“Yanna, you know you’re being unfair. You know that.”
I bit my lip hard to keep myself from my crying. “I know.”
“Then let me---”
“You worry me. You scare me.” Constantijin’s face was pale by the time I finished speaking. But now that I had started, I realized I had to let everything out – as usual. Just because he was Constantijin Kastein didn’t mean it was always going to be different with him.
“We’re too different. You think about sex all the time. You make me think about sex all the time when I never even wanted to…” I forced myself to continue. “I never even wanted to touch myself before you.”
Poor Constantijin.
He looked more than shocked. He looked sick now. Was he thinking he had a lucky escape – that he had almost had sex with a basket case? Sex was nothing to him and here I was, practically having an emotional breakdown before him.
“What do I have to do to change your mind?” He was asking the question, but he wasn’t really asking it. You got what I mean, right?
But I gave him my answer anyway, never mind if I knew he didn’t really care at this point. Everything about Constantijin right now told me so. The impassive look on his face, the stiff stance of his body – everything about it screamed ‘I don’t do complications’.
“Court me.” Walter did that for Carole. Walter – the kindest man I had ever known, my father, the one man I looked up to, and the man Carole once described as the doctor who had affairs with nurses in every major hospital in the world he had been invited to visit.
Constantijin’s eyes widened.
“Make me feel you want me – just me.” I gave him a sad smile, my words halting as I spoke the truth. “But that’s not your thing, right?” Constantijin would think this was another power play. It wasn’t, but I couldn’t blame him for thinking that way.
And he said equally slowly, his words like the final nails burying my heart six feet deep, “No. That’s not my thing.”
He walked me to my room after that, neither of us speaking.
Any time now, I whispered to myself. Anytime now he’d look back and realize he was about to do the greatest mistake of his life, that things could be so great between us, that I was worth chasing after---
We reached my door, and I opened it ever so slowly, waiting for something I knew was becoming more and more impossible. Say something. Please say anything so I can do something to salvage this.
I stepped inside my room, and when I turned around to thank him he was already walking away, killing all my futile hopes in a heartbeat.
It was the last I saw of him for the weekend.