Thinking Of A Future

At first I'd thought that the only concern we'd had was whether or not we could get pregnant but I didn't see all the rest of it. The stacked up unpaid bills and the lingering debt. The quiet inadequacy he felt when it didn't just happen the way that he thought it would, the way that he'd been told he had to make it.

Expectation is a heavy weight to bear and Blake had felt that expectation. Be a man and be a provider and be unreadable. Don't let your weakness show and goddammit stop being such a disappointment.

I knew that feeling. Too weak to work the farm and too interested in escaping to be satisfied with a quiet life. Eager and excited to get out and put it behind me but always truly living with one foot back in that life and all of the expectations that I left behind and it isn't fair, it isn't right. It isn't good to have that weigh on you when you're starting out finding your own path.

To a man with expectations Blake certainly could have been a disappointment. Sure I saw him as an epitome, sure I saw all of his successes, but what about his faults and flaws?

He wasn't a sports star. He wasn't on the football team. He wasn't here in college on a scholarship.

He wasn't smart enough to be top of his class either, so any business success that wasn't either middling or built off the back of someone else would elude him all his life.

He had charm and charisma, but it was all so shallow for him. True leaders had charisma but they also had respect and Blake had nothing to give to earn that from people. He was a quintissential second stringer, and someone had been reminding him of that his whole damn life.

Now here he was in school, surrounded by people who were smarter than him. Surrounded by peers who were not his peers but his betters instead and he was drowning in it and even his lifeline was being unravelled with that dressing down that Rachel had given him.

This was a man on the edge and that made him dangerous and it made him hard to predict and it made me more than just a villain and more than just the subject of his desire.

It made me, if I didn't act carefully, into prey.

So what should I do? What should I say? How should I get out of this?

I don't know, but I do know that I say the wholly wrong thing instead.

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