Night Moves

Please forgive the personal nature of this post.  I'll try and keep it as unmessy as possible, and there will be no identifying details.  In a year where there have been many "firsts", there has just been one more.  For the first time ever I woke someone up at 3am and threw them out of my apartment.  That sounds a little harsh, and maybe it is.  Prior to his falling asleep we had been chatting amiably and he said that he would tell his ex-wife if he had a girlfriend but not about something like this as there would be no point.

This was the first indication that what was happening between us was something like this.  I had thought that perhaps I was in the early, tentative stages of perhaps becoming his girlfriend.  That's what I was feeling anyway, about him.  Boyfriend, not girlfriend, obviously.  There had been a clutch of lovely dates leading to this evening and things, I thought, were going really well.

In the profound silence that followed his comment, I pretended we should get some sleep, which he then did.  I lay there being cuddled, feeling sick.  It took quite some time to get up the courage to put on the light and apologetically wake him.  He had thought it was clear from the outset that he was only looking for (that most sinister and dismissive of words) fun.  I'm not sure how it was clear as it hadn't actually been mentioned.

Standing in a bath-towel shaking, I un-double-locked my front door and told him to go.  No tears, no real hurt, just a sort of outrage that this has happened again and I didn't see it coming.  For the last couple of weeks this man lightened my days, in both a sense of shining a light, and a sense of defying gravity.  That was, of course, clearly bollocks, but it did feel real.

One day someone will be honoured to call me their girlfriend.  In the meantime I think I'll double-lock the front door again.