Love I Can No Longer Touch Chapter 05
My relentless accusations tore clean through the gentle facade Ashley had been struggling to maintain.
“Ashley, you never gave me the chance to tell you. In your eyes, everything I did was just me being unreasonable or me competing with Jordan for your attention. And now you want to lecture about the sanctity of our marriage? Don’t you find that ridiculous?”
Ashley’s initial shock slowly gave way to a silence I couldn’t decipher.
What was she thinking?
Could this fleeting moment of remorse really sustain her through the merciless barrage of questions I was leveling at her now?
It had been so long since I’d said this much to Ashley, and the exhaustion hit me all at once.
“Shaun, I had a document due that day. That’s the only reason Ashley came by to keep me company. Why must you make it sound so awful? You have no idea how overwhelmed she is with work every day.
“Given how busy she is, you ought to be a little more understanding when she occasionally neglects you.”
Jordan, whom Ashley had ignored all this time, finally found an opening to interject.
With just a few words, he deflected the blame and aimed it squarely back at me.
This was his usual tactic. Every time we reached this point, I’d fall silent out of guilt toward Ashley. Persuaded by his sophistry, she would then launch a fresh round of accusations against me.
However, I wasn’t going to play along with them anymore. After all, why should I keep indulging him?
The moment Jordan began to lose steam, I tore right through the mood he’d been so deliberately conjuring.
“Jordan, do you think I don’t know that the only reason Ashley sees me this way is that you’ve been telling her that men always use these kinds of push-and-pull games just to get a little attention from her?”
Clearly, he hadn’t expected me to lay all of this out in the open. However, this was a funeral for his relative, after all. Whatever messy business existed between the three of us had no place disturbing the dead.
I couldn’t be bothered to engage with them any further, so before Ashley could even react, I turned and walked
away.
After doing that, something suddenly came to mind. Thus, I looked back and said to Ashley, “By the way, Ms. Hunt has passed away. Her gravestone is over there. Remember to pay your respect to her.”
With that, I turned and walked away, leaving Ashley standing there with an expression of utter shock and remorse.
After leaving the cemetery, I decided to go home and pack my things.
In that fleeting moment, Ashley might have felt genuine guilt toward me, but how long could that possibly last? It wasn’t like this was the first time she had felt a momentary pang of sympathy for me.
Surely those days from our youth-huddled together for warmth in that basement couldn’t be so easily forgotten.
In the beginning, she would occasionally remember those years we spent licking each other’s wounds. Only, she never said sorry to me as plainly as she had just now.
At most, it came in the form of perfunctory gifts-money, a car, a house, or hollow sweet nothings.
1 once believed that her clumsy acts of care were no different from before, that she was just stretched too thin to manage every detail.
It wasn’t until later that I realized her heart had been slowly and steadily drawn into the tender trap Jordan had so carefully laid for her.
He had attributed all of Ashley’s past suffering to me. He painted my every action as nothing more than immature jealousy and petty competition for her attention. Bit by bit, the person Ashley saw when she looked at me became something monstrous.
Those hollow, going-through-the-motions gestures were merely the earliest signs of her growing impatience with me.
Therefore, even though Ashley’s apology caught me off guard with its blunt sincerity, I had long since lost any interest in hoping for it. After all, what was the point? It wasn’t like anything ever came of it.
