn’t make you innocent.

I turn over to stare at the ceiling, defeated with my heart beating everywhere, and still so wanting you. I hate that this room feels like home. I hate how much you’re fighting me. And I hate how we acted like a couple last night—full of flirtatious banter, stories about when this happened and that happened, arms tangled on the street as we carried each other to your place, laughing until it hurt.

I just don’t understand you, your choices. And I hate that you don’t really get them, either. How’s it going to work? You can’t even say. If you at least had a promising answer maybe then I’d be able to let it go, let you go, let this go.

“I don’t know how, ok?” you say to me again, in a way that sounds like even you are so drained from trying to make sense of it. Even as you keep telling me, “Just go ahead, say it” like you need to hear it from me, to prove that what you’re thinking is true, I do not say another word. The uncertainty in your voice speaks for itself. And part of me crumbles, because I know that you were never, ever uncertain of me. And I wish I could understand whatever this is you’re going through.

You fall asleep in the pale blue morning I know all too well in this room, as I lay wide awake on the side of the bed that used to be mine, but now belongs to someone else. Maybe I should feel guilty for being here. Maybe I should feel disgusted with myself for being “that” girl, for trying to have you when you’re somebody else’s lover now. I asked personal questions about something that isn’t my business, and maybe I should feel badly about that, too.

But I don’t. I don’t feel any of those things. And none of it matters to me.

Do what you want to do.

Just know that you’ll never have with her what you ever had with me.