Heartbreaker

When I first met Noah Scott, I knew that she was the one for me.

It didn’t matter if she looked at me like I was the lowest thing she ever stumbled upon. It didn’t matter that she treated me like I was a piece of chewed gum stuck to the bottom of her prized, genuine-leather combat boots.

It didn’t matter that she smoked more cigarettes a day than I could in a week. It didn’t matter that she only wore one earring, on her right lobe. It didn’t matter if she dressed like she’d been drinking and dancing and working out in the gym all night, and it didn’t matter that she was a complete and total bitch most of the time.

Noah was the girl I wanted, fell in love with in an instant, and I would not settle until I convinced her that she loved me too.

I trailed after her like some downtrodden puppy, watched her self-destruct in the scummiest bars and lower herself to guys who were nothing and wanted nothing more than one thing and one thing only. I held her hair back countless times as she vomited up the toxins she’d put in her body just hours before and I’d found her wasted, completely clothed and crying in strangers’ bathtubs on a handful of occasions.

She was a mess.

But I wanted her to be my mess, and for the longest time I believed that she was – without actually asking her to be mine. I’d been around her so long that I was practically her shadow, and people just noticed. It was kind of impossible not to see my intentions.

And for a while, after a whole lot of convincing, we actually were something – an exclusive couple, kissing and making out and groping included.

Maybe it wasn’t everyone’s dream, to be with a girl who smoked like a chimney and swore like a sailor and made crude comments and verbally abused more than she ever said anything nice, but it was a dream come true for me.

I liked waking up beside Noah in the morning to find her toying with my dog-tags – the very dog tags that she’d once called me a pansy for wearing. I liked feeling her fingers laced through my own in those early morning hours, and I liked knowing that she was infamous for heart-breaking and had not broken my heart – at least not yet.

I liked learning the little things about her, and how they all tied into her past and her present. I liked that she was completely the same person she was with me when she was around her father, and I liked that despite all her pushing and avoiding and arguing that she made me fall in love with her even more.

I was intrigued when she always seemed to answer questions with one phrase, her signature line, “No good thing lasts.”

And I never really understood what she meant. Sure, it was kind of obvious, but I guess I never understood why she said it.

It took only a matter of hours for me to realize why Noah Scott was the way she was, why she acted the way she did and said the things she said – why she lived her life the way she did and regretted nothing.

Noah was a ticking time bomb.

Her heart was defective, literally.

If placed under stress, her heart could just give out without a single warning, and it killed her bit by bit not knowing when she would fizzle out – when she would no longer be able to smoke her cigarettes or drink against all her doctor’s warnings and advisements.

She was a heartbreaker with her own malfunctioning in her very chest.

We lived together two years against all odds, despite the struggles we endured and the amount of effort she placed into separating the two of us before finally giving up and giving in.

For hours, I used to rest my ear over her heart, listening to the beating of it and taking in the way it sounded – so very different from most people after she fell asleep.

Maybe I should have realized that when Noah said, “No good thing lasts” that she meant it, and that all things would eventually end.

She broke my heart, but instead of her delivering the news in her typical Noah kind of fashion – blunt words and curses and middle fingers included – it was her father that told me.

Noah had died.

Her heart had given up on the rest of her body while I was out.

She was gone.

I like to think that she was happy – that I made her happy in those few years we had together. I like to think that she didn’t feel a thing when she died, that she hadn’t felt pain and hadn’t had time to wish for me to be there to call for help. I like to think that she would have said yes when I gathered enough courage to ask her to be mine forever, that she would have accepted the ring that I was asking my mother for that very day without hesitation.

Knowing her though, reflecting on her and her life and what she stood for, there was only a slim chance in all hell that she would have even taken it.

And that in itself would have broken my heart – her rejection.

For the longest time I was angry with her, for not even giving me the opportunity to ask; the bitch hadn’t even given me the chance to break my own heart – she was just that kind of person.

But as time passed, it became easier, and the what-ifs and the could-have-beens started to fade from my mind. Not completely, but they’d dwindled down.

Noah had died.

My lover, my friend, my heartbreaker, gone.