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A Stagnation of Love (rewrite)	By : shinigamiinochi Category: Gundam Wing/AC > AU - Alternate Universe Views: 2207 -:- Recommendations : 0 -:- Currently Reading : 0
Disclaimer: I do not own Gundam Wing AC or the characters from it. I am making no money from this story

Chapter List
- 18
- 19
- 20
A Stagnation of Love

Chapter 4

Part 5
　

Regret is a stupid feeling. When you really think about it, regret is just about the most useless human emotion there is. Sure, it can teach you valuable things and show you which actions you should never, ever repeat. Like letting your boyfriend wear you down until you agree to do something for him that you were uncomfortable with to begin with. But honestly? What use is an emotion that you only feel after you've already fucked up? Regret and I are old buddies, but it's never been the least bit helpful. It hadn't given me the wisdom to stop Quatre's suicide and it hadn't given me the strength to break up with Trowa before I had agreed to have sex with him.

I'm not dumb, ok? I may not be smart and I make a lot of dumb choices, but that doesn't mean that, after I make them, I can't look back at least some of them and see why I made them and what the flaws were. I know why I chose to give in to Trowa and, more importantly, I saw how he had gotten me to do it. I had been lonely and depressed and panicking and, like one of those big predators he dreamed of studying one day, he had pushed me into a corner, into a choice that I hadn't wanted to make. To be with him in ever possible way, or in no way at all.

I'm not proud to admit that, at that point, my reasoning hadn't been logical. I had let my fear take control of me and Trowa had attacked me in every single place that I'm vulnerable. All of my insecurities, he had preyed on. Had that been intentional on his part, or just a coincidence? I don't, even now, want to believe that he's capable of that kind of cruelty. But we had known each other for three years. How couldn't he have known how insecure I was, what buttons to push?

I had regretted that decision before he had even finished, maybe even before he had penetrated me. But taking it back then would have been pointless. Trowa was right about one thing: I'm not some blushing, virgin girl. My virginity, and now my lack of one, doesn't mean at thing to me. I don't feel some loss now that it's gone or like I'm tainted now. I just feel regret. Not because my virginity was some kind of shining, precious thing that I was saving for someone special.

But I still felt... I don't know... dirty? Ashamed? Because, whether he had done it intentionally or not, Trowa had manipulated me, and I had let him do it. And yes, I did feel dirty by the sex itself. I felt used. I felt like Trowa had injured me somehow, like he had betrayed me. I felt wounded by the whole thing at the same time that I knew I was being sensitive. It was just sex. I had sated an urge for someone I cared for. I had fulfilled a use. Wasn't that why we were dating, because we needed each other? So why did I feel so wrong afterwards?

I became incredibly depressed that night on the walk back to my house and would feel it hanging over me like a veil made of lead for days, unable to shake it off or ignore it. I was insanely glad when I walked into the kitchen and found that, despite all of the empty beer cans still on the table and large pile of dirty dishes in the sink, Pat was gone and my father was in bed. In the state that I was in, if either had so much as looked at me with their usual snide contempt, I don't think that I would have been able to bite down on my words like I was typically able to. Though I doubt that a beating would have made me feel any worse.

I dumped the car battery and change on the kitchen counter, went to my room to grab some night clothes, and headed back down into the bathroom. I was willing to risk waking someone up for a shower. I felt gross between the way my ass felt, how sweaty I was, and the grime on my hands and knees from the garage floor. I smelled like oil and gas, or maybe that was just in my head, but I couldn't stop smelling that disgusting mixture of the smells from the garage and sex.

When I started to take my clothes off, the large spot of blood on my underwear almost made me panic. I'm no stranger to injuries, but I had never been hurt there before and I didn't know if I should be worried that I had bled that much. If I was hurt badly enough to need a doctor, what would I do? Just the thought of walking to the hospital and telling someone where I was hurt and why made me feel ill. And what would I tell my father? It was the sort of injury that, well, only one thing could really cause it. There was no lying about why my ass was bleeding.

Grimacing as I did it, I lubricated a finger with some soap and slid it inside of myself. I felt a sharp throb of pain, but it was mostly soreness. I was still loose from the sex, enough that getting a finger in was easy, and I almost laughed in relief when my finger came out bloodless. It still hurt, but it wasn't anything that needed attention. Although I wasn't looking forward to needing to go to the bathroom earlier. It felt weird enough, that feeling of looseness in a place that should not feel that way. I wondered how long that was going to last.

I threw my underwear in the bathroom trashcan and turned on the water in the shower. I looked back at the trash can and bit my lip, thinking about either of my parents finding them in there. I could probably lie and say that I had a cut on my ass from getting hurt at any one of my jobs, but I worried that my father would be able to tell that I was lying. He had that innate knack, either because he knew me so well or because he was a cop, but he absolutely hated lying, even more than the few times that I talked back to him, so I tried to avoid it. Worse than that, I thought about him or Pat teasing me, calling me a woman on her period or something equally embarrassing. I fished the briefs back out of the trash can and dropped them on the floor. I'd find a safer place to dispose of them later.

Never before had I ever felt so good just to get clean. It did little to help ease off the sting of what I had just done, but it made me feel physically better at any rate. I even gave myself an extra ten minutes, risking my father's ire and not even caring that the water had gone to barely luke warm. When I was done, as quietly as I could, I snuck into the kitchen and buried my soiled underwear deep enough into the full trash can that no one was going to see it. I made a mental note to take the trash out myself in the morning. My father's door was still closed, to my relief. He usually sleeps really deeply when he goes to bed smashed, which is more and more frequently lately, so the running water must have not woken him.

I had thought that, as exhausted I was from the sex and fear that had ridden me since I had come home from my other jobs, I would at least manage four hours of deep sleep, even if I had a nightmare or two. And given what my night had been like, I was expecting a nightmare or some really weird dreams. Instead, I laid on my bed, stared up at my ceiling and couldn't even get my eyes closed for more than a few minutes at a time. I was never so thankful for the little, battery operated lantern that Quatre had gotten for me the last Christmas we had spent together.

I hated sleeping in the pitch, black dark. I mean, I'm used to it, I spent all of my childhood sleeping in this window-less attic, and I'm not saying I'm scared of the dark. It just makes me feel disoriented, waking up to nothing. Before my father got me my clock, which also runs on batteries, I never knew what time it was when I woke up, and had hurt myself a couple of times trying to find the door to go downstairs. The lantern gave me just enough light to see the ceiling and walls without being too bright to let me sleep. And it didn't add to our electric bill, so I could run it all night.

The soft glow of it illuminated the ceiling of the attic, throwing shadows into weird shapes on it. I would pretend those shapes formed something until I was able to slip off into sleep; a dog, a ship, some snarling monster. The floor of my room is hard wood, but the walls and ceiling are this really cheap plaster that used to be white, but are yellowed with age. My dad talks about painting them, but I know that he never will. The kitchen needs painting long before the attic ever will. The dusky rose color of the walls down there are starting to look a bit brown, especially since a pipe burst last winter and flooded the kitchen. I really hoped that we wouldn't have a incident like that again, I didn't think we could afford it.

Even playing the shadow game couldn't get me to sleep. Every time I closed my eyes, I saw Trowa's angry face when he realized that I hadn't gotten hard or how he had looked when he had more or less informed me that if I didn't agree to have sex with him, we were through. Then I would open my eyes and stare at the ceiling some more. I just couldn't stop thinking about it, no matter how much I wanted to just forget about it. My feelings were such a confusing cluster fuck, I couldn't sort them out.

I was angry at Trowa for pushing me. I know that sounds like a contradiction since I was the one that had given in to him in the first place and I was the one that felt guilty about leading him on all the time, but I was angry at him, whether it made sense or not. I was angry at myself for giving in, for not being able to give him what he wanted even at the end, and most of all, I was angry at myself for not being able to enjoy it.

Yes, I hadn't wanted to have sex to begin with, but shouldn't I have felt something when I had finally surrendered to it? Was Trowa right? Was I actually not gay? I also felt angry at him for lying to me. He had kept saying that it would feel good, that it wouldn't hurt, and both of those things were wrong. But had he really been lying, or was he just ignorant or was something wrong with me?

I felt ashamed for all of the reasons why I was angry; I felt ashamed that I was such a crappy boyfriend, I felt ashamed that I had made this choice and it hadn't even made Trowa happy. I felt ashamed that I had compromised with myself and now I felt all this regret. I felt ashamed that I still felt fear when I thought about sex, even though the unknown of it had been stripped from me.

I felt guilt. Out of all the things that I was feeling that night, I think that was the worst of it. I felt guilty because... because I had slept with the boy that Quatre had loved. How stupid was that? Quatre was dead, what did he care? But I had the same exact feeling that I had had when I had started to date Trowa, like I was cheating on my best friend. Only now it was about a thousand times worse. If Quatre could see me at that moment, would he have hated me for taking what should have been his? Taking it and twisting it into something bitter and terrible? I was sure that, if he had been in my place, having sex with Trowa, it would have been something special.

Maybe I was just biased and chose to see it like that, but I bet that, had Quatre been the one that Trowa had been dating, he wouldn't have brought him down to some dirty garage and fucked him on the cold, cement floor. I bet he wouldn't have called him a freak. Of course, Quatre probably would have liked the sex, so he wouldn't have had a reason to call him that.

And I felt guilty about how fucking bitter that thought made me feel. How sick was that? I was bitter that the guy I was dating, whom I didn't love even half as much as Quatre had, would have treated Quatre better. Quatre, who had killed himself because that same guy had hurt him. It was just this endless cycle inside of me, feeling guilty and bitter, and the bitterness fueling my guilt more and more. Was I jealous of Quatre, of the possibilities that he had had? How could I? I didn't love Trowa.

But then I would remember how they used to look at each other, talk to each other about nothing at all, bumble around like two newborn deer trying to walk, and how happy they had both looked even while stumbling. And then I thought about my own relationship with Trowa, how closed off we were, how we never really talked about anything important that needed to be said, how angry we got at each other and I just wanted to cry.

And I felt confused. Confused by those emotions and confused about where we were going to go from there on. Did we even have a future together? I had been sure, for awhile, that we didn't because of our age difference, but did we even have a short term future? Would Trowa want to continue on with our relationship after the disaster of that night, did I want to? I am a bit ashamed to admit that, at some point in the small hours of the morning, the thought of Trowa breaking up to me made me feel as much relief as it did panic. I didn't want to be alone, but... I felt worn down. Depressed and tired.

I was tired of him being angry at me, I was tired of feeling sad and bitter that I couldn't be what he wanted. I felt like I was on this rollercoaster that I couldn't get off of. I was used to not being happy since Quatre had died, but I couldn't seem to get used to the mire of up and down that my relationship with Trowa was putting me through. I didn't know what to do. I had thought, in that childish way of mine, that having sex with him would make me feel better, that if I could just clear that one hurdle for him, it would make things better. I had not thought for a single second that it would make it worse.

I was still as confused and conflicted as I had been from when we had first started dating. Another thing that had never come to me, and it should have, was the possibility that Trowa would want to have sex with me again. Why had I thought that I would just need to get it over with and then things would fall into place? I still didn't want to break up with him, but I didn't want to have sex with him again. I couldn't bear thinking of going through all that again. My fear of sex hadn't gotten better, it had gotten worse.

What was even more frightening than my sexual hang ups and not knowing if I physically could get aroused, that I might actually be impotent or something was that the idea of breaking up with him was not as terrifying as it had once been. I still couldn't do it, but it was less of a knee-jerk reaction. I had somehow stopped thinking of how horribly lonely I would be again and more of how I might be able to live with it. I still cared for him, but that bitterness in me that he had put there when he had called me a freak seemed to be growing. I didn't know who to hate more for putting it there, him or me.

I should have called it off at that point. I think anyone else would have. How could you stay in a relationship with someone you were starting to seriously resent? But I kept remembering how it felt when he just touched my hair or kissed me gently, how warm my chest would get. I liked those things so much. And maybe... maybe the sex would get better? Maybe I would get used to it like I got used to my father hitting me. The thought of trying to do it again made me feel sick, and that should have been a sign of the kind of cliff edge I was standing on, but I still hadn't reached the point where I could make up my mind without being pushed into it.

I tossed and turned all night and early morning with those kinds of thoughts in my head. If Trowa didn't want to break up with me over my lackluster performance in bed, minus the bed part, what would I do the next time that he wanted to fuck? I think that I had gotten to the point where I couldn't tell him no anymore and that horrified me. I felt like he had raped me, like he had taken away even my ability to have an opinion on anything in our relationship. He had gotten me to consent once, so he could do it again and how I felt about it meant nothing.

My clock cheerfully informed me that four am had arrived and I got up to change my clothes and put on my sneakers. I left the house and ran all the way to the park, and then I just kept running along the jogging trail. It helped for a little while. I focused on where my next footstep was taking me, got lost in the sound of the birds waking up and the sight of the early sun streaming through the trees and not on why my heart was beating so fast, why my head hurt so much.

Somehow, I ran for an hour and a half before I realized how much I was hurting and had to slow down to a brisk jog. I started to turn around on the trail and head back. The last thing I needed was to let my emotional turmoil make me late for school and since I had skipped dinner the night before, I really need to get something in my stomach, even if it was just water and a piece of toast. Then I thought about school. I thought about walking through those front doors, about passing Relena in the hallway, and, horror of all horrors, I thought about facing Trowa. I thought about how he had seen me naked and how I had felt him inside of me. I thought about his angry glare and I thought about him wanting to talk about it, about him wanting to do it again.

I'm not proud to admit that at that point in my run, I had to find a bush to throw up behind. I told myself that it was just a combination of a lack of anything in me except for the water I had drank out of the bathroom faucet before leaving the house and my lack of sleep. I hadn't, after all, had much sleep at all that week between no sleep the night before and the sleep deprivation I had forced myself into during the weekend. I told myself that, but I didn't believe a word of it.

I didn't really feel like eating after throwing up on my run, but I still dared to take the time to run back home and make a quick breakfast of buttered toast and water and made my lunch. We barely had any food at all, but I managed to save two slices of bread, some turkey, shredded cheese, and a couple of leaves of lettuce for a half-assed sandwich. My father was awake and puttering around the kitchen, looking fit to throw things from an obvious hangover, so I worked quickly.

As I was stuffing my sandwich into a brown paper bag, he noticed the car battery on the counter and glanced at me. For a moment, I thought he was going to say I got the wrong one or something else to start a fight and I tensed, paper bag clenched in a death grip, ready to bolt if I had to, but he just took a swig of his coffee and pushed past me to go outside, no doubt to grab the day's newspaper. I grabbed my book bag from my room and left without so much as a terse word between us. I could almost believe that the day would turn out alright.

That feeling was bolstered when I managed to get through the entire day without a single run in with Relena. She and her gaggle of friends, or female admirers, sycophants, whatever you wanted to call them, were too busy assaulting the new addition to her class. I can't remember his first name, but his last name was Yani or Yuy or Yiomi, something oddly exotic like that. I remembered thinking that he must be a foreigner, despite the rumors about him, and was surprised to see that he while he have a fairly Asian look to him, his eyes were a deep blue, all for the two seconds I had glimpsed at him. He was in a couple of my classes, but anything Relena got worked up over, I didn't want any part of and just ignored the lot of them. All I knew was that, thanks to him, Relena wasn't paying any attention to me.

I wasn't naive enough to think that that would be permanent. There would be only two outcomes, like there always was. Relena would either grow bored with him and resume to tormenting me again or she would pull him into her fold and he would become one of my bullies. Either way, he was just another face in the crowd to me. I was too worked up into knots over Trowa to pay attention to anything else anyway.

I didn't see much of Trowa that day, either, and for some stupid reason, I just assumed that it was going to be like it was when I thought he hadn't wanted to see me and we would just avoid each other for a few days or maybe a week. Don't know why I thought that, it wasn't like we were fighting exactly. Or maybe we were. Hell if I even knew anymore. If that was what being in a relationship is like, I never want to date anyone else. I have some great memories of us, but really, the emotional tornado that was our relationship just fucking drained me. So I was a bit surprised when I ran into my boyfriend during my last period: gym. The very last place I would have thought I would end up seeing him.

I have probably written this before, but it bears repeating: I fucking hate gym. Hate it. I hated it back when Quatre was alive and I will probably hate it up until the day that I graduate. I am not lazy or fat or even uncoordinated. Sure, I'm not athletic by any means and I couldn't tell you the rules of football if my life depended on it, but I've been told that I am a fairly quick and agile person when I need to be. I enjoy running to some degree. But for me, gym is a nightmare, especially when we have team sports. I always seem to end up a target. And for some reason, as if having Zechs in my gym classes wasn't bad enough, I always end up on the opposite team to him. And boy, is Zechs a pro at turning every team activity into an all out war zone against underclassmen and people like me that are smaller than he is or he just plain doesn't like. He can turn a single game of tag football into full out assault. And I mean that literally.

I was having a perfectly neutral day until I walked into the gymnasium that afternoon and found, to my utmost horror, that we were playing dodge ball. Sometimes I think that gym class was thought up through an act of sadism. I get the need to make kids active, but really? I can understand track, football, baseball, yoga, and hell, I can even understand the stupid weight lifting classes and tennis. But fucking dodge ball? It was like an excuse for the bigger kids to beat the shit out of the younger or slighter ones without having to go to the principal's office for it. And our gym teacher, out of his infinite wisdom, never seemed to have a problem with us choosing our own teams.

By the end of the period, I felt like Zechs could have punch the shit out of me and it would hurt just as much as him lobbing those stupid, goddamned rubber balls at me like I was an especially pesky fly he was trying to flatten. And since we had to play to the end of the block, it didn't matter how many times I had been hit, as soon as one team was depleted, we got to play all over again. When the bell rang, my arms were almost entirely black and blue from using them to defend my face, which was miraculously untouched.

Even my legs and stomach had a few bruises. But somehow, that was ok over my getting punched? I didn't really see the difference. I was ready to take my obligatory shower and head off to the library to spend the next hour before my first shift started, and hopefully the hot water would soothe some of my soreness, when Coach Horner called out to me.

"Maxwell! Help Barton put the equipment away!" he bellowed from the other side of the gymnasium just as I was making my way to the shower room.

I spun and stared at him with wide eyes. Barton? He had to mean some other kid in my class, but there weren't any other Bartons that I knew of. Sure enough, when I glanced towards the equipment room past Horner's shoulder, Trowa was standing there, his arms full of the traffic cones that we had used to separate the two teams' playing fields. His face was completely neutral as he looked at me, almost bored. I couldn't tell if he was still mad at me with how good of an actor that he was.

I knew that I couldn't show that I was surprised to see him or apprehensive. I wouldn't give a single person even a shred of suspicion that we were anything more than passing acquaintances, so I shrugged and started to pick up the dodge balls strewn around the gymnasium. Trowa disappeared into the equipment room with the cones, but in my peripheral view, I saw him come back out to help me.

I felt completely tense, insanely worried that Zechs would make some snide remark to us as he strode past, no doubt on his way to share a smoke with his buddies outside the school, but he didn't even look at either of us. Trowa and I were on opposite ends of the gym, working towards each other, so we looked as distant and ambivalent towards each other as I did with all of my schoolmates. I didn't relax until the rest of the class filed out and Coach Horner disappeared into his office. By then, Trowa and I were standing mere feet apart, picking up the last of the large, rubber balls.

"What are you doing here?" I dared to ask him only when we were the only two people in the gymnasium within earshot.

I made sure to keep my tone flat and devoid of any accusation. Had he come here because he wanted to talk to me about the previous night? But that just sounded egotistical of me. He would never risk anyone catching on to our relationship just so he could talk to me. He could have called me at home if he had wanted a chat. But still, some part of me wished that his presence there was because he had been worried about me or that he was planning on apologizing for what he had done. But even then, somehow I knew that he wouldn't. I didn't even know if he felt sorry or if he felt he had done something wrong. Hell, I wasn't even entirely sure if he had.

"I'm Coach Horner's teacher's aid," he explained to me, taking the balls that I had collected to put in a sack, "Apparently that sort of thing looks good on a college application. I usually work with the class block before yours, but I just have a reading period this block for the next couple of days, so I switched classes."

He suddenly got this light, little blush on his cheeks and it didn't take much to put things together from that. He hadn't needed to change blocks, no matter what lie he had pulled out of his ass to tell Horner. He had switched because it was my class. I felt a heat blossom on my cheeks and I was sure that I was blushing harder than he was, especially on my fair skin. I wondered if he had watched Zechs pelt dodge balls at me or if he had only shown up towards the end of class to help with the clean up. He had seen me being bullied before, so it wasn't a big deal, but it still embarrassed me.

"I need your help putting this stuff away, if you don't have anywhere to go right away?" he asked, those dark green eyes of his not meeting my own in shyness.

I almost rolled my eyes at him at his obvious ploy to get me alone. It wasn't like there was anyone near us to hear what we were saying anyway, but if it made him feel better, I wasn't going to say anything. I took the sack of dodge balls from him to maintain the illusion and followed him into the equipment closet. It was a musty room, completely cluttered with bins of different balls and gymnastics equipment everywhere. There was a huge, blue mat on the floor that covered most of the room and when Trowa closed the door behind him, it would have been completely dark if not for the little window letting in the afternoon light. It almost made Trowa's eyes seem to glow when I turned to look at him.

"Where do you want these?" I lifted up the sack I was carrying.

"There is fine," he pointed to one of the bins.

As I turned and dropped the sack where he had told me to, I felt him walk up behind me, so close that if I took a step back, I would collide into him and I could feel his body heat through the thin, old t-shirt I wore for gym. A chill shot through me as I realized just how close to me that he was and I couldn't help but remember the last time we had been that close, the heavy feel of his chest against my back, the sound of his hips hitting my bare skin as he had thrust into me. That chill wasn't from any kind of pleasure or even anticipation, but fear. I was scared of Trowa getting near me? When the hell had that happened and why? We had already done it, so what was there for me to feel nervous about anymore?

I turned around to... I don't know what. Tell him to back off? That was stupid and I would never admit to him that he made me wary. He would make fun of me, like he had before when I hadn't wanted to put out, or he would get angry and call me a child again. Maybe I had just intended to ask him if he was still angry with me for not enjoying the sex like he obviously had, but as soon as I turned to face him, he pressed his lips against mine.

Compared to what the sex had been like, that kiss was wonderful and warm and, best of all, familiar. I melted into it and responded when his kiss became long and slow, gentle but somehow insistent at the same time. I pressed myself to him and wasn't even ashamed of it, or how good it felt when he placed his strong hands on my shoulders, grasping them with a gentleness that had made his fucking seem even harsher and colder. I can only accurately describe our making out as tender.

Some part of me protested to the kiss, reminding me that I was supposed to be mad at him, even scared of him, that I was bitter and hurt and I had no business feeling any affection for the same boy that had bullied sex out of me the night before, but I ignored it. Kissing him, I wanted to cry and I felt some very unpleasant emotion constrict my chest.

Suddenly, I was very, achingly tired. I felt beaten and as worn thin as the shirt I was wearing. I didn't want to fight him anymore. I just couldn't do it, I didn't have the strength in me anymore for the constant battle with him. It seemed like all we had done lately was fight and make up, fight and make up. Between Trowa and my father, I couldn't deal with it anymore. What was even the fucking point? I never stood up for myself anyway. I never had the guts to tell Trowa that I was pissed off and hurt because of him. There wasn't even a point to that, either.

Why couldn't I just have those small, intimate moments when we were kissing? I liked those moments, they made me happy. Why couldn't I just have that with him? I just wanted to be happy again, to pretend like someone gave a shit about me again, but I just kept thinking about how Trowa had called out Quatre's name, even when he had been fucking me, and I reminded myself that it wasn't my happiness to feel.

No one gave a shit about me. That was just an illusion that I clung to, like the illusion that Trowa clung to, that he hadn't fucked up and gotten the boy the he had loved killed. But there was still this tiny part of myself that hoped and prayed that that wasn't true. Even after Trowa had called me Quatre, I still wanted to believe that he saw me, at least some of the time, that he cared about me, even just a little bit. While that, in itself, scared me, it was better than knowing that I really was just a shell to him, something that he could use and throw away if he wanted to. Because while I was using him, too, I did care about him. I enjoyed being with him, when he wasn't being an ass to me, and I didn't have to pretend that he was someone else.

"Thank you for last night," Trowa said shyly when he pulled away from me, "I... it was amazing... I'm sorry, I should have said that then, I was just so frustrated that... I just don't understand..."

He got that look in his eyes again, the same one that he had gotten when he had belittled me until I had caved, and the same one he had had when he had realized that I wasn't aroused, like he was exasperated at me, like he thought that there was something wrong with me. I felt this hot burst of embarrassment and horror when I realized he was actually going to try to talk about my inability to get it up when he had liked it, enough to get off at any rate.

"Please, can we not talk about it?" I begged him desperately.

I didn't want him to realize just how fucked up I was, that he hadn't been the reason why I hadn't gotten an erection, that in my sixteen years of life, I had never had one. I thought that he was going to get angry at me again for brushing him off, but he must have not wanted to talk about it very much, either, because he shrugged and kissed me again, more interested in making out than in talking to me.

Hell, I was more interested in making out, too, but most guys would if the alternative was talking about the possibility that they were impotent. I became especially interested when one of Trowa's hands cupped the right side of my face and slowly slid down my neck. The slight caress pressed on the still healing bruises my father had put there, but the shiver that ran through me wasn't from pain.

Then it wasn't his hand on my neck but his lips, pressing against my damaged skin, kissing and lightly nipping me. I couldn't help the tiny, startled gasp that escaped from me. He didn't usually dare to kiss my neck, especially not that hard since it was such a noticeable and stereotypical place for hickies, but with my dark bruises there, no one was going to notice and I let myself enjoy the attention there without worry for once.

It hurt, but I didn't care. It felt too good, someone touching me like they actually cared. Why did I like that when I didn't like sex? I couldn't understand it. I felt a warm jolt when those hungry lips found their way between my neck and shoulder. When Trowa tugged on my shirt, leading me to lay down on the mat, I let him. My heart rate began to speed up, remembering what had happened the last time that he had gotten me on the ground, but I was on my back this time and for some stupid reason, that didn't frighten me as much. Just because he wasn't ordering me to get on my hands and knees again, it didn't mean that he didn't want to have sex again. But we were at school, it wasn't like he would dare try something, right?

Still, my heart thudded almost painfully in my chest as Trowa loomed over me, kissing me deeply and earnestly, and I felt his hand slide under my shirt. It was still neutral territory, nothing more than we had done before, so why did I feel so off kilter? Were things really so different just because we had had sex? And for that matter, why did I feel trepidation at all? I knew what sex was going to be like, I had gotten through it before, so there was no reason for me to be scared anymore. But I was and I didn't know how to conquer it. I might as well have never had agreed to have sex with Trowa in the first place for all of the good it had done.

I felt him fumble excitedly at the button and zipper to my jeans, but I didn't fight him. I didn't know what he intended, if he was really going to fuck me right there in the gym or if he still just wanted to fool around a little. It wasn't until I felt his hand slide under my underwear and wrap around my dick that the pure ridiculousness of what was happening hit me like a truck.

We were at school, messing around in a place that had the potential to be very public. We didn't have the key to this room and we couldn't lock the door like we had in the studio. Anyone could just walk in and see what we were doing. Hell, Coach Horner was still around and soon, the various team sports would start. Someone was going to come in to get their equipment eventually, and here we were, lying on a mat, kissing, with Trowa's hand in my pants.

But what frightened me the most wasn't the possibility of being discovered, although that was pretty terrifying, it was that Trowa didn't seem to care. He was the one that was always so careful, he was the one that always seemed scared of someone finding out that he was gay, that we were even friends, let alone dating. He was the one that had thrown Quatre away because of his fucking reputation. But there he had gotten me into that equipment room so we could make out, not me.

Was he really that hard up, that desperate for sex that he would ignore the danger of doing this at school? I could almost laugh about it if it didn't scare me. I had thought that having sex with him would... would mellow him out a little, that he would be less eager, that it would sate something in him. Instead, it had seemed to make him bolder.

I jolted upright when I felt him start to stroke me, and when I realized just how exposed we were, but he still had a hand on my chest, under my shirt, and he pushed me back down. That one little motion of force only flamed the fire of fear in me, and it angered me a little. Really, it wasn't anything more, anything worse than how he had gotten me to agree to have sex with him. And it wasn't any different than the first time he had tried to ignore my protests, but it didn't bother me any less.

His hand on my cock, gently moving up and down it, felt so weird. He had touched me down there before, but I wasn't pushing him away this time, I wasn't sure if I could. Protesting against him feeling me up felt so petty and tiny compared to what I had let him take from me the night before. I had only touched myself that one time, but this felt much different. In a way, I guess it could have felt good. The longer I went without getting aroused, the harder he stroked me and it made my stomach feel hot.

But it wasn't enough to get me hard, and it just made me feel sick inside, how stressed I was between his attempts to make me feel good, his insistence on that, like he was trying to prove something to one of us or maybe both of us, and the possibility of being discovered. That sickness roared in me when his other hand left my chest to move down my back. My legs trembled a little when I felt that large hand slip down the back of my jeans, those long, strong fingers going between my ass cheeks. He must have thought that my shaking meant that I was enjoying what he was doing, because his grip tightened a little and I felt one of his fingers probe the flesh around the hole he had fucked the previous night.

I couldn't help the hiss I let out then as a jolt of pain shot through me down there. I was still unbelievably sore and I had to squirm away from that questing finger. I wasn't in any kind of shape for what he wanted, not the fingering and sure as hell not any kind of sex. I had to wonder, if he pushed me again, would I let him? Would I let him keep fucking me until I was bloody and damaged down there? Did I want this relationship that badly?

Suddenly, I heard voices, light and sounding far away, outside the door and I panicked. I don't know if I panicked for myself or for him, but I grabbed desperately at his hand and pried it off my still unresponsive member.

"Stop!" I urged and my voice didn't sound nearly as strong as I had wanted it to, it never did.

I could never understand why it was so damned hard to stand up to him. Trowa was only a year older, and nowhere near as imposing as my father, but every time I told him not to do something, my insides turned to water. I never wanted to upset him and that time wasn't any different. When his gaze turned angry, as it always did when I pushed him away, I wanted to find some place dark to crawl into. I never felt afraid of him, I just felt ashamed and inadequate. I was honestly more scared of the obvious, hard bulge in his jeans that I could feel pressed against my leg than him personally.

"What do you mean 'stop'?" he asked with a voice like ice, pulling his hand out of my grip like my touch was dirty to him, "Now what the hell is wrong?! Am I not going slow enough for you, princess?!" he sneered, "What the fuck do you want from me-"

My face flushed red hot as he started to rant at me. He had been contrite moments ago, like he always was days after he would blow up at me. He was never sorry in the way that I wished that he would be. He never said that he would try not to do it again and he never seemed to care to actually fix things, but he did typically seem remorseful about the things that he said when he got mad at me. But then the second I pushed him away or told him no, his anger would come out like this.

Who was the real him anymore? The soft spoken boy that I had met three years ago, the sweet one that would kiss me like there was nothing else he cared for doing, or the one that was looked at me with hatred, all because he was hard up and I wouldn't let him have his way? Was the poorly tempered one just a frustrated part of himself that had been born some time after Quatre's death, or was that really how he was now, and nothing would bring that shy boy back? Did I really want to continue being with him if that latter person was all he was anymore?

"Hey, Trowa!" a call from mere feet away from the closed door made the both of us freeze.

Trowa's face went completely pale and the anger that had been etched across it drained away into terror. I had never seen his eyes go so wide before. I could have almost felt sorry for him, if my own heart weren't trying to burst out of my rib cage in my own fear.

"Fuck!" he swore under his breath and was on his feet in mere seconds.

"Are you sure that he's still here?" a second male voice asked.

My hands were moving before my brain kicked back in, pulling my shirt down and fumbling with shaking hands with my zipper. It kept getting caught on my underwear.

"Yeah," the original voice confirmed, "Coach said he didn't see him leave."

I finally got my jeans closed. My heart was racing so fast, vomiting seemed like a sure thing. How the fuck were we going to get by them? There was only one exit to the equipment room and they were standing right outside it. There was no way in hell we were going to be able to convince these boys that I was just helping Trowa put stuff away. School was long since over and the door was closed. Plus, even if I had righted my clothes, I couldn't do a thing about my blush. And what if Trowa couldn't hide his erection, if he still had one?

It wouldn't even matter. The two of us coming out of that tiny room was going to look suspicious, or at least get some nasty rumors started. Not like anyone needed an excuse to point the finger at me. People had been calling me a fag since I was twelve years old. Even if it was known throughout the school that it was just a rumor, it was one that was easy and fun to believe. After all, I had been Quatre's best friend. Trowa could have been any random boy and they would make the same accusations.

"Maybe he's getting the equipment for the football team together. Don't they meet in like, ten minutes?" a third voice piped in.

They were closer now and I could only imagine them walking towards our little hiding spot. I jumped to my feet, ready for who even knew what, and I turned to Trowa, hoping that he had some kind of plan. I watched in shock as he grabbed the ledge under the row of windows on the far side of the room, got one of them open, and squeezed through it, disappearing like some kind of ninja or ghost.

He left me. Trowa had left me behind. The ledge that he had used to escape was too tall for me to reach, he had barely managed to grab hold of it himself. That he had managed to lift his entire body up there would have been more impressive if he hadn't abandoned me to save his own ass. I didn't know if even could do the same. I wasn't as strong as he was and thanks to the amount of times I had had my arms broken, I never would be able to do something like that without an incredible amount of effort, if at all. It would be a moot point anyway. I wouldn't have the time to stack anything to reach that ledge.

I couldn't get over the fact that Trowa had done that to me. I think that I couldn't wrap my head around it was more shocking to me than what he had actually done. Hadn't he done the same thing to Quatre, turned his back on him to save face? Him not being there wasn't even going to save me from those boys finding me in there. The window was jarred open facing the outside instead of the inside, a pretty glaring statement that something or someone had gone out of it. I was still blushing, but from fear, and there was a me-sized indent on the mat on the floor. Even an idiot could put two and two together, it would just be a matter of figuring out who my 'partner' was. In essence, I was fucked. And, of course, hilariously, Trowa was the one who had fucked me.

I kept replaying it in my head, the sight of Trowa running off. He could have turned around and helped me through the window. It would have been a close call, but I'm fast. We could have gone out together. Instead, he had decided to not risk his precious hide for me. Or he had just not thought of me at all and had bolted like a frightened deer? I don't know which is worse.

I didn't spend more than a second cursing out my piece of shit boyfriend in my head, I couldn't afford the time. I frantically looked around for a place to at least hide, but there wasn't a closet or any place convenient that wouldn't take too much time to get to. The closest things to me were the mat, a low pommel horse, a wired cage full of soccer balls, and a balance beam.

The squeaking sound of someone turning the door knob on the only door in the room made my heart plummet into my intestines. I dropped to my knees and rolled off the mat, shoving myself under the pommel horse. I managed to hook the cage with my foot and push it so it created a barrier between me and the door. With instincts almost as old as I was, I curled myself into as small of a ball as I could. A smaller target, only instead of a punching bag, I was now just a visible target. If I hadn't been so senseless with panic, I would have given myself away by laughing. I never would have thought that all those years of hiding from my drunken father in whatever crevice of the house I could squeeze into would have come in handy in some other situation. If I got out of this, I would owe it to him. How fucked up was that?

With the cage full, they would have to walk around it and crouch to look under the horse in order to actually see me, which was entirely possible, actually. But then the door was opening and I had run out of time to find a better place to hide myself. There was a tiny gap in the cage where I could see what was going on at the doorway. Three boys, all of them in Trowa's grade, walked in. I recognized two of them as being his previous teammates, but I didn't know the third beyond that he was a senior.

"Hey, Barton!" one of them called out.

"You sure he's even in here?" the one that I didn't recognized asked with a bored tone.

"He's got to be," the first one responded.

I felt my hands shake when he walked into the room, towards where I was cowering. He stopped about two feet in front of me. I could see his legs there, feet incased in well worn, but expensive athletic sneakers. I suddenly realized how hard and fast that I was breathing and clamped both my hands across my mouth. My heart was a thundering locomotive.

For a moment, I realized how stupid I was being. It wasn't like they were going to be beat me. Although, if they thought for a second that I had been fooling around with another boy in there, they might. But it wasn't like I was hiding from my father, and really, if they found me under there, it would look even more suspicious.

All he had to do was glance over to where I was. The horse was a small space and it didn't hide me completely. He would no doubt see my sneakers or something and then it would all be over. Zechs would hear that I had been in there with someone and it would give him the fuel to make my life even more of a hell. Not that he needed a reason, but when Zechs Darlian was inspired, well, he got creative.

Why the hell wasn't this guy moving? Did he see me already? I couldn't take just watching his legs and wondering what the fuck he was doing and dared to lean forward to get a glimpse of him. Probably not the smartest move on my part, but that whole mess was driving me nuts. My heart practically stopped when I saw that he was looking up at the open window with an expression that was half confused, half suspicious, like he realized that there was something out of place, but couldn't figure out what it was.

Fuckfuckfuck. Had he already realized that something weird was going on? Those old instincts that had, so far, kept me from being discovered, almost got me caught just then. I was so used to dealing with my father, so used to having to either hide completely, or simply outrun him that I had the urge to dart past the boy and his friends. Of course, I wasn't trying to get away from them, I was trying to avoid detection all together. All I could do was stay where I was and mentally scream at them to go the fuck away.

"C'mon, he's not here," the third boy said in an annoyed tone of voice.

"Where the hell could he have gone?" the one closest to me grumbled, but I watched in complete and utter relief as he turned around and followed the other two back out the door, lazily not shutting it behind them.

I watched them from the open door and what little I could see through the cage until they disappeared across the gym. Even watching them go, I felt on edge. Anyone else could walk in. I felt so shaky and unsure of what to do. I couldn't just walk out of the room and run across the gym and hope no one would see me. I think that I might have stayed where I was for hours, even daring to miss work, if reality hadn't filtered into my adrenaline soaked brain.

"Maybe he's getting the equipment for the football team together. Don't they meet in like, ten minutes?"

"Fuck!" I hissed as I realized how lucky I had been and how, eventually, that luck was going to run out and someone would be coming into the equipment room to set things up for the football team's practice.

I got to my feet, feeling hollow and tired and, quite frankly, like a total idiot. How the hell was I going to get across the gymnasium, take a shower, and grab my stuff without being detected?

"Stop being so fucking stupid," I swore at myself as it came to me, like a slap across the face, that I was panicking over nothing.

Who the hell cared if I took a shower and got my things? That wasn't suspicious. Sure, it was after class and I wasn't on any sports team, but I could pull some lame excuse out of my ass. All I needed to worry about was getting out of the equipment room without being seen. How hard could that be?

As it turned out, not even remotely hard. And the ease of which I did it only made me feel like a bigger moron for panicking. As I crept to the open door and peered out of it, there was not a single person in the gym to see me. I didn't even run. I just walked out of there, bolder than I was actually feeling at that moment, and made my way into the locker room. I rushed through a shower, just enough that I got my fear-sweat off of me and wouldn't reek for work, grabbed my things and left without a single person so much as noticing my presence. I felt like the biggest loser on the planet.
*****
It's probably a good thing that all of my bosses owe my father favors, or at least are friends with him or whatever the hell else is up with their relationships, because with how I was working those two weeks, I probably should have been fired. Between my bouts of insomnia and the two... no, technically three fights that Trowa and I had had in the last month, my head wasn't exactly focused on waiting tables and unloading cargo. I just kept replaying in my head the fact that Trowa had thrown me to the wolves. That neither of us had been caught doing something that no one with any common sense would risk doing was irrelevant. Was he even worried? Did he regret what he had done? Or did he just not give a fuck and was only relieved that his precious reputation was still in tact?

After screwing up two orders, Sal demoted me to dish duty, which did absolutely nothing to distract me from my runaway thoughts. My shift at the diner didn't fare much better, with the same results, although one glance at Andre told me that what he really wanted to do was send me home. I think that I was in some kind of luke warm version of shock where all I was capable of feeling was betrayal and disbelief. I don't know why it bothered me so much. Things hadn't exactly been wonderful between the two of us lately.

For some reason, my anger at him for doing that to me didn't even filter in until later that night at the factory. It was just we well. With the sudden rage that I felt, I probably would have broken some dishes. A lot of them. Instead, I had some nice crates to break open and throw around. By the time that my shift was over, I had busted up every one of my knuckles, somehow managed to bruise my arms even worse than they already were, cut myself in various places with the crowbar I was using no less than six times, and had apparently taught a couple of my coworkers some new swear words. My boss thought that I was a walking accident waiting to happen and Solo couldn't decide if he wanted to talk me through it or just laugh at me.

Either way, I was relieved to be leaving work and exhausted from my anger. I was actually looking forward to going to sleep for once and was sure I would actually manage some. I didn't even want to make myself any food. Technically, all I wanted was to slam my fist into Trowa's face before I exploded and did something stupider than just embarrassing myself at work.

The very last thing I expected to be greeting me when I got home was my father, wide awake at that hour, standing in the kitchen with phone in hand, and looking thoroughly pissed off.

"I don't give a fucking shit," he was yelling into the receiver, "if you don't stop calling here-"

His stony, grey eyes flickered to me and I knew that the only reason why I wasn't on the floor with a broken nose or a black eye was that whoever he was talking to would hear it. But when he saw me there and all that rage was suddenly focused on me, I thought that he might risk it anyway.

"This fucker has been calling every goddamned hour!" he roared at me, thrusting the phone at me like he was considering hitting me with it, "I have work in the morning, you piece of shit, and so does your mother! This isn't a fucking call center and if you don't deal with it, I'll haul him in for harassment, you got that?!"

I didn't need for him to say a single word more. There was only one person who would ever call my house looking for me, especially every hour. I felt an anger and frustration that easily rivaled my father's fill me. I wanted to throw the phone into the wall or just maliciously hang up on him and pull the phone cord out of the wall. Or just inform my father of where 'this fucker' was calling from and see if he really would arrest him for harassment.

"What?!" I snarled into the phone.

Some of the raw rage bled out of my father's expression and he almost looked amused that I was as pissed off at the caller as he was. There was a lengthy pause before Trowa spoke, long enough that I almost did hang up on him.

"You're home," he said simply.

I could imagine him calling up my house every hour trying to get a hold of me, but not knowing what time I got off of work, but too chicken shit to ask my dad. Or maybe he had and my father had pettily refused to tell him. It enraged me, that he had kept calling my house, getting my father more and more angry at me, when Trowa had been the one to abandon me in the first place. I didn't even want to take his fucking phone call.

"No shit," I sneered.

"I'm-" he started to say.

I'll never know what exactly he had been intending to tell me, but if it was to apologize to me for throwing me to the wolves, I didn't want to hear it. Suddenly, I got a miserable, crystal clear image of what the rest of Trowa and mine's relationship was going to be like. He would try to push me into something that I didn't want to do or do something that I didn't like or I would do something that he didn't like, we would fight about it and avoid each other for a little while until he would apologize or act contrite about it, we would fall back together again, not really resolving anything, and things would be nice for awhile until the next fight. And there would always be a next fight, I realized with absolute certainty. Because he kept pushing and I kept evading and accepting his half-hearted apologies, even when I didn't really forgive him.

Then, hearing his voice over the phone, ready to start the dance all over again, I didn't want to forgive him or so much as let him believe that I could forgive him. Not because I was mad at him, and I was. Not because I didn't think he was really sorry, and I didn't. I somehow knew, just from the sound of his voice, that he was only sorry because I was upset, not because he had betrayed me. I was just tired of dealing with him. I was tired of being hurt and being forced to let go of that hurt for him. What was the fucking point? I knew that, if that sort of thing happened again, Trowa would bolt again. Him saying that he was sorry about it, just like every other goddamned time he had apologized to me for something, didn't mean that he had any desire to change.

"What do you want?" I asked brusquely.

He paused again, unsure, I think, of my mood. He had probably thought that I would be understanding and I would forgive him outright, or I would be too desperate to move past the problem to be anything but meek, like always. And like always, he would bulldoze forward and I would get out of the way. I think that my anger and shortness with him was leaving him unbalanced. Good. Let him be the unsure one for once.

"C... can we go out tomorrow...? We just have a half day, so I thought we could go out to lunch or something... Do you want to?" he suggested with a shyness that I usually found endearing, but right then, it only infuriated me because I couldn't tell if he was trying to manipulate me into pity, disarming me with fake meekness and acting contrite, or if he was genuine.

"No," I said coldly and with a great deal of finality.

Another pause. I could actually feel his shock over the phone line. I had never turned him down for a date before. In fact, with the exception of sex, I had never told him no about anything, and since I had caved about that as well, I couldn't really say that I had ever denied him anything, now could I?

"Duo-" he started to plead.

"No," I repeated forcefully, feeling my rage rising, "You listen to me for once. What gives you the fucking right to call here, keep my parents up all goddamned night, and get me into fucking trouble because you want something?! This could have waited until tomorrow, you asshole, and you damned well know it! You don't get to harass me because you feel like you need something from me and get my parents pissed off at me for it! I don't owe you shit after what you just pulled! So no, I will not-" by some sort of miracle, and it was just that, because I sure as hell hadn't been thinking logically at that point in my angry tirade, what popped into my head then wasn't what came pouring out of my mouth and instead of 'go on a date with you', I said, "hang out with you!"

The more pissed off that I got, the more mellow my father seemed to get and after my rant, he actually looked impressed. He had never seen me act like that before and I didn't blame him, I wasn't sure where my behavior was coming from, either. I think that I was at least somewhat aware that my anger wasn't all stemming from what had happened in the equipment room, that a large portion of it was from the night before in the auto shop, all the rage I should have felt before, but had denied myself. I was surprised that Trowa didn't hang up on me and that, instead of not speaking for awhile again, he spoke as soon as I took a breath to try to calm myself down.

"We need to talk," he said curtly.

He sounded upset and nervous, but also a bit angry instead of shy. I guess he didn't like my yelling at him anymore than I liked it when he yelled at me.

"... I want to see you," he added then and there was this... this sad desperation to his voice.

It was the first time that he had ever said something like that to me, that he wanted. I think if he had just said that we needed to talk, I would have been able to maintain my pissed off attitude and could have hung up on him without an ounce of guilt. But that sadness in his voice just eviscerated me. I felt like he had stabbed me in the heart and all of my anger had poured out, leaving me, instead of relief, hollow and drained. I couldn't even fight him, couldn't even keep my goddamn rage. I was that pathetic. Hell, I didn't even feel annoyed at him for daring to be mad at me for telling him off.

"Fine," I conceded grudgingly.

"Where would you like to go?" he asked, his meekness slowly returning.

He didn't ask me that very often and on a normal day, it would have warmed me and made me feel affection for him, but I just couldn't find the energy to give a shit.

"I'll let you know tomorrow," it was impossible to keep the cold flatness out of my tone.

I hung up on him, not caring one bit if he had more to say and was relieved to hand the phone back to my father. I just couldn't do it anymore. I wanted to scream 'I give up, you win' at the world. I was just done, so thoroughly and completely done.

"Sorry," I murmured to my father and tensed, waiting for the blow, but too tired to really care beyond that.

It's funny. Trowa had driven me to a point in those last twenty-four hours that only my father and Quatre's death had ever brought me to. He had never struck me or physically hurt me if you overlooked the painful sex, and I didn't love him half as much as I had loved Quatre. And yet, I felt like my father could have beaten me to a bloody pulp just then and there was no way that I could have felt any worse. But he didn't hit me. He just flashed me a weird look and took the phone from me.

"Tell your stupid friend not to call here anymore," he cautioned, a threat of violence in his tone, as well as a bit of disbelief, like my having a friend was impossible to him.

Did I, though? I was starting to wonder just what it was about Trowa that I could call a friend, especially when I tried to compare him to Quatre. Or maybe I was just bitter. Could you really have a boyfriend that you didn't even call your friend? I used to, but lately it had seemed like all he did was hurt me. We didn't hang out, we went on dates. We didn't talk, we fought. I couldn't share anything with him and we had little in common besides our mutual pain.

It seemed like, the longer I was with Trowa, the less I wanted a boyfriend and the more I wanted a friend. Fuck, who was I kidding? Nothing at all had changed since I had started dating him, nothing had changed in three years. I didn't want a friend, I wanted my friend back. Three years and that's all I have ever wanted. Nothing changes.

"He's just some jerk from school," I muttered and made my way upstairs to my room.

Although I was horribly tired, after that phone call, I only managed three, restless, nightmare fueled hours. I dreamed of pushing Quatre in front of the train. I dreamt that Trowa had pushed him, then Relena, then my father. I dreamt of Trowa raping me. I dreamt of my father touching my hair, telling me that I look like my mother used to, then he dragged me, screaming, into Neely's auto shop garage.

I don't remember the rest of the dream, but I woke up with my heart pounding like a taiko drum and breathing so hard that my chest hurt. I couldn't manage to fall asleep after that. I would have gone out for a walk until school started, but even in my windowless room, I could hear rain pelting the roof. I wouldn't have minded running in the rain if it had been Summer, but even though it was still just September, it was chilly out. I had a foreboding feeling that Winter is going to be brutal this year with the constant cold fronts we were getting in the Fall.

I thought about going downstairs and putting the television on mute so I wouldn't wake my parents up, but I didn't feel like watching the kind of programming that would be on at four am, so I picked a random book from my bookcase and dug out the little CD player and headphones that I had stashed in the hole in the wall a few feet from my bed. I mostly used the little compartment I had made out of the loose floorboards to hide my journals and what little money I've been saving.

About a month ago, I found another spot in my room to hide things that I didn't want my father to take or destroy. A part of the wall by my bed got... damaged when my father had tried to kick me while wearing his steel toed boots. Knowing the kind of injury it would have caused from prior experience, I had managed to get out of the way and past him down the steps before he had cornered me, but the wall hadn't been so lucky.

His kick had punch a hole right through the plaster and had cracked some of the lath of boards under it just enough that it had been easy for me to finish the job. I cleared away the broken plaster and board and cleaned up all the dust and dirt and various insect leavings to make a little hidey hole for myself. It's not that big, about two feet tall and three feet across and put my laundry basket in front of it so no one would be able to notice it unless they were starting right at the wall. I put the jacket that Quatre had gotten me for my birthday in there, some of my favorite books and my small collection of CDs in there, too.

Well, ok, some of the CDs I have aren't really mine. I didn't steal them... exactly. It's just that they... the school, I mean, had waited awhile to take Quatre's stuff out of his locker. His parents hadn't requested any of it, so they had waited until after his funeral to do it. Out of respect or they had just forgotten, I don't know, but eventually, after the worst of my grief had left me enough for me to think intelligible thoughts beyond my pain, I had gone through the things that he had left behind and taken some stuff.

It's not stealing when you know that the person wouldn't have minded you having the stuff you took, or if you already knew the combination on the locker, right? It wasn't like Quatre kept a lot of crap in his locker, just some textbooks, school supplies like pencils and notebooks, his gym clothes, a bottle of water, and some CDs. If there was anything precious, anything that he had truly loved in that locker at all, it had been Quatre's music.

I had felt bad about taking it at first, but I knew that he would have wanted me to have it. His parents would have thrown them away or given them to his sisters, but Quatre had loved music, especially instrumental stuff like jazz and classical. I had a bunch of Beethoven, Mozart, and various folk music thanks to him. One of my favorite CDs to listen to at night is this Irish fiddle one he had.

Actually, all of my music collection was thanks to Quatre. I had offhandedly told him once that I liked older rock bands like The Rolling Stones and blues musicians like Muddy Waters and the very next day, he had placed five CDs that he had made himself in my hands, all a mix of rock and blues. Until then, I hadn't even owned a cassette. Then he had just kept making more CDs for me until I had told him that I didn't have anything to play them on, which had prompted him to buy me my disc player. I hadn't been able to tell him at the time that it was the nicest gift anyone had ever given me in my entire life. I guard that stupid thing like it's made of gold.

I laid down on my mattress, reading by the low light of my lantern, and listened to B.B King, Howlin' Wof, and Stevie Ray Vaughan for two solid hours before I heard screaming coming from downstairs. All things considered, I felt lucky to have had peace for that long.

"Going to work hung over again?! I hope they fire your ass, then you can become as big of a loser as that lazy pig you call a friend!" my mother was shrieking.

I barely heard a soft cry, a thud, and then a moment's worth of silence and knew that my father had just hit her. But it wasn't more than a minute before she started screaming at him again, his deeper voice joining hers in a fucked up duet. With slightly shaking hands, I changed my current CD to one that had some Rolling Stones and Blue Oyster Cult on it and switched tracks until I found the loudest song on there. I turned the volume up until all I could hear was the roaring shriek of the guitars and the mad pounding of drums and pressed the ear phones tight against my ears, drowning out the chaos that was going on downstairs.

It was dangerous. I wouldn't be able to hear my father coming if he decided to go for me next, but I just couldn't take that sound, not after the night that I had just had. Sometimes I think that, even after I've moved out of this house, when I'm in my thirties or forties, I'll still have nightmares about that noise. The screaming, the thud of a body hitting the wall... The only thing that saves my sanity is that I can't hear the sound of a fist impacting flesh from all the way up here. At least, not unless I'm the one getting hit.

I stayed like that for thirty minutes, as long as I dared, before turning the disc player off, reminding myself to hunt down some fresh batteries soon. When I pulled the ear phones off, everything was blissfully quiet. Not that that meant that things were better downstairs, but I needed to get ready for school. I didn't feel much relief that we only had a half school day because of teacher conferences, not knowing what it was I had to do after school. Because that morning, seeing Trowa wasn't something that I wanted to do or was looking forward to, it was a chore.

I dared the steps, so sure that my father would just be there, pissed off about the phone calls from last night all over again, but there was nothing blocking my path. When I passed by his bedroom, I heard the gut wrenching sound of my mother sobbing, the sound thick and muffled, like she was holding her nose shut. The bedroom door was slightly ajar and I braved her anger, peeking inside.

She was sitting on the bed, still wearing her nightgown even though she needed to be getting ready for work. The light blue fabric was stained red from the blood dripping from her nose. She had a tissue pressed against it, but it was completely bloody and she didn't seem concerned with getting a clean one, too involved with crying to care about stopping the blood flow. She looked so small and frail to me just then, her bare legs so thin, her face, so like mine if it weren't for the wear that decades of alcoholism had done to it. Her grey eyes were rimmed red and miserable, her long, chestnut hair a rat's nest of tangles.

I ached to comfort her, to throw my arms around her and tell her that everything was going to be ok. I wanted to give her something... anything... and just then, it didn't matter that she had never given me an ounce of comfort my entire life. She was my mother and she was hurting, and that made me hurt so deep down in me. That I couldn't, that I had absolutely nothing to offer her but more suffering and sorrow was one of the most horrible pains that I have ever felt.

Looking at her then, not as the mother that had neglected me for my entire life and told me that I had been unwanted, but simply as the woman who had brought me into the world, a woman that was sobbing like her own world was ending, what hurt Trowa had done to me seemed so insignificant. It made me feel petty and foolish and as worthless as she claimed that I was. It just about killed me to do it, but I walked past the bedroom as quietly as I could. If I couldn't help her, then I wasn't going to make her feel ashamed that I had seen her cry, either.

I couldn't keep my mind on my classes. I kept swinging between that vision of my mother, crying with a bloody nose, and my upcoming meeting with Trowa. Truthfully, I didn't want to see him. Seeing my mother like that that morning had just sucked all of my anger at him right out of me. I just felt very sad; for her, for me, and for Trowa, too. I didn't feel up to fighting with him or even yelling at him like I had over the phone. It had been so easy with my rage burning in me, but even though I still felt mad at him, I couldn't built up that anger into anything. But I didn't want to go hang out with him and talk about what had happened the day before, either.

What was there to say? Trowa had been willing to leave me behind to save his own ass. His reputation was more important to him than our relationship. But so what? I had known that since we had first started dating. If that weren't true, we wouldn't act like we were total strangers at school. I completely understood why he had abandoned me, things would be a lot harder for him if people found out that he was gay than it would be for me. So why did it bother me so much? Why did I feel so angry when I remembered him climbing through that window without so much as a look back at me?

I just couldn't see the point of talking it over with him. He would say all the things that I already knew. I would say that I understood and we would end up back on square one again. I would still be hurt and we would solve absolutely nothing, as always. Was that what I wanted, to keep on going knowing that he was going to continue to pressure me to have sex with him, only to not even have my goddamned back at the first sign of trouble? I could break up with him, I realized. I had an excuse now. I could tell him that it wasn't the fighting or my fears of sex, but that he had betrayed me. That sounds plausible, right?

But I still felt this nervousness in my gut, this intense uncertainty. I still didn't want to do it. What frightened me wasn't that I still wanted to date him, but the thought of what it was going to take to get me to the point where I could break it off with him. Would I ever get there? Was I just a chicken shit and I would have to drive him to that point instead? He had to be tired of me, he sure as hell didn't seem happy in this relationship.

But what if neither of us did? What if we stayed together for the rest of the year? The thought of that, of being with him and doing this over and over and over with him made me feel weary. You weren't supposed to feel that about someone you supposedly cared for, did you?

I spent my half day at school engaged in a messed up game of tug of war with myself, debating over and over if I should meet with Trowa like I had told him that I would or just blow him off. Neither prospect made me feel good. When the final bell rang, I decided what the hell. As long as I picked a place in town, I could just leave if he pissed me off. It wasn't like I had anything else to do. I didn't have any work for hours yet and I really didn't want to go home. So why not? At least, that was what I told myself. I think that I still held on to some childish hope that we could be ok, even though I knew deep down that we had never been 'ok' to begin with.

The light rain from that morning had turned into a monsoon-like downpour. The school parking lot looked more like a stream than flat pavement and even students that would usually linger to talk to friends were running towards cars and buses. The hood on my thin jacket wasn't going to save me from getting soaked to the bone and my father had taken the good umbrella to work, leaving just the smaller one for Mom, so I hadn't bothered to take one. I stood under the overhang by the school's entrance, watching my classmates evacuate the place and puddles turn into mini lakes.

In almost no time at all, I was the only person that I could see. All the buses and most of the cars were gone. With the teachers at their conferences, there wasn't going to be anyone else around for hours. I almost thought that Trowa had gone home, too, in light of the heavy rain, but then the doors behind me opened and he strode out, looking around to, no doubt, see if there would be anyone to see us. He only walked up to me when he noticed that it was just the two of us. He was wearing a thick raincoat and had a large, black umbrella in hand. He opened it and brought it over my head in a very gentlemanly gesture. It reminded me, a bit cruelly, of all the reasons why I was finding it so hard to end things with him.

"Where did you want to go?" he asked me without any other kind of greeting, his shy demeanor returning to him.

"The boardwalk?" I suggested.

It was a good, neutral place for us to talk or whatever Trowa had in mind. Public enough that he wouldn't dare to even try holding hands with me, but between the rain and the brisk, Fall weather, the boardwalk would be completely deserted save for some of the more desperate food vendors and restaurants. Besides, I knew a few places there where no one would see us.

"Sure," he agreed and stood next to me under his umbrella.

It was big enough for the both of us to comfortably stand under and not get wet, but we had to stay close enough for our shoulders to touch. I blushed warmly every time his brushed up against mine and loathed the stupid, shy reaction. I wished so strongly then that we were a normal couple, a couple that was socially accepted. Just two people who were in love and walking together in the rain. He would press his side against mine and I would cover his hand as it gripped the umbrella with my own. It would be close and intimate and wonderful.

But that would never be us. My heart ached and I longed for that so painfully. I hated the world then for destroying that desire for me, and I hated Trowa for not being the boy in my fantasy. Most of all, I hated myself for being gay and knowing that I would never have it, no matter who I was with.

We kept to back streets as we made our way towards the beach. Not that it really mattered. The sheet of rain was thick, making it difficult to see at all even if you dared to walk out in it. Trowa's umbrella was doing a commendable job of keeping my head dry, but there was nothing to be done for my sneakers and socks and the cuffs of my jeans. Every step was a small puddle and the bigger ones were nearly invisible. Central Nausten was a ghost town.

The same along the beach felt more like mud to walk on and the ocean looked violent as large waves struck the sand and rocky cliff face further to the south. We were on the opposite end of the beach from where I usually went running, so I couldn't see the mound that I liked to walk on, but I bet it was completely submerged. I wished that I had watched the weather forecast that morning , but just looking at those waves and the black sky, I knew that a big storm was coming, even if the wind hadn't picked up yet.

I led Trowa to a little shack that was beside the boardwalk on the beach. I call it a shack very loosely. The structure was literally nothing more than three walls and a tin, sheet roof. There were a couple of wooden benches far enough in the ten by twenty foot shack that they were only slightly wet from the rain. There weren't any windows or anything more of note about the place, a perfect hiding spot away from the storm and the boardwalk. In the Summer, the shack was used to sell shaved ice, but that season was long past.

"Do you want anything to eat?" Trowa asked me as I laid my jacket over one of the benches so I could sit on it without getting any wet spots on my jeans.

My stomach chose that moment to gurgle unhappily and I flushed darkly in embarrassment.

"Uh, yeah... I haven't eaten anything since lunch yesterday," I confessed sheepishly.

He smiled fondly at me, well used to my constantly skipping meals. That look made my insides warm and turn into mush. I might have been... not very pleased at him at that moment, but he was still so handsome when he wasn't mad at me. When he looked at me like that, like he cared, like he enjoyed being with me, I thought that I could love him. How could I possibly break up with him? Who else in all of Nausten, in all of the world, would ever look at me like that?

"You can get as much as you want," he offered.

I felt a bit guilty then. There I had been, angry at him, and as always, he was buying me lunch. No matter how poorly our relationship was going, no matter if we were fighting, he always did that without ever demanding that I pay for our dates for once. It made me feel like a colossal asshole.

"Could you get me a couple of hot dogs and a Mountain Dew? Oh, and some french fries?"

I could practically feel my stomach drooling at the mere thought of food.

"Sure," he said with a soft smile that sent this weird wave of both bewilderment and affection through me.

He was being so nice to me, so painfully nice. Did he know about my doubts, that I had been considering ending things with him and he was trying to manipulate me? No, I decided looking at his smile. He was being genuine. Was he trying to calm me so we wouldn't fight, or was he just honestly not mad at me anymore for me pushing him away again yesterday and yelling at him over the phone? Had he noticed my melancholy during our walk?

Then, before he left the shelter of the shack, he leaned over and kissed me gently on my forehead and I was lost. I watched him leave, my forehead tingling from the memory of his cool lips, and felt tears threaten my vision. I had to squeeze down on a black bruise on my arm to get them stopped. Have you ever been in pain for a really long time, like days or weeks or even longer, and suddenly have that pain go away in a single instance? It hurts. The absence of that pain actually hurts for a bit before your body gets used to it. What I felt then was just like that. I had been living with such fear and hate of him, of sex, of disappointing him, of compromise and loneliness as I longed in my head and heart for all the parts of our relationship that I liked while Trowa kept pushing me into things that scared me.

Those little things; holding hands and kissing and just being with each other, became more and more distant, always leading to the things that I was scared of. Then, suddenly, just as I was thinking that this relationship wasn't worth the hurt anymore, those things came back to me. A walk in the rain, his affectionate smile, a kiss. And it hurt. It should have felt good, and it did, but it only felt good under so many layers of pain. Pain... from getting something that I dared to want.

I wanted so little, yearned for barely anything anymore. I didn't dream. I didn't hope. Because life had taught me that I was never going to get anything that I really wanted, or I would and something or someone was just going to take it away. Dreaming could only harm me, so I had learned to stop doing it. So why... why did actually getting such a tiny thing hurt me so much?

I watched the rain and the waves as I waited for Trowa to come back, my thoughts so conflicted that I felt physically ill with them. Now that the worst of my anger and bitterness had abided, I tried to look at our relationship as clinically as I could. I know now, looking back, that I wasn't being clinical at all. I had been tainted by a moment of affection and my depression. I had gone from one end of the spectrum of my feelings for my boyfriend to the entire other end, from hating to caring, all because of a kiss. My weakness was pathetic, if I dared to analyze it. I can afford to now, but then, I just couldn't. I didn't dare even notice it.

But I told myself that I was being critical and unbiased, as stupid as that sounds. I told myself, like I always did, that the affection I felt for him, and the affection he seemed to feel for me, made all the other crap worthwhile. That kiss had been important to me. I guess a lot of people my age would have scoffed at it, just a chaste kiss on the forehead, but I liked it more than Trowa kissing me on the mouth because it wasn't a kiss of passion, it wasn't one that he was willing to give me because he was horny and he wanted it to lead somewhere. I wanted to believe that he had done it because he cared, that he liked something about me that was more than just as a stand in for Quatre. Don't laugh at me, I know it's stupid now, I know that there was no way someone like him could find anything about me attractive or endearing beyond what he had needed to see. If he could only kiss me like that, then didn't that make all the fighting, the pushing, the bullshit between us worth it? Didn't mean that we had some kind of future?

I'm not some naive, air-headed girl, overfed on romantic nonsense thinking that love would conquer all, that being hurt was ok so long as Trowa claimed that he loved me. I wasn't delusional. But I also didn't want to be alone, and I didn't want to lose those happy moments. I wasn't willing to shrug off the pain that he had caused me and I knew that our relationship was still fucked up, but I chose to believe that staying with him was worth it.

In all of the time that I was with him, it didn't occur to me until now that all I was doing was settling. Just like I had caved in to Trowa's lust, I had caved in to myself, to my own, damned loneliness, my weakness. How fucked up is that? I put a band-aid on the festering sores of our relationship. Is it really so surprising that it all went to shit so quickly?

Trowa came back with our food pretty quickly. I imagined that he hadn't had to wait in any lines. Usually the food vendors would just give you paper plates to put your food on, or a plastic tray if you bought enough, but whoever he had bought from had been considerate enough to put the hot dogs and french fries in Styrofoam, take out containers so nothing would get wet.

"Thanks," I said to him as I took my designated container and soda from him.

Those hot dogs looked like the best thing in the world to me. They were incredibly messy, piled on with mustard, ketchup, cheese, sweet relish, and diced onions. The first dog I finished so quickly in my ravenous hunger that at least half of it ended up in the container instead of my mouth, but I made quick work of the mess, using my fries to scoop it up. Trowa watched me eat in amusement, shaking his head at what I was sure was a total lack of manners. That or he just thought it was weird that I was that hungry and hadn't even said anything about it until he had offered me food. And there, naked under the amusement, was that affection again that made my stomach twist up and turn liquid all at the same time. But honestly, I was so used to being hungry that I don't think about it, or sometimes even notice it, until I go to eat something.

It's not like I'm homeless or some starving kid from a third world country. I get at least one meal a day, I just don't eat as much as I should. When you live hand to mouth like my family often does, unless Dad gets a bonus or there's nothing to fix around the house that week, eating three meals a day just seems like a waste of food and money. It doesn't even bother me usually, but put free food in front of me after skipping a few meals and my stomach becomes a gaping maw.

I took a sip of my Mountain Dew with a slight grimace. I'm not a big fan of the stuff. The flavor isn't so terrible, but there's this weird, cloying taste in it that makes my stomach hurt for some reason. I like it more than Pepsi and Coke, but that's not saying much. When I do have soda, I prefer the lemon-lime flavors or root beer or club soda. But I desperately needed caffeine for my work shifts later that day and Mountain Dew is loaded with that crap.

"I'm sorry that I got you into trouble last night," Trowa apologized when he finished his own meal of a loaded hamburger and fries.

I chewed thoughtfully on my last fry and took a final gulp from the soda before I said anything.

"He was pretty mad," I confessed, "but I got lucky and he didn't ground me or anything," 'or beat the shit out of me because of you,' "You just can't call my house anymore, ok? Ever."

The look on his face completely destroyed the peace I had been feeling, sitting there and eating with him. He looked put out at that bit of news, not quite angry, but definitely annoyed. Is it wrong that I was more worried about him spitefully calling my house and getting me into serious trouble with my father than I was about his feelings on the subject? Why did we have to talk about this anyway? Couldn't we just sit there and enjoy each other's company? Things had been easier and better before he had opened his mouth and I resented him a little for it. I didn't want to remember how angry I had been with him yesterday and exactly why he was apologizing to me.

"Sorry," he repeated but now his tone lacked much sincerity, "but I was desperate. I was worried about you, I needed to make sure that were ok after what happened."

"Don't you mean you needed to know if your reputation is still in tact?" I blurted out coolly and could have slapped myself for it.

What the hell was wrong with me? Why had I said that, when I had already decided to just let the whole mess go? Was I still bitter about it?

Trowa looked angry for a second and I didn't blame him. He was being nice to me and trying to patch things up after what he had done and I was throwing it in his face. Even when his anger died down, there was something in his frustrated expression, some coldness that greatly worried me. He hadn't looked like that since the night we had had sex.

"So what if I was worried about that?" he challenged angrily, "I'm not like you, Duo, I actually give a shit about what people think about me. I have friends, maybe not as much as I did when I was on the basketball team, but people don't call me fag and leave the room when I walk in it. I don't want that to change because a few of my friends found me..." he suddenly took a deep breath, obviously having been seconds away from saying something he would have regretted, "Maybe if you were more careful and cared more about what people think and say about you, you wouldn't have so much trouble with Zechs and Relena."

What the fuck was that supposed to mean? I was only getting bullied because... because what? I wasn't as cautious as him? Or was he insinuating that I acted gay? Was he harping on my hair again or was this something else that he disapproved of?

"Well you can relax," I snapped at him, feeling all of the anger that I had tried to let go of returning to me with an easiness that made me sick, "I didn't fucking out you. While you ran away and left me to deal with it on my own, I hid. None of your friends saw me or suspected anything. Your precious reputation is in tact."

He snorted and the way he did it, if a snort could have any kind of tone at all, made me think that he actually blamed me for the whole thing. I wanted to leave, then. Just get up and walk out into the pouring rain and abandon him like he had abandoned me. I should have. That fucked up date had just showed me, with absolute clarity, what our relationship was. I had been having a nice time, warmed from how gentle and almost loving he was being, when in the course of one, single moment, it was shit again. Why was this so easy to break?

"What would you have done if they had found me?" I asked him and the raw, overwhelming bitterness in my voice horrified me, "What would you have done to save your own skin? Lied about our relationship, tell them that we weren't doing anything in there at all, that you had thought that I was goddamned girl when you haven't had a single girlfriend your whole life?!"

It felt disgustingly good, throwing back his insults that I looked like a girl in his face. But as I looked at him, something black passed in his eyes. He was looking down at the wet sand by his feet with this intense focus, this anger. But when I brought up his lack of hetero dating, his expression changed for a second. He looked like he wanted to say something to me, something that, I was sure, would have been incredibly harsh and cruel. But he looked... guilty for some reason and whatever it was didn't come out. That guilt made my guts twist in fear. I was sure, in that moment, that something was wrong, something more than I knew and that frightened me.

"What relationship?" he looked at me, his green eyes piercing and dark in the grey gloom of the day, his face contorted in an angry, vengeful sneer, "It isn't like we're fucking."

I felt like he had just shot me in the heart as he turned everything around on me and I felt a seed of doubt being planted in the wound. Did he really feel that way, that we didn't even have a relationship because, even after I had let him fuck me once, I had still pushed him away? Was that the real reason why he had left me behind in the equipment room, to punish me for telling him no again, or just because what we had wasn't important enough to risk himself for?

I stood up from the bench and almost did walk away. I wish that I had, that some common sense had entered my head. I wish that he had never kissed me that day, I wish that he had never polluted my heart with that one act of tenderness. Instead, I turned to him, my arms crossed over my chest defensively.

"What would you have done?" I repeated angrily, feeling like I was in those waves that I had been watching only minutes before, swept into chaos.

Trowa stood, too, his eyes like emerald ice as he looked at me, not as his boyfriend, but as some kind of pest.

"Whatever it took to save me from you," he said, "Do you really think that you're worth being ostracized over?"

His cruelty made a not too sane, bitter laugh explode from me, but as nuts as it sounded, it was still better than crying, which was my alternative at that point.

"And what exactly is that?" I accused him harshly, "Told them that I was the one who had come onto you? That I was raping you?"

The rage in his eyes bled out of him, leaving only that flat coldness. Seeing it there made this deep sense of horrible foreboding fill me.

"Yes," he said in a as matter of fact, straightforward way as anyone could sound, leaving absolutely no doubt in me that he was being honest, "and they would have believed me."

I took a shaky step backwards away from him as my heart clenched. What was more horrible, I wondered, that classmates I hadn't even met would easily believe me of raping someone bigger and stronger than myself, or that the boy that claimed to care about me, who kissed me and had had sex with me, could even more easily accuse me of that?

The same boy that knew that I was being bullied over those kinds of insinuations, that I was a fag, a pervert, and the same boy that knew how much I had suffered over the death of my best friend, who had killed himself for those same insinuations, the friend that he claimed to have loved, could say something like that to me. He could destroy what little I had left, and he could do it easily. It was the thought of Quatre then that wrenched another bitter and hysterical laugh from me. A part of me was so happy then, so incredibly relieved that Quatre had never lived to see this hideous side of his love. Or maybe this part only existed for me. I had to bite down on my tongue hard enough to make it bleed to keep Trowa from seeing the tears that wanted to grow in my eyes.

"I guess I shouldn't be surprised," I said snidely to hide how badly my hand was shaking as I used it to swipe my wet bangs out of my face, feeling Trowa's cruelty infect me like some sort of plague, "After all, Quatre wasn't worth you risking your reputation over, either, so why should I be?"

His eyes widened in pain at the reminder of what he had done three years ago and I relished in it. It made me feel sick later, but I fucking relished his agony, which seemed to mock mine. I took a step forward, feeling bold in my anger and grief.

"It's a good thing that the two of you were never together," I sneered, "or you would have just accused him of raping you at the first sign of trouble. And that would have killed him-"

Trowa's look of complete fury was my only warning before he slammed his fist into the right side of my face. He hadn't pulled the blow, but had struck me as hard as he could in his rage. Pain exploded in my right cheek and I staggered backwards into the rain, but I didn't fall. He was strong, but not as strong as my father was and I was a veteran at knowing how to take hits. But the pain of it was nothing compared to my shock. He had hit me. Trowa had actually hit me. He strode up to me, getting right in my face and letting himself get soaked in the rain, too. I flinched from him, but managed to hide it by putting my hand over the right side of my face. My skin felt fiery hot and throbbed. Even my eye hurt even though he had missed it by all of an inch.

"Don't act so high and mighty," he hissed at me, "You were never the one I wanted and don't you fucking forget that."

I looked up at him through my one, good eye and saw the contempt and absolute hatred for me there. I felt each and every one of those words. They weren't anything that I hadn't feared through our entire relationship, but to hear him actually say that to me, that I wasn't wanted... I almost laughed again. That was me in a nutshell. Never wanted, just used. Never the one loved, just the punching bag. I wanted to sob. I wanted to cry until my tears looked like the furious rain that was pelting me. I glanced down at the ground, unable to handle him hating me so much, but I could still feel his gaze, like he was looking at some disgusting insect.

"Why don't you just break up with me?" I asked in a heartbroken whisper, my voice full of agony and despair. I hadn't even known that I was capable of sounding like that after watching Quatre kill himself.

"I don't know," Trowa said flatly and shoved past me, walking back towards the boardwalk, his unfurled umbrella clutched tightly in his white knuckled grip.

He left me there alone in the rain as I stood there, pretending that the wetness on my cheeks were tears. The same tears that suddenly refused to come to me. The only comfort I had was the icy rain and the sound of the waves crashing against the shore. To me, it made the same sound of Trowa's fist hitting my face.
End Part 5

Author's note: Sorry about the long chapter, I wanted to stick to keep the entire fight together, so it dragged on for a bit. This chapter is very close to done. There will probably be 1-2 more parts and then I'll be moving on to chapter 5, which is going to be a bit of a doozy. I'll be writing up a warning about it when this chapter is over.
Thank you, as always, to everyone who has commented, noted me, favorited, kudos'd, and bookmarked this story. It means to much to me ;_;
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A Stagnation of Love (rewrite)