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Encounter

How long had it been? Weeks? Months? At some point, he just lost track of the time. His job was demanding, with fifteen days on and only six days off in between, and often he was asked to work those days off as well. He didn't care. He didn't mind sitting in his truck on 12 hour shifts, sometimes days, sometimes nights, sometimes doubles if his employers thought they could get away with it and were short staffed. Energy drinks had become his sustenance on those occasions, but when he was back home, it was whiskey he desired, something to help him sleep instead of something to keep him awake.

Something to help him forget.

There were other things that helped with forgetting as well. He still hit the night clubs on what weekends he had to himself. He still regularly found a nice, warm body to share his bed with, and sometimes it was even the same person more then once. It was those ones he had to watch out for, though. A couple of weeks, a month at the most, then discard them. Find something fresh, something new.

Make sure he didn't grow attached. Make sure he didn't start to care.

He was starting to feel better. He was starting to be able to forget how much it had hurt when she had left. He'd drowned out the pain with work and booze and sex and had relearned how to not care. How to not share. How to never let anybody get that close again.

And then there she was. It didn't make him sad to see her, again. No, it actually just pissed him off instead. Here he had spent so long getting her out of his system, and there she was, out on the dance floor with a group of girls, smiling cheerfully, laughing, her body moving to the uptempo beat of the music.

She'd cut her hair. Pale blonde that had once been down to her lower back now short, barely to her chin, jaggedly cut. And she looked so god damned happy. Of course she did. She didn't have to deal with him anymore, did she?

He wanted to approach her. He wanted to make sure she saw him there, maybe find somebody easy to make out with right in front of her, then loudly announce he was going to take them home. He wanted her to feel pain. To suffer. To feel sorry for leaving him.

He'd already taken several steps towards her when he stopped, realizing what he was doing, making himself think through the anger. If he could no longer remember how long it had been since she left, then was it even really worth it to do anything now? The time for pain had long since past and....

And he'd already hurt her enough. Before. Before she left that was all he he had done was hurt her. That's how they had ended up like this, after all.

Of course, all of this had gone through his mind in an instant, and in that time he hadn't taken his eyes off of her. In that time she had looked his direction, and her eyes widened, locking onto his, startled to see him. She stopped smiling for a brief instant, before one of her friends grabbed her by the arm and pulled her towards them, encouraging her to keep dancing. And then some random guy approached, a drink in each hand, and she threw herself at him, smiling from ear to ear once more as her arms went around his waist and she leaned up to kiss him. On the lips. With her horrible b***h mouth she kissed some new guy.

She was just glancing back his way when Finn was j about to turn around and leave, but she managed to catch his eye anyways, and he stopped, only to smile at her, his eyes like a snakes. Cold. Dead. He lifted a hand, as though to wave, and indeed his fingers even began to waggle.

And then he flipped her the bird instead. Still smiling, he turned and left, not bothering to tell those that he'd arrived with that he was leaving. He had enough booze at home to get himself wasted, anyways, and it would be cheaper as well.

Thankfully, it was the last time he would ever see her.

Love:

Do you love this one, Finn Connor?

It was a question he found that he asked himself often, as he gazed down at the woman who's face was resting against his bare chest. Light hair, light eyes, and dim witted, like most of the one's he brought home. Sometimes he just couldn't help himself. Sometimes, when he woke up, hours too early, when the morning light still had yet to spill in through the window blinds, he just couldn't keep himself from thinking these things. From asking himself questions to which he already knew the answers.

Will you let this one come back again tonight? Will you let this one in for longer then the others? Is she the one to break the chain?

No.

That was always the answer, and he found himself shifting away from her, pushing her off of him, rolling onto his side as though the distance between his body and hers gave emphasis to the single syllable.

No.

Will you ever love again?

That question was one that he hadn't asked himself before, and it came with a surprising jolt of pain, an ache in his chest combined with a wrenching sensation in his stomach, one that made him feel faintly ill.

I hope not. He answered himself. He wished he could give himself the same answer as he did the other questions. He wished it could just be a simple no like all of those others had been.

Why?

Why indeed? Was it really just because the loss was too painful to bear again? Was he really so soft and sensitive beneath the rough shell of an exterior that he showed? His hand clenched into a tight fist at the thought, wrapped up in a sheet. He felt the pain in his heart ease away as though it never existed, replaced by an all too familiar empty cold.

Because love is for people who deserve it.

idk gonna keep doing these cuz they're fun