How It Started

There is this instant connection that I thought only existed in movies and novels but it is real. 

The absolute convergence of two separate souls, braiding into one, in a split second of eye contact. 

It felt just like a moment of suspended reality, the room becoming a tunnel of just him and I. Nothing else existed and nothing else needed to. 

I knew at that moment that something was different, but I was mean, and I knew he was meaner. 

We carried on with or less than pleasant lives separately for months, conversing only when we had to. Our manager started to schedule us together once a week, for only three to four hours. Every moment spent together behind the counter of our mediocre gas station was suddenly a little less awful, and a little more fun. We we're both dismissive and standoffish, but we laughed, and smiled, and more often than not smoked way too much pot to be useful. We clicked as cashiers, we made an excellent team, and we left it at that, coexisting. 

Fast forwarding to the end of November, we we're working, everything was less than ok for me, I had left my abusive boyfriend of three years just a week earlier. I was sad, and angry, I hadn't slept in days, and I hadn't eaten in longer. I was in one hell of a mood. Ready to fight and ready to cut anyone down for anything and everything. I didn't need a reason and I didn't want one either.

I tried to laugh and smile with Quin anyway.

We started to "spit shit" about the people around us like we had always done. I was starting to feel better about everything around me, As soon as my anger had all but left me,, my ex came into the gas station. I was feeling as "ok" about it as I could, gritting my teeth as Quin rang in his pack of Marlboro's, and grinding them as he asked me about something that I can't remember. Then he was gone, and I was fine. 

A few minutes later, after a bit of analyzing, Quin told me that he had never seen two people act so pleasantly toward one another after a break up and he "bet we'd be back together soon."

Rage hit me in that moment harder than any person ever had or ever could, I wanted nothing more than to spit every drop of venom from my mouth directly into his face. I wanted to hit, and kick, and scream, and cut him down for not understanding that I had spent the last three years in Hell, and how hard it was for me to get out. To let him know that is was gut-wrenching for me that he assumed that I would ever go back now that i was gone. But I couldn't.

I had been hurt, very hurt, but I didn't want to hurt him back. That was new to me. I was all but famous or hurting people far worse than they could ever hurt me. Instead I told him that he was upsetting me, but I wasn't going to yell at him, and I wasn't going to get mad. I just need him to know that he was hurting me.

Quintin reacted poorly, with anger, and he asked very sharply, "What makes you think I give a fuck about your feelings?'