I Closed the Door and Locked it from the Inside

When I met you I didn't need anyone. I walked into your life- into
the video shop where you sat slumped behind the counter with your head
in your hands and your hair in your face- and altered it irrevocably. I
was determined you wouldn't change me. "Ma, I've met someone," I told
her on the telephone. "But he's not my boyfriend or anything."
You came to my room with tequila and books. You wrote me poetry and
sang to me. We sat on my bed in the darkness and watched black and
white movies. You kissed me over and over. You made me laugh so hard I
sprayed wine across the sheets. People who met us assumed we'd known
each other for years, not days.
Crossing the road you told me, "I used to think other people were
interesting until I met you." I listened with half an ear.
As usual on our meetings, I was late. There you were still, waiting
anxiously in torrential rain by Trafalgar Square with the largest and
most beautiful bouquet of red roses I had ever seen. Nobody had ever
bought me flowers before. I allowed you to kiss me as you handed them
over. "Oh. Do I have to carry these around all day," I sighed,
irritably.
I was hurtful to you on many occasions. One time I wounded you with my
cruel mouth and you made an inarticulate expression of pain or
frustration and left. I didn't look back to see you walk off. I carried
on walking in the opposite direction with an unknown and alien feeling
in the pit of my stomach. It dissipated when I heard the sound of your
footsteps catching up to me. Out of breath, you said, "As if I could
ever leave you."
You told me you were in love with me and made huge changes in your
life in order to incorporate me into it. You spent all your money on
me. You made me compilation tapes of all the songs that reminded you of
me. One night I told you I loved you too as I swayed drunkenly in the
kitchen. It made you so happy. The next day I took it back.
On the anniversary of Elvis' birthday I opened the curtains and London
was veiled in snow. "It's a real white Christmas," you said, joining me
at the window.
While we sat in a bar one evening I noticed a girl looking your way.
She kept engineering excuses to be near you. She was prettier than me
but you scarcely even noticed her. For some reason, my stomach clenched
like a fist.
"Baby, come here and make love to me," you used to urge gently,
tugging at my arm and kissing my fingers. "It's not 'making love'," I'd
sneer. "It's fucking."
For months we carried on like this, you and I. On a sunny afternoon we
sat drinking wine and smoking cigarettes in the garden. I watched you,
thinking how handsome you were and how happy it would make me to
finally open the secret door within myself that had, until now,
remained so very tightly locked. I realised in that instant that you
were unique. "Do you love me, honey?" I asked teasingly, stroking your
inner thigh with my toe. You inhaled deeply on your cigarette and gazed
into the middle-distance as the smoke escaped your nostrils. "No," you
said.