Chapter 18 #2
Casey looked up at the ceiling, at the giant glossy cardboard baubles on red ribbons that twirled lazily in the slight breeze ever present in such an old building.
She was so used to holding in her feelings that she wondered if she had become emotionally constipated.
She took a deep breath and attempted to push her feels out.
“The thing is, it doesn’t matter if I like him or not, because I’m cursed and therefore destined to fuck it up. ”
Margo frowned mid-chew. “I haven’t picked up any hints of diabolical influence in your aura, so I presume we’re talking metaphorical curses here?”
“Are there…Do people actually get cursed, for real?”
“Piss off the wrong entity, and they do,” Margo said knowingly.
“Right. Well, metaphorically, then. But it doesn’t make my bad luck any less real.”
“Here, have a piece of Turkish delight and tell me when your curse was cast.”
She blew out a long sigh. “I grew up around parents who had an almost pathological thirst for confrontation, and I know exactly how generic it is to blame my parents for my issues, but from my earliest memories all I ever wanted was to avoid conflict, and I did that by making myself inconspicuous and trying to make people happy because happy people don’t scream at each other.
If I’m being honest, I wasn’t that surprised that I’d people-pleased my way into getting married in the first glimpse. ”
“That explains a lot,” Margo mused. “How did you become entangled with Sam Moon, if you don’t mind my asking?” She offered Casey a champagne truffle from a pink beribboned box of eight costing ￡9.99, and Casey took one because now was not the time for caution.
“I met him in a bar. He was drowning his sorrows, insinuating that he might end it all because what was life without his ex, and I…” Was she really going to share her shameful thought processes?
She looked away as she spoke. “I was envious of her. I didn’t know her, but I wanted to be her so badly.
I wanted to be loved that way, you know?
Desperately, passionately. I wanted someone to love me so much that they couldn’t bear to live without me.
” She remembered how intoxicating it had felt to witness his obsession with his ex, how she would have done almost anything to have him feel that way about her…
“He worshipped his ex-girlfriend, and I thought that if I fixed him, he’d feel that way about me; he’d worship me instead.
I wanted to know what that felt like.” She took another truffle and bit it in half, letting the soft center melt on her tongue.
“When he proposed, I wondered, just for a second, if I’d finally cracked the code and made him love me with the desperation I’d been so jealous of. Pathetic, huh?”
“No. Human,” Margo replied. “What made you turn him down?”
She thought back. “Aside from not being in love with him anymore, I realized that the proposal wasn’t about me at all, and all his histrionics before hadn’t been about his ex either, not really.
They were simply his incessant desire to possess anything that eludes him.
He has an inherent dissatisfaction with absolutely everything.
It was exhausting trying to keep him happy.
I knew in that moment that if I said yes, I’d be setting myself up for a life of being made to feel like a failure, and I already did that quite well by myself. ”
“They’re not all like that, you know. Men, I mean.”
“I know,” Casey said, sighing.
“I’d put money on Ajay being quite the opposite. I was listening to you two outside on the CCTV,” said Margo innocently.
“Those cameras don’t have sound.”
“I tweaked them. Don’t look at me like that. I’m on holiday; I’m entitled to some entertainment.”
Casey sighed again. “It doesn’t matter anyway.”
“Because you’re cursed.”
“Exactly.”
“Bullshit.”
“Okay, then, what if it’s me? What if I am the curse and I turn perfectly good men into fuckwits?
Trust me, everyone is better off if I leave relationships well alone.
Ajay deserves someone who’s, I don’t know, not me.
And actually, I like being single: no entanglements, no one else I have to consider; there’s freedom in independence. ”
Margo let the words settle around them for a few moments and then said, “There absolutely is. A woman does not need a partner to be fulfilled; she is more than enough. And if I thought that you were happy in the life that you have chosen, then I wouldn’t be saying this, but the yearning in your heart for someone to share this life with is so loud that I can hear it echoing off the walls. ”
“You can’t really hear it, can you?” She wasn’t keen on her loneliness being audible.
“Oh yes,” said Margo seriously. “It’s like whale song, only sadder.”
Casey groaned. “Well, that’s not mortifying at all!”