Misconstrued

Deep blue eyes stared through tears at me as I got up, and numb fingers pulled crisp white sheets up closer to her body.

“You’re leaving?” she asked as one of those tears rolled delicately off her cheek and splashed lightly onto the sheets. “This really is all you wanted me for?”

“It would seem that way, sugar.” It had to be this way. I pulled up my jeans and started to button up my shirt as I stood, but gave up half way and pulled my jumper on over it instead. I needed to get out of there. Every second spend listening to her cry was another second she had to think of something hurtful to say as some kind of revenge. So yes, I’d fucked her without the intent of giving her what I might have led on to but if she’d stopped for a moment she might have realised I clearly wasn’t the dating kind. It was all over the tabloids and now all over my face, I knew, as I turned without that trademark smirk I was somewhat known for these days and went to wish her a good night.

“Have a goo –”

“Go to hell, Gerard! I’ll never listen to you sing ever again!” I walked out the door just in time to save myself being hit by the lamp she hurled, hearing her curse under her breath as I walked away. She had been cute, and harder work than some of the others I’d bedded in my recent memory, but there was something satisfying about that. I’d known all along that this would be the ending to our month long story; I would play her right into my hands and in the end she wouldn’t even suspect it. I knew there would be confusion, then talk, then rumour, and I was already smiling bitterly as I left the hotel and ignored as someone snapped a front page photo of me getting into a cap looking like I’d just had sex with yet another stranger who would sell her story to whoever would listen for those vultures to read and remark on. It didn’t bother me nearly as much as it used to. I felt I was becoming apathetic towards it. Towards… everything.

I would go home and my face would find the pillows of my couch which is where I would pass out and wake the following morning with a floral print covering one of my cheeks. I would shower, I would draw, and I would make my way to the studio to record something. Anything. I had to keep busy for a while before I found another beauty to seduce and infect me, all in the name of forgetting them in the end. This was my working system and work it did, most of the time.

My heavy eyes wandered across the hallway as I was still struggling with the keys to my apartment door and landed on Jane, literally the girl next door. She’d been out late, too. She smiled awkwardly at me before she closed her apartment door, not even offering to help my drunken ass with mine. But that was Jane. I had a sneaking suspicion she knew who I was and had read about what I did, and could understand that awkwardness from her on more levels than she herself might have known. I may not have known much about her but I knew she’d lost a lover a while back, and I knew some nights she still cried herself to sleep as her voice resonated through the paper-thin walls and into my tiny bedroom in the dark as I, too, sometimes cried for a lost... love.