It doesn't get any easier

If I hadn’t fucked everything up, I would have spent the rest of the month simultaneously excited about my upcoming year abroad and dreading being apart from Charley. Instead, I spent it numbly trying to prepare myself for what I knew had to come – another long period spent on the other side of the world from her, a futile opportunity to try and sort my shit out alone.

Naturally, with everything that had happened it didn’t go great. Completely deflated, I reverted back to being a hermit, all my time spent mindlessly playing FromSoft games I couldn’t even really bring myself to enjoy anymore. Unsurprisingly, the regular visits to her apartment came to an abrupt halt, along with any form of contact between the two of us.

I didn’t even have the small comfort of actually being able to play PlayStation with my uni friends, because they all headed back to classes in mid-September for the beginning of the UK academic calendar.

That being said, it wasn’t like none of them ever wanted to meet up in person. With the new year afoot, all the London uni students were resuming their outings to clubs and bars all over the city, and my friends were no exception. But throughout this period, I had absolutely no interest in hauling myself into the city to spend ridiculous amounts of money on watered down drinks and maybe drunkenly get with a stranger or two. Even though when I thought about the possibility logically, it maybe didn’t seem like such a bad idea in these circumstances.

No, all I wanted to do was wallow in self-pity in my room and not interact with a single other human being.

After a while, people began to stop bothering to check if I was going out – they all knew I was gonna be gone this year, so it wasn’t that big a deal anyway.

Max was the only one who ended up messaging me directly about it.

Hey, are you OK? You’ve been blowing everyone off.

Um … not so much. You know that girl you were talking about…

Shit. I’m sorry, man. You want to talk about it?

Not right now. Sorry.

All good. If you ever do, I’ll be here.

It didn’t help that there really wasn’t anyone to blame but myself. I was angry with Charley, undoubtedly; she’d been unbelievably harsh the day that I told her I loved her. Even if I’d been in the wrong, she’d never talked to me like that before – like I was some idiotic and immature kid who should never have even entertained the thought of being with her when it would go against her precious plan.

Yet while the way she had gone about it had been unreasonably ruthless, she hadn’t said anything unfair. I knew that it had been wrong of me to expect anything from her. She had been _explicitly _clear when she’d told me it was never going to be anything more than sex. I’d been a fool to think that when she had rejected me, she’d been acting out of character. In all the time I’d known her, her one unrelenting trait had been that when she said something, she stuck by it.

I had been so arrogant, so naïve to believe that I was the kind of person who a girl like Charlotte Kim would want to be with, just because I wanted to be with her. Even more so in believing that it would be so easy for someone to get over the stepsibling issue like I had.

My thoughts were a mess like never before, and after a while my behavior had clearly caught the attention of my parents.

My dad, I could handle – I was long past the age where his frowning glares and disapproving tuts had any effect on me. But my stepmum, as inquisitive and probing as her daughter, was clearly only a few steps away from strapping me down and waterboarding the truth out of me.

After days upon days of suggestive comments and leading questions about my recent activity, I silently went to go for a walk in a **** attempt to clear my thoughts after dinner one day.

Unfortunately, she caught me just as I was slinking out of the house, striding up to me with a hopeful smile plastered on her face. “Hey, you going to meet up with Charley?”

“What? No.” I must have made a sour face involuntarily, because she frowned.

“What’s going on with you two? Did you have an argument or something?”

To put it mildly. “No, Mum,” I sighed.

I moved to open the front door and leave but she leaned against it, stopping me. “I’m serious, Luke. You were spending so much time together, and you both seemed really happy about it. And then suddenly, you’re shutting yourself in your room again. Something happened, didn’t it?”

“Please don’t do this right now,” I muttered, trying to keep the emotion out of my words. “I’m just going for a walk, that’s it.”

“Luke …” she repeated, concern in her voice.

I tried to open the door again, and this time she let me. “Ask her, if it bothers you so much,” I said. “She always has all the answers, doesn’t she?”